CHAPTER XI LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE

INDEX

CRABBE

CHAPTER I

EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH

(1754-1780)

Two eminent English poets who must be reckoned moderns though each

produced characteristic verse before the end of the eighteenth century,

George Crabbe and William Wordsworth, have shared the common fate of

those writers who, possessing a very moderate power of self-criticism,

are apparently unable to discriminate between their good work and their

bad. Both have suffered, and still suffer, in public estimation from

this cause. The average reader of poetry does not care to have to search

and select for himself, and is prone summarily to dismiss a writer

(especially a poet) on the evidence of his inferior productions.

Wordsworth, by far the greater of the two poets, has survived the

effects of his first offence, and has grown in popularity and influence

for half a century past. Crabbe, for many other reasons that I shall

have to trace, has declined in public favour during a yet longer period,

and the combined bulk and inequality of his poetry have permanently

injured him, even as they injured his younger contemporary.

Widely as these two poets differed in subjects and methods, they

achieved kindred results and played an equally important part in the

revival of the human and emotional virtues of poetry after their long

eclipse under the shadow of Pope and his school. Each was primarily made

a poet through compassion for what "man had made of man," and through a

concurrent and sympathetic influence of the scenery among which he was

brought up. Crabbe was by sixteen years Wordsworth's senior, and owed

nothing to his inspiration. In the form, and at times in the technique

of his verse, his controlling master was Pope. For its subjects he was

as clearly indebted to Goldsmith and Gray. But for _The Deserted

Village_ of the one, and _The Elegy_ of the other, it is conceivable

that Crabbe, though he might have survived as one of the "mob of

gentlemen" who imitated Pope "with ease," would never have learned where

his true strength lay, and thus have lived as one of the first and

profoundest students of _The Annals of the Poor_. For _The Village_, one

of the earliest and not least valuable of his poems, was written (in

part, at least) as early as 1781, while Wordsworth was yet a child, and

before Cowper had published a volume. In yet another respect Crabbe was

to work hand in hand with Wordsworth. He does not seem to have held

definite opinions as to necessary reforms in what Wordsworth called

"poetic diction." Indeed he was hampered, as Wordsworth was not, by a

lifelong adherence to a metre--the heroic couplet--with which this same

poetic diction was most closely bound up. He did not always escape the

effects of this contagion, but in the main he was delivered from it by

what I have called a first-hand association with man and nature. He was

ever describing what he had seen and studied with his own eyes, and the

vocabulary of the bards who had for generations borrowed it from one

another failed to supply him with the words he needed. The very

limitations of the first five-and-twenty years of his life passed in a

small and decaying seaport were more than compensated by the intimacy

of his acquaintance with its inhabitants. Like Wordsworth he had early

known love and sorrow "in huts where poor men lie."

Wordsworth's fame and influence have grown steadily since his death in

1850. Crabbe's reputation was apparently at its height in 1819, for it

was then, on occasion of his publishing his _Tales of the Hall_, that

Mr. John Murray paid him three thousand pounds for the copyright of this

work, and its predecessors. But after that date Crabbe's popularity may

be said to have continuously declined. Other poets, with other and more

purely poetical gifts, arose to claim men's attention. Besides

Wordsworth, as already pointed out, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Keats,

Shelley had found their various admirers, and drawn Crabbe's old public

from him. It is the purpose of this little volume to inquire into the

reasons why he is still justly counted a classic, and whether he has

not, as Tennyson said of him, "a world of his own," still rich in

interest and in profit for the explorer.

* * * * *

Aldeburgh--or as it came to be more commonly spelled in modern times,

Aldborough--is to-day a pleasant and quiet watering-place on the coast

of Suffolk, only a few miles from Saxmundham, with which it is connected

by a branch line of the Great Eastern Railway. It began to be known for

its fine air and sea-bathing about the middle of the last century, and

to-day possesses other attractions for the yachtsman and the golfer. But

a hundred years earlier, when Crabbe was born, the town possessed none

of these advantages and means of access, to amend the poverty and rough

manners of its boating and fishing inhabitants. In the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries Aldeburgh had been a flourishing port with a

population able to provide notable aid in the hour of national danger.

Successive Royal Charters had accorded to the town markets, with other

important rights and privileges. It had returned two members to

Parliament since early in the days of Elizabeth, and indeed continued to

do so until the Reform Bill of 1831. But, in common with Dunwich, and

other once flourishing ports on the same coast, Aldeburgh had for its

most fatal enemy, the sea. The gradual encroachments of that

irresistible power had in the course of two centuries buried a large

portion of the ancient Borough beneath the waves. Two existing maps of

the town, one of about 1590, the other about 1790, show how extensive

this devastation had been. This cause, and others arising from it, the

gradual decay of the shipping and fishing industries, had left the town

in the main a poor and squalid place, the scene of much smuggling and

other lawlessness. Time and the ocean wave had left only "two parallel

and unpaved streets, running between mean and scrambling houses." Nor

was there much relief, aesthetic or other, in the adjacent country,

which was flat, marshy, and treeless, continually swept by northern and

easterly gales. A river, the Ald, from which the place took its name,

approached the sea close to the town from the west, and then took a

turn, flowing south, till it finally entered the sea at the neighbouring

harbour of Orford.

In Aldeburgh, on Christmas Eve 1754, George Crabbe was born. He came of

a family bearing a name widely diffused throughout Norfolk and Suffolk

for many generations. His father, after school-teaching in various

parishes in the neighbourhood, finally settled down in his native place

as collector of the salt duties, a post which his father had filled

before him. Here as a very young man he married an estimable and pious

widow, named Loddock, some years his senior, and had a family of six

children, of whom George was the eldest.

Within the limits of a few miles round, including the towns and villages

of Slaughden, Orford, Parham, Beccles, Stowmarket, and Woodbridge, the

first five-and-twenty years of the poet's life were spent. He had but

slight interest in the pursuits of the inhabitants. His father, brought

up among its fishing and boating interests, was something nautical in

his ambitions, having a partnership in a fishing-boat, and keeping a

yacht on the river. His other sons shared their father's tastes, while

George showed no aptitude or liking for the sea, but from his earliest

years evinced a fondness for books, and a marked aptitude for learning.

He was sent early to the usual dame-school, and developed an insatiable

appetite for such stories and ballads as were current among the

neighbours. George Crabbe, the elder, possessed a few books, and used to

read aloud to his family passages from Milton, Young, and other didactic

poets of the eighteenth century. Furthermore he took in a country

magazine, which had a "Poet's Corner," always handed over to George for

his special benefit. The father, respecting these early signs of a

literary bent in the son, sent him to a small boarding-school at Bungay

in the same county, and a few years later to one of higher pretensions

at Stowmarket, kept by a Mr. Richard Haddon, a mathematical teacher of

some repute, where the boy also acquired some mastery of Latin and

acquaintance with the Latin classics. In his later years he was given

(perhaps a little ostentatiously) to prefixing quotations from Horace,

Juvenal, Martial, and oven more recondite authors, to the successive

sections of _The Borough_ But wherever he found books--especially

poetry--he read them and remembered them. He early showed considerable

acquaintance with the best English poets, and although Pope controlled

his metrical forms, and something more than the forms, to the end of his

life, he had somehow acquired a wide knowledge of Shakespeare, and even

of such then less known poets as Spenser, Raleigh, and Cowley.

After some three years at Stowmarket--it now being settled that medicine

was to be his calling--George was taken from school, and the search

began in earnest for some country practitioner to whom he might be

apprenticed. An interval of a few months was spent at home, during which

he assisted his father at the office on Slaughden Quay, and in the year

1768, when he was still under fourteen years of age, a post was found

for him in the house of a surgeon at Wickham-Brook, near Bury St.

Edmunds. This practitioner combined the practise of agriculture on a

small scale with that of physic, and young Crabbe had to take his share

in the labours of the farm. The result was not satisfactory, and after

three years of this rough and uncongenial life, a more profitable

situation was found with a Mr. Page of Woodbridge--the memorable home of

Bernard Barton and Edward FitzGerald. Crabbe became Mr. Page's pupil in

1771, and remained with him until 1775.

We have the authority of Crabbe's son and biographer for saying that he

never really cared for the profession he had adopted. What proficiency

he finally attained in it, before he forsook it for ever, is not quite

clear. But it is certain that his residence among the more civilised and

educated inhabitants of Woodbridge was of the greatest service to him.

He profited notably by joining a little club of young men who met on

certain evenings at an inn for discussion and mutual improvement. To

this little society Crabbe was to owe one chief happiness of his life.

One of its members, Mr. W.S. Levett, a surgeon (one wonders if a

relative of Samuel Johnson's protégé), was at this time courting a Miss

Brereton, of Framlingham, ten miles away. Mr. Levett died young in 1774,

and did not live to marry, but during his brief friendship with Crabbe

was the means of introducing him to the lady who, after many years of

patient waiting, became his wife. In the village of Great Parham, not

far from Framlingham, lived a Mr. Tovell, of Parham Hall, a substantial

yeoman, farming his own estate. With Mr. and Mrs. Tovell and their only

child, a daughter, lived an orphan niece of Mr. Tovell's, a Miss Sarah

Elmy, Miss Brereton's bosom-friend, and constant companion. Mr. Levett

had in consequence become the friend of the Tovell family, and conceived

the desire that his young friend, Crabbe, should be as blessed as

himself. "George," he said, "you shall go with me to Parham; there is a

young lady there who would just suit you!" Crabbe accepted the

invitation, made Mr. Tovell's acquaintance, and promptly fell in love

with Mr. Tovell's niece. The poet, at that time, had not yet completed

his eighteenth year.

How soon after this first meeting George Crabbe proposed and was

accepted, is not made clear, but he was at least welcomed to the house

as a friend and an admirer, and his further visits encouraged. His youth

and the extreme uncertainty of his prospects could not well have been

agreeable to Mr. and Mrs. Tovell, or to Miss Elmy's widowed mother who

lived not far away at Beccles, but the young lady herself returned her

lover's affection from the first, and never faltered. The three

following years, during which Crabbe remained at Woodbridge, gave him

the opportunity of occasional visits, and there can be no doubt that

apart from the fascinations of his "Mira," by which name he proceeded to

celebrate her in occasional verse, the experience of country life and

scenery, so different from that of his native Aldeburgh, was of great

service in enlarging his poetical outlook. Great Parham, distant about

five miles from Saxmundham, and about thirteen from Aldeburgh, is at

this day a village of great rural charm, although a single-lined branch

of the Great Eastern wanders boldly among its streams and cottage

gardens through the very heart of the place. The dwelling of the Tovells

has many years ago disappeared--an entirely new hall having risen on the

old site; but there stands in the parish, a few fields away, an older

Parham Hall;--to-day a farm-house, dear to artists, of singular

picturesqueness, surrounded and even washed by a deep moat, and shaded

by tall trees--a haunt, indeed, "of ancient peace." The neighbourhood of

this old Hall, and the luxuriant beauty of the inland village, so

refreshing a contrast to the barrenness and ugliness of the country

round his native town, enriched Crabbe's mind with many memories that

served him well in his later poetry.

In the meantime he was practising verse, though as yet showing little

individuality. A Lady's Magazine of the day, bearing the name of its

publisher, Mr. Wheble, had offered a prize for the best poem on the

subject of _Hope_, which Crabbe was so fortunate as to win, and the same

magazine printed other short pieces in the same year, 1772. They were

signed "G.C., Woodbridge," and included divers lyrics addressed to Mira.

Other extant verses of the period of his residence at Woodbridge show

that he was making experiments in stanza-form on the model of earlier

English poets, though without showing more than a certain imitative

skill. But after he had been three years in the town, he made a more

notable experiment and had found a printer in Ipswich to take the risk

of publication. In 1775 was printed in that town a didactic satire of

some four hundred lines in the Popian couplet, entitled _Inebriety_.

Coleridge's friend, who had to write a prize poem on the subject of Dr.

Jenner, boldly opened with the invocation--

"Inoculation! Heavenly maid, descend."

As the title of Crabbe's poem stands for the bane and not the antidote,

he could not adopt the same method, but he could not resist some other

precedents of the epic sort, and begins thus, in close imitation of _The

Dunciad_--

"The mighty spirit, and its power which stains

The bloodless cheek and vivifies the brains,

I sing"

The apparent object of the satire was to describe the varied phases of

Intemperance, as observed by the writer in different classes of

society--the Villager, the Squire, the Farmer, the Parish Clergyman, and

even the Nobleman's Chaplain, an official whom Crabbe as yet knew only

by imagination. From childhood he had had ample experience of the vice

in the rough and reckless homes of the Aldeburgh poor. His subsequent

medical pursuits must have brought him into occasional contact with it

among the middle classes, and even in the manor-houses and parsonages

for which he made up the medicine in his master's surgery. But his

treatment of the subject was too palpably imitative of one poetic model,

already stale from repetition. Not only did he choose Pope's couplet,

with all its familiar antitheses and other mannerisms, but frankly

avowed it by parodying whole passages from the _Essay on Man_ and _The

Dunciad_, the original lines being duly printed at the foot of the page.

