And
at the same time the spread of education, and the improved poor-laws
and other legislation, by raising the condition of other parts of
England, have tended to obliterate the contrast which was so marked
in Wordsworth's day. How marked that contrast was, a comparison of
Crabbe's poems with Wordsworth's will sufficiently indicate. Both
are true painters; but while in the one we see poverty as something
gross and degrading, and the _Tales of the Village_ stand out from a
background of pauperism and crime; in the other picture poverty
means nothing worse than privation, and the poet in the presence of
the most tragic outcast of fortune could still
Have laughed himself to scorn, to find
In that decrepit man so firm a mind.[3]
[Footnote 3: The previous page ends midsentence, within an ordinary
paragraph, sentence finished by this verse (probably an excerpt from
a poem).]
Nay, even when a state far below the _Leech-Gatherer's_ has been
reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the life
of the _Old Cumberland Beggar_, at one remove from nothingness, has
yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading days are
passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but amid
neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; and a life
that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on the
liberality of nature and the affections of human hearts.
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