Excerpt from Poems This poetic career was thus intersected by a gap of twenty-three years between the publication of the Newspaper, and that of the Parish Register. It is not uncommon that poets should somewhat languish during the middle part of life, and revive in their later years. Wordsworth offers an instance of this, and so, I think, does Tennyson. But there are few poets who, like Crabbe, have kept both the best and largest part of their wine until they have passed their fiftieth year. Out of the seven volumes of the Complete Works, five and a half, and those much the best, belong to the post - fifty period. The Tales of the Hall, filling two volumes of the 1834 edition, were written in 1817 and 1818 when the poet was nearly sixty-five. They are not of such sustained merit, I think, as the previous Tales published in 1812, and Crabbe's artistic defects appear more clearly in them, yet they are full of most excellent passages, and please by a kind of autumnal mellowness. About the year 1820 the popularity of Crabbe's poetry was, perhaps, at its height. Mr. Murray was able to give to him, in 1819, the sum of GBP3000 for the Tales of the Hall, together with the copyright of all the previous works. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.