There is little of Crabbe's later accent of sympathy. Epigram is too

obviously pursued, and much of the suggested acquaintance with the

habits of the upper classes--

"Champagne the courtier drinks, the spleen to chase,

The colonel Burgundy, and Port his grace"

is borrowed from books and not from life. Nor did the satire gain in

lucidity from any editorial care. There are hardly two consecutive lines

that do not suffer from a truly perverse theory of punctuation. A copy

of the rare original is in the writer's possession, at the head of which

the poet has inscribed his own maturer judgment of this youthful

effort--"Pray let not this be seen ... there is very little of it that

I'm not heartily ashamed of." The little quarto pamphlet--"Ipswich,

printed and sold by C. Punchard, Bookseller, in the Butter Market, 1775.

Price one shilling and sixpence"--seems to have attracted no attention.

And yet a critic of experience would have recognised in it a force as

well as a fluency remarkable in a young man of twenty-one, and pointing

to quite other possibilities when the age of imitation should have

passed away.

In 1775 Crabbe's term of apprenticeship to Mr. Page expired, and he

returned to his home at Aldeburgh, hoping soon to repair to London and

there continue his medical studies. But he found the domestic situation

much changed for the worse. His mother (who, as we have seen, was

several years older than her husband) was an invalid, and his father's

habits and temper were not improving with time. He was by nature

imperious, and had always (it would seem) been liable to intemperance of

another kind. Moreover, a contested election for the Borough in 1774 had

brought with it its familiar temptations to protracted debauch--and it

is significant that in 1775 he vacated the office of churchwarden that

he had held for many years. George, to whom his father was not as a rule

unkind, did not shrink from once more assisting him among the

butter-tubs on Slaughden Quay. Poetry seems to have been for a while

laid aside, the failure of his first venture having perhaps discouraged

him. Some slight amount of practice in his profession fell to his share.

An entry in the Minute Book of the Aldeburgh Board of Guardians of

September 17, 1775, orders "that Mr. George Crabbe, Junr., shall be

employed to cure the boy Howard of the itch, and that whenever any of

the poor shall have occasion for a surgeon, the overseers shall apply to

him for that purpose." But these very opportunities perhaps only served

to show George Crabbe how poorly he was equipped for his calling as

surgeon, and after a period not specified means were found for sending

him to London, where he lodged with a family from Aldeburgh who were in

business in Whitechapel. How and where he then obtained instruction or

practice in his calling does not appear, though there is a gruesome

story, recorded by his son, how a baby-subject for dissection was one

day found in his cupboard by his landlady, who was hardly to be

persuaded that it was not a lately lost infant of her own. In any case,

within a year Crabbe's scanty means were exhausted, and he was once more

in Aldeburgh, and assistant to an apothecary of the name of Maskill.

This gentleman seems to have found Aldeburgh hopeless, for in a few

months he left the town, and Crabbe set up for himself as his successor.

But he was still poorly qualified for his profession, his skill in

surgery being notably deficient. He attracted only the poorest class of

patients--the fees ware small and uncertain and his prospects of an

early marriage, or even of earning his living as a single man, seemed as

far off as ever. Moreover, he was again cut off from congenial

companionship, with only such relief as was afforded by the occasional

presence in the town of various Militia regiments, the officers of which

gave him some of their patronage and society.

He had still happily the assurance of the faithful devotion of Miss

Elmy. Her father had been a tanner in the Suffolk town of Beccles, where

her mother still resided, and where Miss Elmy paid her occasional

visits. The long journey from Aldeburgh to Beccles was often taken by

Crabbe, and the changing features of the scenery traversed were

reproduced, his son tells us, many years afterwards in the beautiful

tale of _The Lover's Journey_. The tie between Crabbe and Miss Elmy was

further strengthened by a dangerous fever from which Crabbe suffered in

1778-79, while Miss Elmy was a guest under his parents' roof. This was

succeeded by an illness of Miss Elmy, when Crabbe was in constant

attendance at Parham Hall. His intimacy with the Tovells was moreover to

be strengthened by a sad event in that family, the death of their only

child, an engaging girl of fourteen. The social position of the Tovells,

and in greater degree their fortune, was superior to that of the

Crabbes, and the engagement of their niece to one whose prospects were

so little brilliant had never been quite to their taste. But henceforth

this feeling was to disappear. This crowning sorrow in the family

wrought more cordial feelings. Crabbe was one of those who had known and

been kind to their child, and such were now,

"Peculiar people--death had made them dear."

And henceforth the engagement between the lovers was frankly accepted.

But though the course of this true love was to run more and more

smooth, the question of Crabbe's future means of living seemed as

hopeless of solution as ever.

And yet the enforced idleness of these following years was far from

unprofitable. The less time occupied in the routine work of his

profession, the more leisure he had for his favourite study of natural

history, and especially of botany. This latter study had been taken up

during his stay at Woodbridge, the neighbourhood of which had a Flora

differing from that of the bleak coast country of Aldeburgh, and it was

now pursued with the same zeal at home. Herbs then played a larger part

than to-day among curative agents of the village doctor, and the fact

that Crabbe sought and obtained them so readily was even pleaded by his

poorer patients as reason why his fees need not be calculated on any

large scale. But this absorbing pursuit did far more than serve to

furnish Crabbe's outfit as a healer. It was undoubtedly to the observing

eye and retentive memory thus practised in the cottage gardens, and in

the lanes, and meadows, and marshes of Suffolk that his descriptions,

when once he found where his true strength lay, owed a charm for which

readers of poetry had long been hungering. The floral outfit of pastoral

poets, when Crabbe began to write, was a _hortus siccus_ indeed.

Distinctness in painting the common growth of field and hedgerow may be

said to have had its origin with Crabbe. Gray and Goldsmith had their

own rare and special gifts to which Crabbe could lay no claim. But

neither these poets nor even Thomson, whose avowed purpose was to depict

nature, are Crabbe's rivals in this respect. Byron in the most

hackneyed of all eulogies upon Crabbe defined him as "Nature's sternest

painter yet the best." The criticism would have been juster had he

written that Crabbe was the truest painter of Nature in her less lovely

phases. Crabbe was not stern in his attitude either to his fellow-men,

or to the varying aspects of Nature, although for the first years of his

life he was in habitual contact with the less alluring side of both.

But it was not only through a closer intimacy with Nature that Crabbe

was being unconsciously prepared for high poetic service. Hope deferred

and disappointments, poverty and anxiety, were doing their beneficent

work. Notwithstanding certain early dissipations and escapades which his

fellow-townsmen did not fail to remember against him in the later days

of his success, Crabbe was of a genuinely religious temperament, and had

been trained by a devout mother. Moreover, through a nearer and more

sympathetic contact with the lives and sorrows of the poor suffering, he

was storing experience full of value for the future, though he was still

and for some time longer under the spell of the dominant poetic fashion,

and still hesitated to "look into his heart and write."

But the time was bound to come when he must put his poetic quality to a

final test. In London only could he hope to prove whether the verse, of

which he was accumulating a store, was of a kind that men would care

for. He must discover, and speedily, whether he was to take a modest

place in the ranks of literature, or one even more humble in the shop of

an apothecary. After weighing his chances and his risks for many a weary

day he took the final resolution, and his son has told us the

circumstances:--

"One gloomy day towards the close of the year 1779, he had strolled to

a bleak and cheerless part of the cliff above Aldeburgh, called The

Marsh Hill, brooding as he went over the humiliating necessities of his

condition, and plucking every now and then, I have no doubt, the

hundredth specimen of some common weed. He stopped opposite a shallow,

muddy piece of water, as desolate and gloomy as his own mind, called the

Leech-pond, and 'it was while I gazed on it,' he said to my brother and

me, one happy morning, 'that I determined to go to London and venture

all'"

About thirty years later, Crabbe contributed to a magazine (_The New

Monthly_) some particulars of his early life, and referring to this

critical moment added that he had not then heard of "another youthful

adventurer," whose fate, had he known of it, might perhaps have deterred

him from facing like calamities. Chatterton had "perished in his pride"

nearly ten years before. As Crabbe thus recalled the scene of his own

resolve, it may have struck him as a touching coincidence that it was by

the Leech-pool on "the lonely moor"--though there was no

"Leech-gatherer" at hand to lend him fortitude--that he resolved to

encounter "Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty." He was,

indeed, little better equipped than Chatterton had been for the

enterprise. His father was unable to assist him financially, and was

disposed to reproach him for forsaking a profession, in the cause of

which the family had already made sacrifices. The Crabbes and all their

connections were poor, and George scarcely knew any one whom he might

appeal to for even a loan. At length Mr. Dudley North, of Little Glemham

Hall, near Parham, whose brother had stood for Aldeburgh, was

approached, and sent the sum asked for--five pounds. George Crabbe,

after paying his debts, set sail for London on board a sloop at

Slaughden Quay--"master of a box of clothes, a small case of surgical

instruments, and three pounds in money." This was in April 1780.

CHAPTER II

POVERTY IN LONDON

(1780-1781)

Crabbe had no acquaintances of his own in London, and the only

introduction he carried with him was to an old friend of Miss Elmy's, a

Mrs. Burcham, married to a linen-draper in Cornhill. In order to be near

these friendly persons he took lodgings, close to the Royal Exchange, in

the house of a hairdresser, a Mr. Vickery, at whose suggestion, no

doubt, he provided himself with "a fashionable tie-wig". Crabbe at once

began preparations for his literary campaign, by correcting such verse

as he had brought with him, completing "two dramas and a variety of

prose essays," and generally improving himself by a course of study and

practice in composition. As in the old Woodbridge days, he made some

congenial acquaintances at a little club that met at a neighbouring

coffee-house, which included a Mr. Bonnycastle and a Mr. Reuben Burrow,

both mathematicians of repute, who rose to fill important positions in

their day. These recreations he diversified with country excursions,

during which he read Horace and Ovid, or searched the woods around

London for plants and insects.

From his first arrival in town Crabbe kept a diary or journal,

addressed to his "Mira" at Parham, and we owe to it a detailed account

of his earlier struggles, three months of the journal having survived

and fallen into his son's hands after the poet's death. Crabbe had

arrived in London in April, and by the end of the month we learn from

the journal that he was engaged upon a work in prose, "A Plan for the

Examination of our Moral and Religious Opinions," and also on a poetical

"Epistle to Prince William Henry," afterwards William IV., who had only

the year before entered the navy as midshipman, but had already seen

some service under Rodney. The next day's entry in the diary tells how

he was not neglecting other possible chances of an honest livelihood. He

had answered an advertisement in the _Daily Advertiser_ for "an

amanuensis, of grammatical education, and endued with a genius capable

of making improvements in the writings of a gentleman not well versed in

the English language." Two days later he called for a reply, only to

find that the gentleman was suited. The same day's entry also records

how he had sent his poem (probably the ode to the young Sailor-Prince)

to Mr. Dodsley. Only a day later he writes. "Judging it best to have two

strings to the bow, and fearing Mr. Dodsley's will snap, I have finished

another little work from that awkward-titled piece, 'The Foes of

Mankind': have run it on to three hundred and fifty lines, and given it

a still more odd name, 'An Epistle from the Devil.' To-morrow I hope to

transcribe it fair, and send it by Monday."

"Mr. Dodsley's reply just received: 'Mr. Dodsley presents his

compliments to the gentleman who favoured him with the enclosed poem,

which he has returned, as he apprehends the sale of it would probably

not enable him to give any consideration. He does not mean to insinuate

a want of merit in the poem, but rather a want of attention in the

public.'"

All this was sufficiently discouraging, and the next day's record is one

of even worse omen. The poet thanks Heaven that his spirits are not

affected by Mr. Dodsley's refusal, and that he is already preparing

another poem for another bookseller, Mr. Becket. He adds, however: "I

find myself under the disagreeable necessity of vending or pawning some

of my more useless articles: accordingly have put into a paper such as

cost about two or three guineas, and, being silver, have not greatly

lessened in their value. The conscientious pawnbroker allowed me--'he

_thought_ he _might'_--half a guinea for them. I took it very readily,

being determined to call for them very soon, and then, if I afterwards

wanted, carry them to some less voracious animal of the kind."

The entries during the next six weeks continue of the same tenor. Mr.

