CRITICAL NOTICES OF NEW PUBLICATIONS. 279 



" Much by myself I might in listening glean, 

 MixM with the crowd, unmark'd if not unseen, 

 Uninterrupted I might ramble on, 

 Nor cause an interest, nor a thought, in one ; 

 For who looks backward to a being tost 

 About the world, forgotten long, and lost. 

 For whom departing not a tear was shed. 

 Who disappeared, was missing, and was dead I 

 Save that he left no grave, where some might pass, 

 And ask each other who that being was. 



" I, as a ghost invisible, can stray 

 Among the crowd, and cannot lose my way ; 

 My ways are where the voice of man is known. 

 Though no occasion offers for my own ; 

 My eager mind to j511 with food I seek, 

 And, like the ghost, await for one to speak." 



This extract will confirm our preceding observations. It will shew 

 that Crabbe's powers of mind and his keenness of observation in his 

 latter years had suffered little abatement, but his finish is less polished, 

 and his sentiment and feeling, delicacy of thought, and happiness of 

 expression, are somewhat coarser in their pourtray than in the unequalled 

 performances of his antecedent years. Yet — his is a name which shall 

 never die. If he possessed not the high-wrought genius, the towering 

 fancy, the delicate conception, and the imaginative grandeur of some of 

 his contemporaries, he excelled most of them in his general knowledge of 

 human nature, in his mode of imparting that knowledge in the most 

 captivating and striking form, and in the rigid purity of his morals. 

 There is scarcely a situation in life that he has not known and exhibited 

 with a truth and felicity which the most fastidious will acknowledge to be 

 complete. Crabbe was indeed the poet of nature. 



A Dissertation on the Antiquities of the Priory of Great Malvern, in 

 Worcestershire. By the Rev. H. Card, D. D. F. A. S., &c. &c. Vicar 

 of Great Malvern, 4to. Rivingtons*, London : Ridge, Worcester. 



In the summer of 1830, the Duchess of Kent, accompanied by her 

 daughter, the Princess Victoria, visited the fashionable village of Great 

 Malvern, and so delighted were they with the amenity and grandeur of 

 its position, that they sojourned for several weeks in its health-restoring 

 atmosphere. It appears from the dedication that her Royal Highness 

 expressed an anxious desire to Dr. Card to possess a history of the 

 antiquities of its magnificent'church. The learned Doctor immediately 

 prepared to obey the Royal mandate, and to this circumstance we are 

 indebted for the volume bearing the above title. 



The number of an author's productions is not always the infallible 

 criterion of merit. We have known many plodding, well-meaning men, 

 who have written more volumes in about half a dozen years than we 

 would willingly read in ten times the like space ; but Dr. Card belongs 

 to a different order of writers. The list of his published works, we 

 perceive, amounts to eighteen, — an incredible number for an author of 

 such acknowledged celebrity — but it is a convincing proof how much 

 genius and learning can accomplish when assisted by habits of perse- 

 verance and a right notion of the proper distribution of time. 



It has been the fashion for all writers, clerical and lay, to extol the 

 vandalism of the Vlllth Henry's reign in laying waste the almost fault- 

 less models of churches, monasteries, and abbeys, which abounded in 

 the various counties of this kingdom, on the ashes of which were raised 

 the * * glorious" fabric of the Protestant church. Where was the necessity 

 NO. IV. 2 o 