Becket, for whose approval were sent "Poetical Epistles, with a preface

by the learned Martinus Scriblerus" (he was still harping on the string

of the Augustans), proved no more responsive than Dodsley, "'Twas a very

pretty thing, but, sir, these little pieces the town do not regard." By

May 16th he had "sold his wardrobe, pawned his watch, was in debt to his

landlord, and finally at some loss how to eat a week longer." Two days

later he had pawned his surgical instruments--redeemed and repawned his

watch on more favourable terms--and was rejoiced to find himself still

the possessor of ten shillings. He remained stout of heart--his faith in

Providence still his strong comfort--and the Vickery family, though he

must have been constantly in their debt, were unfailingly kind and

hospitable. He was also appealing to the possible patrons of literature

among the leading statesmen of the hour. On May 21 we learn that he was

preparing "a book" (which of his many ventures of the hour, is

uncertain), and with it a letter for the Prime Minister, Lord North,

whose relative, Dudley North, had started him on his journey to London.

When, after a fortnight's suspense, this request for assistance had been

refused, he writes yet more urgently to Lord Shelburne (at that time out

of office) complaining bitterly of North's hardness of heart, and

appealing on this occasion to his hoped-for patron both in prose and

verse--

"Ah! Shelburne, blest with all that's good or great,

T' adorn a rich or save a sinking state,

If public Ills engross not all thy care,

Let private Woe assail a patriot's ear,

Pity confined, but not less warm, impart,

And unresisted win thy noble heart"--

with much more in the same vein of innocent flattery. But once again

Crabbe was doomed to disappointment. He had already, it would seem,

appealed to Lord Chancellor Thurlow, with no better success. Crabbe felt

these successive repulses very keenly, but it is not necessary to tax

North, Shelburne, and Thurlow with exceptional hardness of heart. London

was as full of needy literary adventurers as it had been in the days of

_The Dunciad_, and men holding the position of these ministers and

ex-ministers were probably receiving similar applications every week of

their lives.

During three days in June, Crabbe's attention is diverted from his own

distresses by the Lord George Gordon Riots, of which his journal from

June 8th contains some interesting particulars. He was himself an

eye-witness of some of the most disgraceful excesses of the mob, the

burning of the governor of Newgate's house, and the setting at liberty

of the prisoners. He also saw Lord George himself, "a lively-looking

young man in appearance," drawn in his coach by the mob towards the

residence of Alderman Bull, "bowing as he passed along."

At this point the diary ends, or in any case the concluding portion was

never seen by the poet's son. And yet at the date when it closed, Crabbe

was nearer to at least the semblance of a success than he had yet

approached. He had at length found a publisher willing to print, and

apparently at his own risk, "_The Candidate_--a Poetical Epistle to the

Authors of the _Monthly Review,"_ that journal being the chief organ of

literary criticism at the time. The idea of this attempt to propitiate

the critics in advance, with a view to other poetic efforts in the

future, was not felicitous. The publisher, "H. Payne, opposite

Marlborough House, Pall Mall," had pledged himself that the author

should receive some share of the profits, however small; but even if he

had not become bankrupt immediately after its publication, it is

unlikely that Crabbe would have profited by a single penny. It was

indeed a very ill-advised attempt, even as regards the reviewers

addressed. The very tone adopted, that of deprecation of criticism,

would be in their view a proof of weakness, and as such they accepted

it. Nor had the poem any better chance with the general reader. Its

rhetoric and versification were only one more of the interminable echoes

of the manner of Pope. It had no organic unity. The wearisome note of

plea for indulgence had to be relieved at intervals by such irrelevant

episodes as compliments to the absent "Mira," and to Wolfe, who

"conquered as he fell"--twenty years or so before. The critics of the

_Monthly Review_, far from being mollified by the poet's appeal,

received the poem with the cruel but perfectly just remark that it had

"that material defect, the want of a proper subject."

An allegorical episode may be cited as a sample of the general style of

this effusion. The poet relates how the Genius of Poetry (like, but how

unlike, her who was seen by Burns in vision) appeared to him with

counsel how best to hit the taste of the town:--

"Be not too eager in the arduous chase;

Who pants for triumph seldom wins the race:

Venture not all, but wisely hoard thy worth,

And let thy labours one by one go forth

Some happier scrap capricious wits may find

On a fair day, and be profusely kind;

Which, buried in the rubbish of a throng,

Had pleased as little as a new-year's song,

Or lover's verse, that cloyed with nauseous sweet,

Or birthday ode, that ran on ill-paired feet.

Merit not always--Fortune Feeds the bard,

And as the whim inclines bestows reward

None without wit, nor with it numbers gain;

To please is hard, but none shall please in vain

As a coy mistress is the humoured town,

Loth every lover with success to crown;

He who would win must every effort try,

Sail in the mode, and to the fashion fly;

Must gay or grave to every humour dress,

And watch the lucky Moment of Success;

That caught, no more his eager hopes are crost;

But vain are Wit and Love, when that is lost"

Crabbe's son and biographer remarks with justice that the time of his

father's arrival in London was "not unfavourable for a new Candidate in

Poetry. The giants, Swift and Pope, had passed away, leaving each in his

department examples never to be excelled; but the style of each had been

so long imitated by inferior persons that the world was not unlikely to

welcome some one who should strike into a newer path. The strong and

powerful satirist Churchill, the classic Gray, and the inimitable

Goldsmith had also departed; and more recently still, Chatterton had

paid the bitter penalty of his imprudence under circumstances which must

surely have rather disposed the patrons of talent to watch the next

opportunity that might offer itself of encouraging genius 'by poverty

depressed.' The stupendous Johnson, unrivalled in general literature,

had from an early period withdrawn himself from poetry. Cowper, destined

to fill so large a space in the public eye somewhat later, had not as

yet appeared as an author; and as for Burns, he was still unknown beyond

the obscure circle of his fellow-villagers."

All this is quite true, but it was not for such facile cleverness as

_The Candidate_ that the lovers of poetry were impatient. Up to this

point Crabbe shows himself wholly unsuspicious of this fact. It had not

occurred to him that it was possible for him safely to trust his own

instincts. And yet there is a stray entry in his diary which seems to

show how (in obedience to his visionary instructor) he was trying

experiments in more hopeful directions. On the twelfth, of May he

intimates to his Mira that he has dreams of success in something

different, something more human than had yet engaged his thoughts. "For

the first time in my life that I recollect," he writes, "I have written

three or four stanzas that so far touched me in the reading them as to

take off the consideration that they were things of my own fancy."

Thus far there was nothing in what he had printed--in _Inebriety_ or

_The Candidate_--that could possibly have touched his heart or that of

his readers. And it may well have been that he was now turning for fresh

themes to those real sorrows, those genuine, if homely, human interests

of which he had already so intimate an experience.

However that may have been, the combined coldness of his reviewers and

failure of his bookseller must have brought Crabbe within as near an

approach to despair as his healthy nature allowed. His distress was now

extreme; he was incurring debts with little hope of paying them, and

creditors wore pressing. Forty years later he told Walter Scott and

Lockhart how "during many months when he was toiling in early life in

London he hardly over tasted butcher-meat except on a Sunday, when he

dined usually with a tradesman's family, and thought their leg of

mutton, baked in the pan, the perfection of luxury." And it was only

after some more weary months, when at last "want stared him in the face,

and a gaol seemed the only immediate refuge for his head," that he

resolved, as a last resort, to lay his case once more before some public

man of eminence and character. "Impelled" (to use his own words) "by

some propitious influence, he fixed in some happy moment upon Edmund

Burke--one of the first of Englishmen, and in the capacity and energy of

his mind, one of the greatest of human beings."

It was in one of the early months of 1781 (the exact date seems to be

undiscoverable) that Crabbe addressed his letter, with specimens of his

poetry, to Burke at his London residence. The letter has been preserved,

and runs as follows:--

"Sir,--I am sensible that I need even your talents to

apologise for the freedom I now take; but I have a plea

which, however simply urged, will, with, a mind like yours,

sir, procure me pardon. I am one of those outcasts on the

world who are without a friend, without employment, and

without bread.

"Pardon me a short preface. I had a partial father who

gave me a better education than his broken fortune would

have allowed; and a better than was necessary, as he could

give me that only. I was designed for the profession of

physic, but not having wherewithal to complete the requisite

studies, the design but served to convince me of a parent's

affection, and the error it had occasioned. In April last I

came to London with three pounds, and flattered myself this

would be sufficient to supply me with the common necessaries

of life till my abilities should procure me more; of these I

had the highest opinion, and a poetical vanity contributed to

my delusion. I knew little of the world, and had read books

only: I wrote, and fancied perfection in my compositions;

when I wanted bread they promised me affluence, and soothed

me with dreams of reputation, whilst my appearance subjected

me to contempt.

"Time, reflection, and want have shown me my mistake.

I see my trifles in that which I think the true light; and

whilst I deem them such, have yet the opinion that holds

them superior to the common run of poetical publications.

"I had some knowledge of the late Mr. Nassau, the brother

of Lord Rochford; in consequence of which I asked his Lordship's

permission to inscribe my little work to him. Knowing

it to be free from all political allusions and personal abuse,

it was no very material point to me to whom it was dedicated.

His Lordship thought it none to him, and obligingly consented

to my request.

"I was told that a subscription would be the more profitable

method for me, and, therefore, endeavoured to circulate

copies of the enclosed Proposals.

"I am afraid, sir, I disgust you with this very dull narration,

but believe me punished in the misery that occasions it.

You will conclude that during this time I must have been at

more expense than I could afford. Indeed the most parsimonious

could not have avoided it. The printer deceived

me, and my little business has had every delay. The people

with whom I live perceive my situation, and find me to be

indigent and without friends. About ten days since I was

compelled to give a note for seven pounds, to avoid an arrest

for about double that sum which I owe. I wrote to every

friend I had, but my friends are poor likewise: the time of

payment approached, and I ventured to represent my case

to Lord Rochford. I begged to be credited for this sum till

I received it of my subscribers, which I believe will be within

one month: but to this letter I had no reply, and I have

probably offended by my importunity. Having used every

honest means in vain, I yesterday confessed my inability, and

obtained with much entreaty and as the greatest favour a

week's forbearance, when I am positively told that I must,

pay the money or prepare for a prison.

"You will guess the purpose of so long an introduction. I

appeal to you, sir, as a good and, let me add, a great man.

I have no other pretensions to your favour than that I am

an unhappy one. It is not easy to support the thoughts of

confinement; and I am coward enough to dread such an end

to my suspense. Can you, sir, in any degree aid me with

propriety? Will you ask any demonstrations of my veracity?

I have imposed upon myself, but I have been guilty of no

other imposition Let me, if possible, interest your compassion.

I know those of rank and fortune are teased with

frequent petitions, and are compelled to refuse the requests

even of those whom they know to be in distress; it is, therefore,

with a distant hope I ventured to solicit such favour:

but you will forgive me, sir, if you do not think proper

to relieve. It is impossible that sentiments like yours can

proceed from any but a humane and generous heart.

"I will call upon you, sir, to-morrow, and if I have not the

happiness to obtain credit with you, I must submit to my fate.

My existence is a pain to myself, and every one near and dear

to me are distressed in my distresses. My connections, once

the source of happiness, now embitter the reverse of my

fortune, and I have only to hope a speedy end to a life so

unpromisingly begun: in which (though it ought not to be

boasted of) I can reap some consolation from looking to the end

of it. I am, sir, with, the greatest respect, your obedient

and most humble servant,

GEORGE CRABBE."

The letter is undated, but, as we shall see, must have been written in

February or March of 1781. Crabbe delivered it with his own hands at

Burke's house in Charles Street, St. James's, and (as he long after told

Walter Scott) paced up and down Westminster Bridge all night in an agony

of suspense.

This suspense was not of long duration Crabbe made his threatened call,

and anxiety was speedily at an end. He had sent with his letter

specimens of his verse still in manuscript. Whether Burke had had time

to do more than glance at them--for they had been in his hands but a few

hours--is uncertain. But it may well have been that the tone as well as

the substance of Crabbe's letter struck the great statesman as something

apart from the usual strain of the literary pretender. During Burke's

first years in London, when he himself lived by literature and saw much

of the lives and ways of poets and pamphleteers, he must have gained

some experience that served him later in good stead. There was a flavour

of truthfulness in Crabbe's story that could hardly be delusive, and a

strain of modesty blended with courage that would at once appeal to

Burke's generous nature. Again, Burke was not a poet (save in the

glowing periods of his prose), but he had read widely in the poets, and

had himself been possessed at one stage of his youth "with the _furor

poeticus_." At this special juncture he had indeed little leisure for

such matters. He had lost his seat for Bristol in the preceding year,

but had speedily found another at Malton--a pocket-borough of Lord

Rockingham's,--and, at the moment of Crabbe's appeal, was again actively

opposing the policy of the King and Lord North. But he yet found time

for an act of kindness that was to have no inconsiderable influence on

English literature. The result of the interview was that Crabbe's

immediate necessities were relieved by a gift of money, and by the

assurance that Burke would do all in his power to further Crabbe's

literary aims. What particular poems or fragments of poetry had been

first sent to Burke is uncertain; but among those submitted to his

judgment were specimens of the poems to be henceforth known as the _The

Library_ and _The Village._ Crabbe afterwards learned that the lines

which first convinced Burke that a new and genuine poet had arisen were

the following from _The Village,_ in which the author told of his

resolution to leave the home of his birth and try his fortune in the

city of wits and scholars--

"As on their neighbouring beach yon swallows stand

And wait for favouring winds to leave the land;

While still for flight the ready wing is spread:

So waited I the favouring hour, and fled;

Fled from those shores where guilt and famine reign,

And cried, 'Ah! hapless they who still remain--

Who still remain to hear the ocean roar;

Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore;

Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway,

Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away;

When the sad tenant weeps from door to door,

And begs a poor protection from the poor!"

Burke might well have been impressed by such a passage. In some other

specimens of Crabbe's verse, submitted at the same time to his judgment,

the note of a very different school was dominant. But here for the

moment appears a fresher key and a later model. In the lines just quoted

the feeling and the cadence of _The Traveller_ and _The Deserted

Village_ are unmistakable. But if they suggest comparison with the

exquisite passage in the latter beginning--

"And as the hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,

Pants to the place from which it first she flew,"

they also suggest a contrast. Burke's experienced eye would detect that

if there was something in Crabbe's more Pope-like couplets that was not

found in Pope, so there was something here more poignant than even in

Goldsmith.

Crabbe's son reflected with just pride that there must have been

something in his father's manners and bearing that at the outset invited

Burke's confidence and made intimacy at once possible, although Crabbe's

previous associates had been so different from the educated gentry of

London. In telling of his now-found poet a few days afterwards to Sir

Joshua Reynolds, Burke said that he had "the mind and feelings of a

gentleman." And he acted boldly on this assurance by at once placing

Crabbe on the footing of a friend, and admitting him to his family

circle. "He was invited to Beaconsfield," Crabbe wrote in his short

autobiographical sketch, "the seat of his protector, and was there

placed in a convenient apartment, supplied with books for his

information and amusement, and made a member of a family whom it was

honour as well as pleasure to become in any degree associated with." The

time thus spent was profitable to Crabbe in other ways than by enlarging

his knowledge and ideas, and laying the foundation of many valued

friendships. He devoted himself in earnest to complete his unfinished

poems and revise others under Burke's judicious criticism. The poem he

first published, _The Library_, he himself tells us, was written partly

in his presence and submitted as a whole to his judgment. Crabbe

elsewhere indicates clearly what were the weak points of his art, and

what tendencies Burke found it most necessary he should counteract.

Writing his reminiscences in the third person years later, he naively

admitted that "Mr. Crabbe had sometimes the satisfaction of hearing,

when the verses were bad, that the thoughts deserved better; and that if

he had the common faults of inexperienced writers, he had frequently the

merit of thinking for himself." The first clause of this sentence might

be applied to Crabbe's poetry to the very end of his days. Of his later

and far maturer poems, when he had ceased to polish, it is too true that

the thoughts are often better than their treatment. His latest

publisher, John Murray, used to say that in conversation Crabbe often

"said uncommon things in so common a way" that they passed unnoticed.

The remark applies equally to much of Crabbe's poetry. But at least, if

this incongruity is to exist, it is on the more hopeful side. The

characteristic of so much poetry of our own day is that the manner is

uncommon, and the commonness resides in the matter.

When Crabbe had completed his revisions to his own satisfaction and his

adviser's, Burke suggested the publication of _The Library_ and _The

Village_, and the former poem was laid before Mr. Dodsley, who only a

few months before had refused a poem from the same hand. But

circumstances were now changed, and Burke's recommendation and support

were all-sufficient. Dodsley was all politeness, and though he declined

to incur any risk--this was doubtless borne by Burke--he promised his

best endeavours to make the poem a success. _The Library_ was published,

anonymously, in June 1781. The _Monthly_ and the _Critical Reviews_

awarded it a certain amount of faint praise, but the success with the

general public seems only to have been slight.

When Burke selected this poem to lay before Dodsley, he had already read

portions of _The Village,_ and it seems strange that he should have

given _The Library_ precedence, for the other was in every respect the

more remarkable. But Burke, a conservative in this as in other matters,

probably thought that a new poet desiring to be heard would be wiser in

not at once quitting the old paths. The readers of poetry still had a

taste for didactic epigram varied by a certain amount of florid

rhetoric. And there was little beyond this in Crabbe's moralisings on

the respective functions of theology, history, poetry, and the rest, as

represented on the shelves of a library, and on the blessings of

literature to the heart when wearied with business and the cares of

life. Crabbe's verses on such topics are by no means ineffective. He had

caught perfectly the trick of the school so soon to pass away. He is as

fluent and copious--as skilful in spreading a truism over a dozen

well-sounding lines--as any of his predecessors. There is little new in

the way of ideas. Crabbe had as yet no wide insight into books and

authors, and he was forced to deal largely in generalities. But he

showed that he had already some idea of style; and if, when he had so

little to say, he could say it with so much semblance of power, it was

certain that when he had observed and thought for himself he would go

further and make a deeper mark. The heroic couplet controlled him to the

end of his life, and there is no doubt that it was not merely timidity

that made him confine himself to the old beaten track. Crabbe's thoughts

ran very much in antithesis, and the couplet suited this tendency. But

it had its serious limitations. Southey's touching stanzas--

"My days among the dead are passed,"

though the ideas embodied are no more novel than Crabbe's, are worth

scores of such lines as these--

"With awe, around these silent walks I tread;

These are the lasting mansions of the dead:

'The dead!' methinks a thousand tongues reply;

'These are the tombs of such as cannot die!

Crowned with eternal fame, they sit sublime,

And laugh at all the little strife of Time'"

CHAPTER III

FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE

(1781-1783)

Thus far I have followed the guidance of Crabbe's son and biographer,

but there is much that is confused and incomplete in his narrative. The

story of Crabbe's life, as told by the son, leaves us in much doubt as

to the order of events in 1780-1781. The memorable letter to Burke was,

as we have seen, without a date. The omission is not strange, for the

letter was written by Crabbe in great anguish of mind, and was left by

his own hand at Burke's door. The son, though he evidently obtained from

his father most of the information he was afterwards to use, never

extracted this date from him. He tells us that up to the time of his

undertaking the Biography, he did not even know that the original of the

letter was in existence. He also tells us that until he and his brother

saw the letter they had little idea of the extreme poverty and anxiety

which their father had experienced during his time in London. Obviously

Crabbe himself had been reticent on the subject even with his own

family. From the midsummer of 1780, when the "Journal to Mira" comes to

an end, to the February or March of the following year, there is a blank

in the Biography which the son was unable to fill. At the time the

fragment of Diary closes, Crabbe was apparently at the very end of his

resources. He had pawned all his personal property, his books and his

surgical implements, and was still in debt. He had begged assistance

from many of the leading statesmen of the hour without success. How did

he contrive to exist between June 1780 and the early months of 1781?

The problem might never have been solved for us had it not been for the

accidental publication, four years after the Biography appeared, of a

second letter from Crabbe to Burke. In 1838, Sir Henry Bunbury, in an

appendix to the _Memoir and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer_

(Speaker of the House of Commons, and Shakspearian editor), printed a

collection of miscellaneous letters from distinguished men in the

possession of the Bunbury family. Among these is a letter of Crabbe to

Burke, undated save as to the month, which is given as June 26th. The

year, however, is obviously 1781, for the letter consists of further

details of Crabbe's early life, not supplied in the earlier effusion. At

the date of this second letter, Crabbe had been known to Burke three or

four months. During that time Crabbe had been constantly seeing Burke,

and with his help had been revising for the press the poem of _The

Library_, which was published by Dodsley in this very month, June 1781.

The first impression, accordingly, produced on us by the letter, is one

of surprise that after so long a period of intimate association with

Burke, Crabbe should still be writing in a tone of profound anxiety and

discouragement as to his future prospects. According to the son's

account of the situation, when Crabbe left Burke's house after their

first meeting, "he was, in the common phrase, 'a made man'--from that

hour." That short interview "entirely, and for ever, changed the nature

of his worldly fortunes." This, in a sense, was undoubtedly true, though

not perhaps as the writer meant. It is clear from the letter first

printed by Sir Henry Bunbury, that up to the end of June 1781, Crabbe's

future occupation in life was still unfixed, and that he was full of

misgivings as to the means of earning a livelihood.

The letter is of great interest in many respects, but is too long to

print as a whole in the text[1]. It throws light upon the blank space in

Crabbe's history just now referred to. It tells the story of a period of

humiliation and distress, concerning which it is easy to understand that

even in the days of his fame and prosperity Crabbe may well have

refrained from speaking with his children. After relating in full his

early struggles as an imperfectly qualified country doctor, and his

subsequent fortunes in London up to the day of his appeal to Burke,

Crabbe proceeds--"It will perhaps be asked how I could live near twelve

months a stranger in London; and coming without money, it is not to be

supposed I was immediately credited. It is not; my support arose from

another source. In the very early part of my life I contracted some

acquaintance, which afterwards became a serious connection, with the

niece of a Suffolk gentleman of large fortune. Her mother lives with her

three daughters at Beccles; her income is but the interest of fifteen

hundred pounds, which at her decease is to be divided betwixt her

children. The brother makes her annual income about a hundred pounds; he

is a rigid economist, and though I have the pleasure of his approbation,

I have not the good fortune to obtain more, nor from a prudent man could

I perhaps expect so much. But from the family at Beccles I have every

mark of their attention, and every proof of their disinterested regard.

They have from time to time supplied me with such sums as they could

possibly spare, and that they have not done more arose from my

concealing the severity of my situation, for I would not involve in my

errors or misfortunes a very generous and very happy family by which I

am received with unaffected sincerity, and where I am treated as a son

by a mother who can have no prudential reason to rejoice that her

daughter has formed such a connection. It is this family I lately

visited, and by which I am pressed to return, for they know the

necessity there is for me to live with the utmost frugality, and

hopeless of my succeeding in town, they invite me to partake of their

little fortune, and as I cannot mend my prospects, to avoid making them

worse." The letter ends with an earnest appeal to Burke to help him to

any honest occupation that may enable him to live without being a burden

on the slender resources of Miss Elmy's family. Crabbe is full of

gratitude for all that Burke has thus far done for him. He has helped

him to complete and publish his poem, but Crabbe is evidently aware that

poetry does not mean a livelihood, and that his future is as dark as

ever. The letter is dated from Crabbe's old lodging with the Vickerys in

Bishopsgate Street, and he had been lately staying with the Elmys at

Beccles. He was not therefore as yet a visitor under Burke's roof. This

was yet to come, with all the happy results that were to follow. It may

still seem strange that all these details remained to be told to Burke

four months after their acquaintance had begun. An explanation of this

may be found in the autobiographical matter that Crabbe late in life

supplied to the _New Monthly Magazine_ in 1816. He there intimates that

after Burke had generously assisted him in other ways, besides enabling

him to publish _The Library_, the question had been discussed of

Crabbe's future calling. "Mr. Crabbe was encouraged to lay open his

views, past and present; to display whatever reading and acquirements he

possessed, to explain the causes of his disappointments, and the

cloudiness of his prospects; in short he concealed nothing from a friend

so able to guide inexperience, and so willing to pardon inadvertency."

Obviously it was in answer to such invitations from Burke that the

letter of the 26th of June 1781 was written.

It was probably soon after the publication of _The Library_ that Crabbe

paid his first visit to Beaconsfield, and was welcomed as a guest by

Burke's wife and her niece as cordially as by the statesman himself.

Here he first met Charles James Fox and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and through

the latter soon became acquainted with Samuel Johnson, on whom he called

in Bolt Court. Later in the year, when in London, Crabbe had lodgings

hard by the Burkes in St. James's Place, and continued to be a frequent

guest at their table, where he met other of Burke's distinguished

friends, political and literary. Among these was Lord Chancellor Thurlow

to whom Crabbe had appealed, without success, in his less fortunate

days. On that occasion Thurlow had simply replied, in regard to the

poems which Crabbe had enclosed, "that his avocations did not leave him

leisure to read verses." To this Crabbe had been so unwise as to reply

that it was one of a Lord Chancellor's functions to relieve merit in

distress. But the good-natured Chancellor had not resented the

impertinence, and now hearing afresh from Burke of his old petitioner,

invited Crabbe to breakfast, and made him a generous apology. "The first

poem you sent me, Sir," he said, "I ought to have noticed,--and I

heartily forgive the second." At parting, Thurlow pressed a sealed

packet containing a hundred pounds into Crabbe's hand, and assured him

of further help when Crabbe should have taken Holy Orders.

For already, as the result of Burke's unceasing interest in his new

friend, Crabbe's future calling had been decided. In the course of

conversations at Beaconsfield Burke had discovered that his tastes and

gifts pointed much more clearly towards divinity than to medicine. His

special training for the office of a clergyman was of course deficient.

He probably had no Greek, but he had mastered enough of Latin to read

and quote the Latin poets. Moreover, his chief passion from early youth

had been for botany, and the treatises on that subject were, in Crabbe's

day, written in the language adopted in all scientific works. "It is

most fortunate," said Burke, "that your father exerted himself to send

you to that second school; without a little Latin we should have made

nothing of you: now, I think we shall succeed." Moreover Crabbe had been

a wide and discursive reader. "Mr. Crabbe," Burke told Reynolds,

"appears to know something of every thing." As to his more serious

qualifications for the profession, his natural piety, as shown in the

diaries kept in his days of trial, was beyond doubt. He was well read in

the Scriptures, and the example of a religious and much-tried mother had

not been without its influence. There had been some dissipations of his

earlier manhood, as his son admits, to repent of and to put away; but

the growth of his character in all that was excellent was unimpeachable,

and Burke was amply justified in recommending Crabbe as a candidate for

orders to the Bishop of Norwich. He was ordained on the 21st of December

1781 to the curacy of his native town.

On arriving in Aldeburgh Crabbe once more set up housekeeping with a

sister, as he had done in his less prosperous days as parish doctor. Sad

changes had occurred in his old home during the two years of his

absence. His mother had passed away after her many years of patient

suffering, and his father's temper and habits were not the better for

losing the wholesome restraints of her presence. But his attitude to his

clergyman son was at once changed. He was proud of his reputation and

his new-formed friends, and of the proofs he had given that the money

spent on his education had not been thrown away. But, apart from the

family pride in him, and that of Miss Elmy and other friends at Parham,

Crabbe's reception by his former friends and neighbours in Aldeburgh was

not of the kind he might have hoped to receive. He had left the place

less than three years before, a half-trained and unappreciated

practitioner in physic, to seek his fortune among strangers in London,

with the forlornest hopes of success. Jealousy of his elevated position

and improved fortunes set in with much severity. On the other hand, it

was more than many could tolerate that the hedge-apothecary of old

should be empowered to hold forth in a pulpit. Crabbe himself in later

life admitted to his children that his treatment at the hands of his

fellow-townsmen was markedly unkind. Even though he was happy in the

improved relations with his own family, and in the renewed opportunities

of frequent intercourse with Miss Elmy and the Tovells, Crabbe's

position during the few months at Aldeburgh was far from agreeable. The

religious influence, moreover, which he would naturally have wished to

exercise in his new sphere would obviously suffer in consequence. The

result was that in accordance with the assurances given him by Thurlow

at their last meeting, Crabbe again laid his difficulties before the

Chancellor. Thurlow quite reasonably replied that he could not form any

opinion as to Crabbe's present situation--"still less upon the

agreeableness of it"; and hinted that a somewhat longer period of

probation was advisable before he selected Crabbe for preferment in the

Church.

Other relief was however at hand, and once more through the watchful

care of Burke. Crabbe received a letter from his faithful friend to the

effect that he had mentioned his case to the Duke of Rutland, and that

the Duke had offered him the post of domestic chaplain at Belvoir

Castle, when he might be free from his engagements at Aldeburgh. That

Burke should have ventured on this step is significant, both as regards

the Duke and Duchess, and Crabbe. Crabbe's son remarks with truth that

an appointment of the kind was unusual, "such situations in the mansions

of that rank being commonly filled either by relations of the family

itself, or by college acquaintances, or dependents recommended by

political service and local attachment." Now Burke would certainly not

have recommended Crabbe for the post if he had found in his _protégé_

any such defects of breeding or social tact as would have made his

society distasteful to the Duke and Duchess. Burke, as we have seen,

described him on their first acquaintance as having "the mind and

feelings of a gentleman." Thurlow, it is true, after one of Crabbe's

earlier interviews, had declared with an oath (_more suo_) that he was

"as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen." But Thurlow was not merely

jesting. He knew that Fielding's immortal clergyman had also the "mind

and feelings of a gentleman," although his simplicity and ignorance of

the world put him at many social disadvantages. It was probably the same

obvious difference in Crabbe from the common type of nobleman's chaplain

of that day which made Crabbe's position at Belvoir, as his son admits,

full of difficulties. It is quite possible and even natural that the

guests and visitors at the Castle did not always accept Crabbe's talents

as making up for a certain want of polish--or even perhaps for a want of

deference to their opinions in conversation. The "pampered menials"

moreover would probably resent having "to say Amen" to a

newly-discovered literary adventurer from the great metropolis.

In any case Crabbe's experience of a chaplain's life at Belvoir was

not, by his son's admission, a happy one. "The numberless allusions," he

writes, "to the nature of a literary dependent's existence in a great

lord's house, which occur in my father's writings, and especially in the

tale of _The Patron_, are, however, quite enough, to lead any one who

knew his character and feelings to the conclusion that notwithstanding

the kindness and condescension of the Duke and Duchess themselves--which

were, I believe, uniform, and of which he always spoke with

gratitude--the situation he filled at Belvoir was attended with many

painful circumstances, and productive in his mind of some of the acutest

sensations of wounded pride that have ever been traced by any pen." It

is not necessary to hold Crabbe himself entirely irresponsible for this

result. His son, with a frankness that marks the Biography throughout,

does not conceal that his father's temper, even in later life, was

intolerant of contradiction, and he probably expressed his opinions

before the guests at Belvoir with more vehemence than prudence. But if

the rebuffs he met with were long remembered, they taught him something

of value, and enlarged that stock of worldly wisdom so prominent in his

later writings. In the story of _The Patron_, the young student living

as the rich man's guest is advised by his father as to his behaviour

with a fulness of detail obviously derived from Crabbe's own

recollections of his early deficiencies:--

"Thou art Religion's advocate--take heed.

Hurt not the cause thy pleasure 'tis to plead;

With wine before thee, and with wits beside,

Do not in strength of reasoning powers confide;

What seems to thee convincing, certain, plain,

They will deny and dare thee to maintain;

And thus will triumph o'er thy eager youth,

While thou wilt grieve for so disgracing truth.

With pain I've seen, these wrangling wits among,

Faith's weak defenders, passionate and young;

Weak thou art not, yet not enough on guard

Where wit and humour keep their watch and ward.

Men gay and noisy will o'erwhelm thy sense,

Then loudly laugh at Truth's and thy expense:

While the kind ladies will do all they can

To check their mirth, and cry '_The good young man!_'"

Meantime there were alleviations of the poet's lot. If the guests of the

house were not always convinced by his arguments and the servants did

not disguise their contempt, the Duke and Duchess were kind, and made

him their friend. Nor was the Duke without an intelligent interest in

Crabbe's own subjects. Moreover, among the visitors at Belvoir were many

who shared that interest to the full, such as the Duke of Queensberry,

Lord Lothian, Bishop Watson, and the eccentric Dr. Robert Glynn. Again,

it was during Crabbe's residence at Belvoir that the Duke's brother,

Lord Robert Manners, died of wounds received while leading his ship,

_Resolution_, against the French in the West Indies, in the April of

1782. Crabbe's sympathy with the family, shown in his tribute to the

sailor-brother appended to the poem he was then bringing to completion,

still further strengthened the tie between them. Crabbe accompanied the

Duke to London soon after, to assist him in arranging with Stothard for

a picture to be painted of the incident of Lord Robert's death. It was

during this visit that Crabbe received the following letter from Burke.

The letter is undated, but belongs to the month of May, for _The

Village_ was published in that month, and Burke clearly refers to that

poem as just received, but as yet unread. Crabbe seems to have been for

the time off duty, and to have proposed a short visit to the Burkes;--

"Dear Sir,--I do not know by what unlucky accident

you missed the note I left for you at my house. I wrote

besides to you at Belvoir. If you had received these two

short letters you could not want an invitation to a place

where every one considers himself as infinitely honoured and

pleased by your presence. Mrs. Burke desires her best

compliments, and trusts that you will not let the holidays

pass over without a visit from you I have got the poem;

but I have not yet opened it. I don't like the unhappy

language you use about these matters. You do not easily

please such a judgment as your own--that is natural; but

where you are difficult every one else will be charmed. I am,

my dear sir, ever most affectionately yours,

EDMUND BURKE."

The "unhappy language" seems to point to Crabbe having expressed some

diffidence or forebodings concerning his new venture. Yet Crabbe had

less to fear on this head than with most of his early poems. _The

Village_ had been schemed and composed in parts before Crabbe knew

Burke. One passage in it indeed, as we have seen, had first convinced

Burke that the writer was a poet. And in the interval that followed the

poem had been completed and matured with a care that Crabbe seldom

afterwards bestowed upon his productions. Burke himself had suggested

and criticised much during its progress, and the manuscript had further

been submitted through Sir Joshua Reynolds to Johnson, who not only

revised it in detail but re-wrote half a dozen of the opening lines.

Johnson's opinion of the poem was conveyed to Reynolds in the following

letter, and here at last we get a date:--

_March_ 4, 1783.

"Sir,--I have sent you back Mr. Crabbe's poem, which I

read with great delight. It is original, vigorous, and elegant.

The alterations which I have made I do not require him to

adopt; for my lines are perhaps not often better than his

own: but he may take mine and his own together, and

perhaps between them produce something better than either.

He is not to think his copy wantonly defaced: a wet sponge

will wash all the red lines away and leave the pages clean.

His dedication will be least liked: it were better to contract

it into a short, sprightly address. I do not doubt of Mr.

Crabbe's success. I am, Sir, your most humble servant,

SAMUEL JOHNSON."

Boswell's comment on this incident is as follows:--"The sentiments of

Mr. Crabbe's admirable poem as to the false notions of rustic happiness

and rustic virtue were quite congenial with Dr. Johnson's own: and he

took the trouble not only to suggest slight corrections and variations,

but to furnish some lines when he thought he could give the writer's

meaning better than in the words of the manuscript." Boswell went on to

observe that "the aid given by Johnson to the poem, as to _The

Traveller_ and _Deserted Village_ of Goldsmith, were so small as by no

means to impair the distinguished merit of the author." There were

unfriendly critics, however, in Crabbe's native county who professed to

think otherwise, and "whispered that the manuscript had been so

_cobbled_ by Burke and Johnson that its author did not know it again

when returned to him." On which Crabbe's son rejoins that "if these kind

persons survived to read _The Parish Register_ their amiable conjectures

must have received a sufficient rebuke."

This confident retort is not wholly just. There can be no doubt that

some special mannerisms and defects of Crabbe's later style had been

kept in check by the wise revision of his friends. And again, when after

more than twenty years Crabbe produced _The Parish Register_, that poem,

as we shall see, had received from Charles James Fox something of the

same friendly revision and suggestion as _The Village_ had received from

Burke and Johnson.

_The Village_, in quarto, published by J. Dodsley, Pall Mall, appeared

in May 1783, and at once attracted attention by novel qualities. Among

these was the bold realism of the village-life described, and the minute

painting of the scenery among which it was led. Cowper had published his

first volume a year before, but thus far it had failed to excite general

interest, and had met with no sale. Burns had as yet published nothing.

But two poetic masterpieces, dealing with the joys and sorrows of

village folk, were fresh in Englishmen's memory. One was _The Elegy in a

Country Churchyard_, the other was _The Deserted Village_. Both had left

a deep impression upon their readers--and with reason--for two poems,

more certain of immortality, because certain of giving a pleasure that

cannot grow old-fashioned, do not exist in our literature. Each indeed

marked an advance upon all that English descriptive or didactic poets

had thus far contributed towards making humble life and rural scenery

attractive--unless we except the _Allegro_ of Milton and some passages

in Thomson's _Seasons_. Nor was it merely the consummate workmanship of

Gray and Goldsmith that had made their popularity. The genuineness of

the pathos in the two poems was beyond suspicion, although with Gray it

was blended with a melancholy that was native to himself. Although

their authors had not been brought into close personal relations with

the joys and sorrows dealt with, there was nothing of sentiment, in any

unworthy sense, in either poet's treatment of his theme. But the result

of their studies of humble village life was to produce something quite

distinct from the treatment of the realist. What they saw and remembered

had passed through the transfiguring medium of a poet's imagination

before it reached the reader. The finished product, like the honey of

the bee, was due to the poet as well as to the flower from which he had

derived the raw material.

It seems to have been generally assumed when Crabbe's _Village_

appeared, that it was of the nature of a rejoinder to Goldsmith's poem,

and the fact that Crabbe quotes a line from _The Deserted Village_,

"Passing rich on forty pounds a year," in his own description of the

village parson, might seem to confirm that impression. But the opening

lines of _The Village_ point to a different origin. It was rather during

those early years when George's father read aloud to his family the

pastorals of the so-called Augustan age of English poetry, that the boy

was first struck with the unreality and consequent worthlessness of the

conventional pictures of rural life. And in the opening lines of _The

Village_ he boldly challenges the judgment of his readers on this head.

The "pleasant land" of the pastoral poets was one of which George

Crabbe, not unjustly, "thought scorn."

"The village life, and every care that reigns

O'er youthful peasants and declining swains,

What labour yields, and what, that labour past,

Age, in its hour of languor, finds at last;

What form the real picture of the poor,

Demand a song--the Muse can give no more.

Fled are those times when in harmonious strains

The rustic poet praised his native plains:

No shepherds now, in smooth alternate verse,

Their country's beauty or their nymphs' rehearse;

Yet still for these we frame the tender strain,

Still in our lays fond Corydons complain,

And shepherds' boys their amorous pains reveal,

The only pains, alas! they never feel."

At this point follow the six lines which Johnson had substituted for the

author's. Crabbe had written:--

"In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring,

Tityrus, the pride of Mantuan swains, might sing.

But charmed by him, or smitten with his views,

Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse?

From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,

Where Fancy leads, or Virgil led the way?"

Johnson substituted the following, and Crabbe accepted the revised

version:--

"On Mincio's banks, in Caesar's bounteous reign,

If Tityrus found the Golden Age again,

Must sleepy bards the flattering dream prolong,

Mechanic echoes of the Mantuan song?

From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,

Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?"

The first four lines of Johnson are beyond question an improvement, and

it is worth remark in passing how in the fourth line he has anticipated

Cowper's "made poetry a mere mechanic art."

But in the concluding couplet, Crabbe's meaning seems to lose in

clearness through the change. Crabbe intended to ask whether it was safe

to desert truth and nature for one's own self-pleasing fancies, even

though Virgil had set the example. Johnson's version seems to obscure

rather than to make clearer this interpretation. Crabbe, after this

protest against the conventional, which, if unreal at the outset, had

become a thousand times more wearisome by repetition, passes on to a

daring presentation of real life lived among all the squalor of actual

poverty, not unskilfully interspersed with descriptions equally faithful

of the barren coast-scenery among which he had been brought up. It has

been already remarked how Crabbe's eye for rural nature had been

quickened and made more exact by his studies in botany. There was little

in the poetry then popular that reproduced an actual scene as perfectly

as do the following lines:--

"Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,

Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;

From thence a length of burning sand appears,

Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears;

Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,

Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye:

There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,

And to the ragged infant threaten war;

There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;

There the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;

Hardy and high above the slender sheaf

The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;

O'er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,

And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade;

With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound,

And a sad splendour vainly shines around."

Crabbe here perceives the value, as Goldsmith had done before him, of

village scenery as a background to his picture of village life. It

suited Goldsmith's purpose to describe the ideal rural community, happy,

prosperous, and innocent, as contrast with that depopulation of

villages and corruption of peasant life which he predicted from the

growing luxury and selfishness of the rich. But notwithstanding the

title of the poem, it is Auburn in its pristine condition that remains

in our memories. The dominant thought expressed is the virtue and the

happiness that belong by nature to village life. Crabbe saw that this

was no less idyllic and unreal, or at least incomplete, than the

pictures of shepherd life presented in the faded copies of Theocritus

and Virgil that had so long satisfied the English readers of poetry.

There was no unreality in Goldsmith's design. They were not fictitious

and "lucrative" tears that he shed. For his object was to portray an

English rural village in its ideality--rural loveliness--enshrining

rural innocence and joy--and to show how man's vices, invading it from

the outside, might bring all to ruin. Crabbe's purpose was different. He

aimed to awaken pity and sympathy for rural sins and sorrows with which

he had himself been in closest touch, and which sprang from causes

always in operation within the heart of the community itself, and not to

be attributed to the insidious attacks from without. Goldsmith, for

example, drew an immortal picture of the village pastor, closely

modelled upon Chaucer's "poor parson of a town," his piety, humility,

and never failing goodness to his flock.--

"Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,

And even his failings leaned to virtue's side;

But in his duty prompt at every call

He watched and wept; he prayed and felt for all.

And as a bird each fond endearment tries

To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies,

He tried each art, reproved each dull delay,

Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way."

Crabbe remembered a different type of parish priest in his boyhood, and

this is how he introduces him. He has been describing, with an

unmitigated realism, the village poorhouse, in all its squalor and

dilapidation:--

"There children dwell who know no parents' care:

Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there.

Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,

Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed"

The dying pauper needs some spiritual consolation ere he passes into the

unseen world,

"But ere his death some pious doubts arise,

Some simple fears which bold, bad men despise;

Fain would he ask the parish priest to prove

His title certain to the joys above:

For this he sends the murmuring nurse, who calls

The holy stranger to these dismal walls;

And doth not he, the pious man, appear,

He, 'passing rich with forty pounds a year'?

Ah! no: a shepherd of a different stock.

And far unlike him, feeds this little flock:

A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's task

As much as God or man can fairly ask;

The rest he gives to loves and labours light,

To fields the morning, and to feasts the night;

None better skilled the noisy pack to guide,

To urge their chase, to cheer them, or to chide;

A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day,

And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play:

Then, while such honours bloom around his head,

Shall he sit sadly by the sick man's bed,

To raise the hope he feels not, or with zeal

To combat fears that e'en the pious feel?"

Crabbe's son, after his father's death, cited in a note on

these lines what he hold to be a parallel passage from Cowper's

_Progress of Error_, beginning:--

"Oh, laugh or mourn with me the rueful jest,

A cassocked huntsman, and a fiddling priest."

Cowper's first volume, containing _Table-Talk_ and its companion

satires, appeared some months before Crabbe's _Village_. The

shortcomings of the clergy are a favourite topic with him, and a varied

gallery of the existing types of clerical inefficiency may be formed

from his pages. Many of Cowper's strictures were amply justified by the

condition of the English Church. But Cowper's method is not Crabbe's.

The note of the satirist is seldom absent, blended at times with just a

suspicion of that of the Pharisee. The humorist and the Puritan contend

for predominance in the breast of this polished gentleman and scholar.

Cowper's friend, Newton, in the Preface he wrote for his first volume,

claimed for the poet that his satire was "benevolent." But it was not

always discriminating or just. The satirist's keen love of antithesis

often weakens the moral virtue of Cowper's strictures. In this earliest

volume anger was more conspicuous than sorrow, and contempt perhaps more

obvious than either. The callousness of public opinion on many subjects

needed other medicine than this. Hence was it perhaps that Cowper's

volume, which appeared in May 1782, failed to awaken interest. Crabbe's

_Village_ appeared just a year later (it had been completed a year or

two earlier), and at once made its mark. "It was praised," writes his

son, "in the leading journals; the sale was rapid and extensive; and my

father's reputation was by universal consent greatly raised, and

permanently established, by this poem," The number of anonymous letters

it brought the author, some of gratitude, and some of resentment (for it

had laid its finger on many sores in the body-politic), showed how

deeply his touch had been felt. Further publicity for the poem was

obtained by Burke, who inserted the description of the Parish Workhouse

and the Village Apothecary in _The Annual Register,_ which he

controlled. The same pieces were included a few years later by Vicesimus

Knox in that excellent Miscellany _Elegant Extracts_. And Crabbe was to

learn in later life from Walter Scott how, when a youth of eighteen,

spending a snowy winter in a lonely country-house, he fell in with the

volume of _The Annual Register_ containing the passages from _The

Village;_ how deeply they had sunk into his heart; and that (writing

then to Crabbe in the year 1809) he could repeat them still from memory.

Edmund Burke's friend, Edward Shackleton, meeting Crabbe at Burke's

house soon after the publication of the poem, paid him an elegant

tribute. Goldsmith's, he said, would now be the "deserted" village.

Crabbe modestly disclaimed the compliment, and assuredly with reason

Goldsmith's delightful poem will never be deserted. For it is no loss

good and wise to dwell on village life as it might be, than to reflect

on what it has suffered from man's inhumanity to man. What made Crabbe a

now force in English poetry, was that in his verse Pity appears, after a

long oblivion, as the true antidote to Sentimentalism. The reader is not

put off with pretty imaginings, but is led up to the object which the

poet would show him, and made to feel its horror. If Crabbe is our first

great realist in verse, he uses his realism in the cause of a true

humanity. _Facit indignatio versum._

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: I cannot deny myself the pleasure of here acknowledging my

indebtedness to a French scholar, M. Huchon of the University of Nancy.

M. Huchon is himself engaged upon a study of the Life and Poetry of

Crabbe, and in the course of a conversation with me in London, first

called my attention to the volume containing this letter. I agree with

him in thinking that no previous biographer of Crabbe has been aware of

its existence.]

CHAPTER IV

LIFE AT BELVOIR CASTLE AND AT MUSTON

(1783-1792)

"The sudden popularity of _The Village_" writes Crabbe's son and

biographer, "must have produced, after the numberless slights and

disappointments already mentioned, and even after the tolerable success

of _The Library_, about as strong a revulsion in my father's mind as a

ducal chaplaincy in his circumstances; but there was no change in his

temper or manners. The successful author continued as modest as the

rejected candidate for publication had been patient and long-suffering."

The biographer might have remarked as no less strange that the success

of _The Village_ failed, for the moment at least, to convince Crabbe

where his true strength lay. When he again published a poem, two years

later, he reverted to the old Popian topics and methods in a by no means

successful didactic satire on newspapers. Meantime the occasional visits

of the Duke of Rutland and his family to London brought the chaplain

again in touch with the Burkes and the friends he had first made through

them, notably with Sir Joshua Reynolds. He was also able to visit the

theatre occasionally, and fell under the spell, not only of Mrs.

Siddons, but of Mrs. Jordan (in the character of Sir Harry Wildair). It

was now decided that as a nobleman's chaplain it would be well for him

to have a university degree, and to this end his name was entered on the

boards of Trinity College, Cambridge, through the good offices of Bishop

Watson of Llandaff, with a view to his obtaining a degree without

residence. This was in 1783, but almost immediately afterwards he

received an LL.B. degree from the Archbishop of Canterbury. This was

obtained for Crabbe in order that he might hold two small livings in

Dorsetshire, Frome St. Quintin and Evershot, to which he had just been

presented by Thurlow. It was on this occasion that the Chancellor made

his memorable comparison of Crabbe to Parson Adams, no doubt pointing to

a certain rusticity, and possibly provincial accent, from which Crabbe

seems never to have been wholly free. This promotion seems to have

interfered very little with Crabbe's residence at Belvoir or in London.

A curate was doubtless placed in one or other of the parsonage-houses in

Dorsetshire at such modest stipend as was then usual--often not more

than thirty pounds a year--and the rector would content himself with a

periodical flying visit to receive tithe, or inquire into any parish

grievances that may have reached his ear. As incidents of this kind will

be not infrequent during the twenty years that follow in Crabbe's

clerical career, it may be well to intimate at once that no peculiar

blame attaches to him in the matter. He but "partook of the frailty of

his times." During these latter years of the eighteenth century, as for

long before and after, pluralism in the Church was rather the rule than

the exception, and in consequence non-residence was recognised as

inevitable, and hardly matter for comment. The two Dorsetshire livings

were of small value, and as Crabbe was now looking forward to his

marriage with the faithful Miss Elmy, he could not have afforded to

reside. He may not, however, have thought it politic to decline the

first preferment offered by so important a dispenser of patronage as the

Lord Chancellor.

Events, however, were at hand, which helped to determine Crabbe's

immediate future. Early in 1784 the Duke of Rutland became Lord

Lieutenant of Ireland. The appointment had been made some time before,

and it had been decided that Crabbe was not to be on the Castle staff.

His son expresses no surprise at this decision, and makes of it no

grievance. The duke and the chaplain parted excellent friends. Crabbe

and his wife were to remain at Belvoir as long as it suited their

convenience, and the duke undertook that he would not forget him as

regarded future preferment. On the strength of these offers, Crabbe and

Miss Elmy wore married in December 1783, in the parish church of

Beccles, where Miss Elmy's mother resided, and a few weeks later took up

their abode in the rooms assigned them at Belvoir Castle.

As Miss Elmy had lived for many years with her uncle and aunt, Mr. and

Mrs. John Tovell, at Parham, and moreover as this rural inland village

played a considerable part in the development of Crabbe's poetical

faculty, it may be well to quote his son's graphic account of the

domestic circumstances of Miss Elmy's relatives. Mr. Tovell was, like

Mr. Hathaway, "a substantial yeoman," for he owned an estate of some

eight hundred a year, to some share of which, as the Tovells had lost

their only child, Miss Elmy would certainly in due course succeed. The

Tovells' house at Parham, which has been long ago pulled down, and

rebuilt as Paritam Lodge, on very different lines, was of ample size,

with its moat, so common a feature of the homestead in the eastern

counties, "rookery, dove-cot, and fish-ponds"; but the surroundings were

those of the ordinary farmhouse, for Mr. Tovell himself cultivated part

of his estate.

"The drawing-room, a corresponding dining-parlour, and a handsome

sleeping apartment upstairs, were all _tabooed_ ground, and made use of

on great and solemn occasions only--such as rent-days, and an occasional

visit with which Mr. Tovell was honoured by a neighbouring peer. At all

other times the family and their visitors lived entirely in the

old-fashioned kitchen along with the servants. My great-uncle occupied

an armchair, or, in attacks of gout, a couch on one side of a large open

chimney.... At a very early hour in the morning the alarum called the

maids, and their mistress also; and if the former were tardy, a louder

alarum, and more formidable, was heard chiding their delay--not that

scolding was peculiar to any occasion; it regularly ran on through all

the day, like bells on harness, inspiriting the work, whether it were

done well or ill." In the annotated volume of the son's memoir which

belonged to Edward FitzGerald, the writer added the following detail as

to his great-aunt's temper and methods:--"A wench whom Mrs. Tovell had

pursued with something weightier than invective--a ladle, I

think--whimpered out 'If an angel from Hiv'n were to come mawther'"

(Suffolk for _girl_) "'to missus, she wouldn't give no satisfaction.'"

George Crabbe the younger, who gives this graphic account of the

_ménage_ at Parham, was naturally anxious to claim for his mother, who

so long formed one of this queer household, a degree of refinement

superior to that of her surroundings. After describing the daily

dinner-party in the kitchen--master, mistress, servants, with an

occasional "travelling rat-catcher or tinker"--he skilfully points out

that his mother's feelings must have resembled those of the

boarding-school miss in his father's "Widow's Tale" when subjected to a

like experience:--

"But when the men beside their station took,

The maidens with them, and with these the cook;

When one huge wooden bowl before them stood,

Filled with huge balls of farinaceous food;

With bacon, mass saline! where never lean

Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen:

When from a single horn the party drew

Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new;

When the coarse cloth she saw, with many a stain,

Soiled by rude hands who cut and came again--

She could not breathe, but with a heavy sigh,

Reined the fair neck, and shut th' offended eye;

She minced the sanguine flesh in frustums fine,

And wondered much to see the creatures dine!"

The home of the Tovells has long disappeared, and it must not therefore

be confused with the more remarkable "moated grange" in Parham,

originally the mansion of the Willoughbys, though now a farmhouse,

boasting a fine Tudor gateway and other fragments of fifteenth and

sixteenth century work. An engraving of the Hall and moat, after

Stanfield, forms an illustration to the third volume of the 1834 edition

of Crabbe.

When Crabbe began _The Village_, it was clearly intended to be, like

_The Borough_ later, a picture of Aldeburgh and its inhabitants. Yet not

only Parham, but the country about Belvoir crept in before the poem was

completed. If the passage in Book I. beginning:--

"Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,"

describes pure Aldeburgh, the opening lines of Book II., taking a more

roseate view of rural happiness:--

"I, too, must yield, that oft amid those woes

Are gleams of transient mirth and hours of sweet repose,

Such as you find on yonder sportive Green,

The squire's tall gate, and churchway-walk between,

Where loitering stray a little tribe of friends

On a fair Sunday when the sermon ends,"

are drawn from the pleasant villages in the Midlands (perhaps Allington,

where he was afterwards to minister), whither he rambled on his

botanising excursions from Belvoir Castle.

George Crabbe and his bride settled down in their apartments at Belvoir

Castle, but difficulties soon arose. Crabbe was without definite

clerical occupation, unless he read prayers to the few servants left in

charge; and was simply waiting for whatever might turn up in the way of

preferment from the Manners family, or from the Lord Chancellor. The

young couple soon found the position intolerable, and after less than

eighteen months Crabbe wisely accepted a vacant curacy in the

neighbourhood, that of Stathern in Leicestershire, to the humble

parsonage of which parish Crabbe and his wife removed in 1785. A child

had been born to them at Belvoir, who survived its birth only a few

hours. During the following four years at Stathern were born three

other children--the two sons, George and John, in 1785 and 1787, and a

daughter in 1789, who died in infancy.

Stathern is a village about four miles from Belvoir Castle, and the

drive or walk from one to the other lies through the far-spreading woods

and gardens surrounding the ducal mansion. Crabbe entered these woods

almost at his very door, and found there ample opportunity for his

botanical studies, which were still his hobby. As usual his post was

that of _locum tenens_, the rector, Dr. Thomas Parke, then residing at

his other living at Stamford. My friend, the Rev. J.W. Taylor, the

present rector of Stathern, who entered on his duties in 1866, tells me

of one or two of the village traditions concerning Crabbe. One of these

is to the effect that he spoke "through his nose," which I take to have

been the local explanation of a marked Suffolk accent which accompanied

the poet through life. Another, that he was peppery of temper, and that

an exceedingly youthful couple having presented themselves for holy

matrimony, Crabbe drove them with scorn from the altar, with the remark

that he had come there to marry "men and women, and not lads and

wenches!"

Crabbe used to tell his children that the four years at Stathern were,

on the whole, the happiest in his life. He and his wife were in humble

quarters, but they were their own masters, and they were quit of "the

pampered menial" for ever. "My mother and he," the son writes, "could

now ramble together at their ease amidst the rich woods of Belvoir

without any of the painful feelings which had before chequered his

enjoyment of the place: at home a garden afforded him healthful

exercise and unfailing amusement; and his situation as a curate

prevented him from being drawn into any sort of unpleasant disputes with

the villagers about him"--an ambiguous statement which probably,

however, means that the absent rector had to settle difficulties as to

tithe, and other parochial grievances. Crabbe now again brought his old

medical attainments, such as they were, to the aid of his poor

parishioners, "and had often great difficulty in confining his practice

strictly within the limits of the poor, for the farmers would willingly

have been attended _gratis_ also." His literary labours subsequent to

_The Village_ seem to have been slight, with the exception of a brief

memoir of Lord Robert Manners contributed to _The Annual Register_ in

1784, for the poem of _The Newspaper,_ published in 1785, was probably

"old stock." It is unlikely that Crabbe, after the success of _The

Village,_ should have willingly turned again to the old and unprofitable

vein of didactic satire. But, the poem being in his desk, he perhaps

thought that it might bring in a few pounds to a household which

certainly needed them. "_The Newspaper_, a Poem, by the Rev. George

Crabbe, Chaplain to his Grace the Duke of Rutland, printed for J.

Dodsley, in Pall Mall," appeared as a quarto pamphlet (price 2s.) in

1785, with a felicitous motto from Ovid's _Metamorphoses_ on the

title-page, and a politic dedication to Lord Thurlow, evincing a

gratitude for past favours, and (unexpressed) a lively sense of favours

to come.

_The Newspaper_ is, to say truth, of little value, either as throwing

light on the journalism of Crabbe's day, or as a step in his poetic

career. The topics are commonplace, such as the strange admixture of

news, the interference of the newspaper with more useful reading, and

the development of the advertiser's art. It is written in the fluent and

copious vein of mild satire and milder moralising which Crabbe from

earliest youth had so assiduously practised. If a few lines are needed

as a sample, the following will show that the methods of literary

puffing are not so original to-day as might be supposed. After

indicating the tradesman's ingenuity in this respect, the poet adds.--

"These are the arts by which a thousand live,

Where Truth may smile, and Justice may forgive.

But when, amid this rabble-rout, we find

A puffing poet, to his honour blind:

Who slily drops quotations all about

Packet or Post, and points their merit out;

Who advertises what reviewers say,

With sham editions every second day;

Who dares not trust his praises out of sight,

But hurries into fame with all his might;

Although the verse some transient praise obtains,

Contempt is all the anxious poet gains"

_The Newspaper_ seems to have been coldly received by the critics, who

had perhaps been led by _The Village_ to expect something very

different, and Crabbe never returned to the satirical-didactic line.

Indeed, for twenty-two years he published nothing more, although he

wrote continuously, and as regularly committed the bulk of his

manuscript to the domestic fire-place. Meantime he lived a happy country

life at Stathern, studying botany, reading aloud to his wife, and by no

means forgetting the wants of his poor parishioners. He visited

periodically his Dorsetshire livings, introducing his wife on one such

occasion, as he passed through London, to the Burkes. And one day,

seized with an acute attack of the _mal du pays_, he rode sixty miles

to the coast of Lincolnshire that he might once more "dip," as his son

expresses it, "in the waves that washed the beach of Aldeburgh."

In October 1787, Crabbe's household were startled by the news of the

death of his friend and patron the Duke of Rutland, who died at the

Vice-regal Lodge at Dublin, after a short illness, at the early age of

thirty-three. The duke, an open-handed man and renowned for his

extravagant hospitalities, had lived "not wisely but too well." Crabbe

assisted at the funeral at Belvoir, and duly published his discourse

then delivered in handsome quarto. Shortly after, the duchess, anxious

to retain their former chaplain in the neighbourhood, gave Crabbe a

letter to Thurlow, asking him to exchange the two livings in Dorsetshire

for two other, of more value, in the Vale of Belvoir. Crabbe waited on

the Chancellor with the letter, but Thurlow was, or affected to be,

annoyed by the request. It was a thing, he exclaimed with an oath, that

he would not do "for any man in England." However, when the young and

beautiful duchess later appealed to him in person, he relented, and

presented Crabbe to the two livings of Muston in Leicestershire, and

Allington in Lincolnshire, both, within sight of Belvoir Castle, and (as

the crow flies) not much more than a mile apart. To the rectory house of

Muston, Crabbe brought his family in February 1789. His connection with

the two livings was to extend over five and twenty years, but during

thirteen of those years, as will be seen, he was a non-resident. For the

present he remained three years at the small and very retired village of

Muston, about five miles from Grantham. "The house in which Crabbe

lived at Muston," writes Mr. Hutton,[2] "is now pulled down. It is

replaced by one built higher up a slight hill, in a position intended,

says scandal, to prevent any view of Belvoir. Crabbe with all his

ironies had no such resentful feelings; indeed more modern successors of

his have opened what he would have called a 'vista,' and the castle

again crowns the distance as you look southward from the pretty garden."

Crabbe's first three years of residence at Muston were marked by few

incidents. Another son, Edmund, was horn in the autumn of 1790, and a

few weeks later a series of visits were paid by Crabbe, his wife and

elder boy, to their relations at Aldeburgh, Parham, and Beccles, from

which latter town, according to Crabbe's son, they visited Lowestoft,

and were so fortunate as to hear the aged John Wesley preach, on a

memorable occasion when he quoted Anacreon:--

"Oft am I by women told,

Poor Anacreon! thou grow'st old

. . . . .

. . . . .

But this I need not to be told,

'Tis time to _live_, if I grow old."

In 1792 Crabbe preached at the bishop's visitation at Grantham, and his

sermon was so much admired that he was invited to receive into his house

as pupils the sons of the Earl of Bute. This task, however, Crabbe

rightly declined, being diffident as to his scholarship.

In October of this year Crabbe was again working hard at his

botany--for like the Friar in _Romeo and Juliet_ his time was always

much divided between the counselling of young couples and the "culling

of simples"--when his household received the tidings of the death of

John Tovell of Parham, after a brief illness. It was momentous news to

Crabbe's family, for it involved "good gifts," and many "possibilities."

Crabbe was left executor, and as Mr. Tovell had died without children,

the estate fell to his two sisters, Mrs. Elmy and an elderly spinster

sister residing in Parham. As Mrs. Elmy's share of the estate would come

to her children, and as the unmarried sister died not long after,

leaving her portion in the same direction, Crabbe's anxiety for the

pecuniary future of his family was at an end. He visited Parham on

executor's business, and on his return found that he had made up his

mind "to place a curate at Muston, and to go and reside at Parham,

taking the charge of some church in that neighbourhood."

Crabbe's son, with the admirable frankness that marks his memoir

throughout, does not conceal that this step in his father's life was a

mistake, and that he recognised and regretted it as such on cooler

reflection. The comfortable home of the Tovells at Parham fell somehow,

whether by the will, or by arrangement with Mrs. Elmy, to the disposal

of Crabbe, and he was obviously tempted by its ampler room and pleasant

surroundings. He would be once more among relatives and acquaintances,

and a social circle congenial to himself and his wife. Muston must have

been very dull and lonely, except for those on visiting terms with the

duke and other county magnates. Moreover it is likely that the

relations of Crabbe with his village flock were already--as we know they

were at a later date--somewhat strained. Let it be said once for all

that judged by the standards of clerical obligation current in 1792,

Crabbe was then, and remained all his life, in many important respects,

a diligent parish-priest. Mr. Hutton justly remarks that "the intimate

knowledge of the life of the poor which his poems show proves how

constantly he must have visited, no less than how closely he must have

observed." But the fact remains that though he was kind and helpful to

his flock while among them in sickness and in trouble--their physician

as well as their spiritual adviser--his ideas as to clerical absenteeism

were those of his age, and moreover his preaching to the end of his life

was not of a kind to arouse much interest or zeal. I have had access to

a large packet of his manuscript sermons, preached during his residence

in Suffolk and later, as proved by the endorsements on the cover, at his

various incumbencies in Leicestershire and Wiltshire. They consist of

plain and formal explanations of his text, reinforced by other texts,

entirely orthodox but unrelieved by any resource in the way of

illustration, or by any of those poetic touches which his published

verse shows he had at his command. A sermon lies before me, preached

first at Great Glemham in 1801, and afterwards at Little Glemham,

Sweffling, Muston, and Allington; at Trowbridge in 1820, and again at

Trowbridge in 1830. The preacher probably held his discourses quite as

profitable at one stage in the Church's development as at another. In

this estimate of clerical responsibilities Crabbe seems to have remained

stationary. But meantime the laity had been aroused to expect better

things. The ferment of the Wesley and Whitefield Revival was spreading

slowly but surely even among the remote villages of England. What Crabbe

and the bulk of the parochial clergy called "a sober and rational

conversion" seemed to those who had fallen under the fervid influence of

the great Methodist a savourless and ineffectual formality. The

extravagances of the Movement had indeed travelled everywhere in company

with its worthier fruits. Enthusiasm,--"an excellent good word until it

was ill-sorted,"--found vent in various shapes that were justly feared

and suspected by many of the clergy, even by those to whom "a reasonable

religion" was far from being "so very reasonable as to have nothing to

do with the heart and affections." It was not only the Moderates who saw

its danger. Wesley himself had found it necessary to caution his more

impetuous followers against its eccentricities. And Joseph Butler

preaching at the Rolls Chapel on "the Love of God" thought it well to

explain that in his use of the phrase there was nothing

"enthusiastical." But as one mischievous extreme generates another, the

influence of the prejudice against enthusiasm became disastrous, and the

word came too often to be confounded with any and every form of

religious fervency and earnestness. To the end of his days Crabbe, like

many another, regarded sobriety and moderation in the expression of

religious feeling as not only its chief safeguard but its chief

ornament. It may seem strange that the poetic temperament which Crabbe

certainly possessed never seemed to affect his views of life and human

nature outside the fields of poetic composition. He was notably

indifferent, his son tells us, "to almost all the proper objects of

taste. He had no real love for painting, or music, or architecture, or

for what a painter's eye considers as the beauties of landscape. But he

had a passion for science--the science of the human mind, first; then,

that of nature in general; and lastly that of abstract qualities."

If the defects here indicated help to explain some of those in his

poetry, they may also throw light on a certain lack of imagination in

Crabbe's dealings with his fellow-men in general and with his

parishioners in particular. His temperament was somewhat tactless and

masterful, and he could never easily place himself at the stand-point of

those who differed from him. The use of his imagination was mainly

confined to the hours in his study; and while there, if he had his

"_beaux moments_," he had also his "_mauvais quarts d'heure_."

Perhaps if he had brought a little imagination to bear upon his

relations with Muston and Allington, Crabbe would not have deserted his

people so soon after coming among them. The stop made him many enemies.

For here was no case of a poor curate accepting, for his family's sake,

a more lucrative post. Crabbe was leaving the Vale of Belvoir because an

accession of fortune had befallen the family, and it was pleasanter to

live in his native county and in a better house. So, at least, his

action was interpreted at the time, and Crabbe's son takes no very

different view. "Though tastes and affections, as well as worldly

interests, prompted this return to native scenes and early

acquaintances, it was a step reluctantly taken, and I believe, sincerely

repented of. The beginning was ominous. As we were slowly quitting the

place preceded by our furniture, a stranger, though one who knew my

father's circumstances, called out in an impressive tone, 'You are

wrong, you are wrong!'" The sound, he afterwards admitted, found an echo

in his own conscience, and during the whole journey seemed to ring in

his ears "like a supernatural voice."

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: See a pleasant paper on Crabbe at Muston and Allington by

the Rev. W.H. Hutton of St John's College, Oxford, in the _Cornhill

Magazine_ for June 1901.]

CHAPTER V

IN SUFFOLK AGAIN

(1792-1805)

On the arrival of the family at Parham, poor Crabbe discovered that even

an accession of fortune had its attendant drawbacks. His son, George,

records his own recollections (he was then a child of seven years) of

the scene that met their view on their alighting at Parham Lodge. "As I

got out of the chaise, I remember jumping for very joy, and exclaiming,

'Here we are, here we are--little Willy and all!'"--(his parents'

seventh and youngest child, then only a few weeks old)--"but my spirits

sunk into dismay when, on entering the well-known kitchen, all there

seemed desolate, dreary, and silent. Mrs. Tovell and her sister-in-law,

sitting by the fireside weeping, did not even rise up to welcome my

parents, but uttered a few chilling words and wept again. All this

appeared to me as inexplicable as forbidding. How little do children

dream of the alterations that older people's feelings towards each other

undergo, when death has caused a transfer of property! Our arrival in

Suffolk was by no means palatable to all my mother's relations."

Mr. Tovell's widow had doubtless her suitable jointure, and probably a

modest dower-residence to retire to; but Parham Hall had to be vacated,

and Crabbe, having purchased its furniture, at once entered on

possession. The mere re-arrangement of the contents caused many

heartburnings to the spinster-sister, who had known them under the old

_régime_, and the alteration of the hanging of a picture would have made

"Jacky," she averred, to turn in his grave. Crabbe seems, however, to

have shown so much good-feeling and forbearance in the matter that the

old lady, after grimly boasting that she could "screw Crabbe up and down

like a fiddle," was ultimately friendly, and her share of her brother's

estate came in due course to Crabbe and his wife. Moreover, the change

of tenancy at the Hall was anything but satisfactory to the village

generally. Mr. Tovell had been much given to hospitality, and that of a

convivial sort. Such of the neighbours as were of kindred tastes had

been in the habit of "dropping in" of an evening two or three times a

week, when, if a _quorum_ was present, a bowl of punch would be brewed,

and sometimes a second and a third. The substitution for all this of the

quiet and decorous family life of the Crabbes was naturally a hoary blow

and grave discouragement to the village reveller, and contributed to

make Crabbe's life at starting far from happy. His pursuits and

inclinations, literary as well as clerical, made such company

distasteful; and his wife, who had borne him seven children in nine

years, and of these had lost four in infancy, had little strength or

heart for miscellaneous company. But there was compensation for her

husband among the county gentry of the neighbourhood, and notably in the

constant kindness of Dudley North, of Little Glemham Hall, the same

friend who had helped him with money when twelve years before he had

left Aldeburgh, an almost penniless adventurer, to try his fortune in

London. At Mr. North's table Crabbe had once more the opportunity of

meeting members of the Whig party, whom he had known through Burke. On

one such occasion Fox expressed his regret that Crabbe had ceased to

write, and offered his help in revising any future poem that he might

produce. The promise was not forgotten when ten years later _The Parish

Register_ was in preparation.

During his first year at Parham, Crabbe does not appear to have

undertaken any fixed clerical duties, and this interval of leisure

allowed him to pay a long visit to his sister at Aldeburgh, and here he

placed his two elder boys, George and John, at a dame school. On

returning to Parham, he accepted the office of curate-in-charge at

Sweffling, the rector, Rev. Richard Turner, being resident at his other

living of Great Yarmouth. The curacy of Great Glemham, also within easy

reach, was shortly added. Crabbe was still residing at Parham Lodge, but

the incidents of such residence remained far from pleasant, and, after

four years there, Crabbe joyfully accepted the offer of a good house at

Great Glemham, placed at his disposal by his friend Dudley North. Here

the family remained for a further period of four or five years.

A fresh bereavement in his family had made Crabbe additionally anxious

for change of scene and associations for his wife. In 1796, another

child died--their third son, Edmund--in his sixth year. Two children,

out of a family of seven, alone remained; and this final blow proved

more than the poor mother could bear uninjured. From this time dated "a

nervous disorder," which indeed meant a gradual decay of mental power,

from which she never recovered; and Crabbe, an ever-devoted husband,

tended her with exemplary care till her death in 1813. Southey, writing

about Crabbe to his friend, Neville White, in 1808, adds: "It was not

long before his wife became deranged, and when all this was told me by

one who knew him well, five years ago, he was still almost confined in

his own house, anxiously waiting upon this wife in her long and hopeless

malady. A sad history! It is no wonder that he gives so melancholy a

picture of human life."

Save for Mrs. Crabbe's broken health and increasing melancholy, the four

years at Glemham were among the most peaceful and happiest of Crabbe's

life. His son grows eloquent over the elegance of the house and the

natural beauties of its situation. "A small well-wooded park occupied

the whole mouth of the glen, whence, doubtless, the name of the village

was derived. In the lowest ground stood the commodious mansion; the

approach wound down through a plantation on the eminence in front. The

opposite hill rose at the back of it, rich and varied with trees and

shrubs scattered irregularly; under this southern hill ran a brook, and

on the banks above it were spots of great natural beauty, crowned by

whitethorn and oak. Here the purple scented violet perfumed the air, and

in one place coloured the ground. On the left of the front in the

narrower portion of the glen was the village; on the right, a confined

view of richly wooded fields. In fact, the whole parish and

neighbourhood resemble a combination of groves, interspersed with fields

cultivated like gardens, and intersected with those green dry lanes

which tempt the walker in all weathers, especially in the evenings, when

in the short grass of the dry sandy banks lies every few yards a

glowworm, and the nightingales are pouring forth their melody in every

direction."

It was not, therefore, for lack of acquaintance with the more idyllic

side of English country-life that Crabbe, when he once more addressed

the public in verse, turned to the less sunny memories of his youth for

inspiration. It was not till some years after the appearance of _The

Parish Register_ and _The Borough_ that the pleasant paths of inland

Suffolk and of the Vale of Belvoir formed the background to his studies

in human character.

Meantime Crabbe was perpetually writing, and as constantly destroying

what he wrote. His small flock at Great and Little Glemham employed part

of his time; the education of his two sons, who were now withdrawn from

school, occupied some more; and a wife in failing health was certainly

not neglected. But the busy husband and father found time to teach

himself something of French and Italian, and read aloud to his family of

an evening as many books of travel and of fiction as his friends would

keep him supplied with. He was preparing at the same time a treatise on

botany, which was never to see the light; and during "one or two of his

winters in Suffolk," his son relates, "he gave most of his evening hours

to the writing of novels, and he brought not less than three such works

to a conclusion. The first was entitled 'The Widow Grey,' but I

recollect nothing of it except that the principal character was a

benevolent humorist, a Dr. Allison. The next was called 'Reginald

Glanshaw, or the Man who commanded Success,' a portrait of an assuming,

over-bearing, ambitious mind, rendered interesting by some generous

virtues, and gradually wearing down into idiotism. I cannot help

thinking that this Glanshaw was drawn with very extraordinary power; but

the story was not well managed in the details I forget the title of his

third novel; but I clearly remember that it opened with a description of

a wretched room, similar to some that are presented in his poetry, and

that on my mother's telling him frankly that she thought the effect very

inferior to that of the corresponding pieces in verse, he paused in his

reading, and after some reflection, said, 'Your remark is just.'"

Mrs. Crabbe's remark was probably very just. Although her husband had

many qualifications for writing prose fiction--insight into and

appreciation of character, combined with much tragic force and a real

gift for description--there is reason to think that he would have been

stilted and artificial in dialogue, and altogether wanting in lightness

of hand. Crabbe acquiesced in his wife's decision, and the novels were

cremated without a murmur. A somewhat similar fate attended a set of

Tales in Verse which, in the year 1799, Crabbe was about to offer to Mr.

Hatchard, the publisher, when he wisely took the opinion of his rector

at Sweffling, then resident at Yarmouth, the Rev. Richard Turner[3].

This gentleman, whose opinion Crabbe greatly valued, advised _revision_,

and Crabbe accepted the verdict as the reverse of encouraging. The Tales

were never published, and Crabbe again deferred his reappearance in

print for a period of eight years. Meantime he applied himself to the

leisurely composition of the _Parish Register_, which extended, together

with that of some shorter poems, over the period just named.