and cheese on the quay. At last, a situation at a village near Bury St. Edmunds was procured; and Crabbe, then a spare, low-spirited, weakly-looking lad, “in a very ill-made scratch-wig" (his head had been recently shaved in an illness), presented himself at the door of his new home. "His master's daughters, having eyed him for a few moments, burst into a violent fit of laughter, exclaiming, 'La! here's our new 'prentice!" The new apprentice prepared the medicines, helped on the farm, and slept with the ploughboy. Crabbe had always been a great reader. His father gave him all the“ Occasional Poetry" which appeared in a periodical he took in; and most of these -written chiefly in the style of Pope, and in the heroic couplet—the boy got by heart. He now began to write verses, he was fourteen,— and in this pursuit forgot some of the hardships of his position. His next place was with a surgeon near Aldborough; and here" he filled the drawers with poetry." 17. In 1775 he had completed his apprenticeship; and he returned to Aldborough, with the hope that his father would be able to find means to enable him to establish himself in London. But this was impossible: and Crabbe had to return to the piling of butter and cheese on the quay. He did get to London, however, and lived there for about ten months; but all his efforts were unsuccessful, and he had to return to Aldborough. He now set up for himself, as an apothecary; but his chief patients were his poor relations, old women, daily visitors, to request "something comfortable now, cousin George:" and these paid nothing. On the 31st December, 1779, he "determined to go to London, and venture all." He borrowed five pounds, embarked on board a sloop with a box of clothes, a small case of surgical instruments, and his best poems; and was landed in the city with three pounds in his pocket. 18. His object in returning to London was to try and dispose of his MSS., and to enlist the sympathies of men in office in his position. Bookseller after bookseller declined his poems; and the only one found who would accept and publish one, became bankrupt. He wrote to Lord Shelbourne, to Lord Thurlow, to the Prince of Wales; the result was invariably the same,-" no answer." The time spent in waiting he gave to reading, composing two dramas, and essays in imitation of Addison (the “Town” had long been tired of Addisonian Essays), and botanizing in Hornsey Wood. During this year of expectation he was often reduced to fourpence-halfpenny in his pocket; sold his instruments, sold his wardrobe, "pawned his watch, was in debt to his landlord, and finally, at some loss how to eat a week longer." He was reduced literally to eightpence, when he resolved to make "one effort more," and to write to Edmund Burke. After de livering the letter, he walked all night up and down Westminster Bridge. 19. Mr. Burke, though then in the thick of the "hottest fight of parliamentary opposition," was struck by Crabbe's poems; sent for him, and offered him shelter in his own house. Of the poems left with him, Mr. Burke selected The Library and The Village as the best, and induced Dadsby to publish The Library. Crabbe was taken down to Beaconsfield, introduced to Dr. Johnson, to Mr. Fox, to Sir Joshua Reynolds, and other able men; and now, by the advice of Burke, he resolved to enter the Church. Dr. Johnson revised the Village for him; Lord Chancellor Thurlow asked him to breakfast, and, at parting, put a sealed letter into Mr. Crabbe's hands. The letter contained £100. Crabbe, whom Thurlow declared to be as "like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen," never told any one, but his son long after found out, that the first use he made of this money was to seek out some poor scholars he had known, and make them sharers in his good fortune. The Chancellor also promised to serve him after he should have taken orders. 20. On entering the Church, he was appointed domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, at Belvoir* Castle. Soon afterwards, in 1783, he married a Miss Sarah Elmy, and went to live in a small cottage in the neighbourhood. From this date till 1807-from his twentyninth year to his fifty-third--though he wrote a good deal, he published nothing, but filled his time with his parish duties, botany, entomology, mathematics, and the education of his children. From time to time he held grand incremations of his accumulated MSS.; and then bonfires were made in a field near the parsonage. One of them included three novels. He tried field sports; but, in coursing, "the cry of the first hare he saw killed, struck him as so like the wail of an infant, that he turned heartsick on the spot." He was so sen *Pronounced Beevor. The corruption of French names in our language is very great. So Chateau Vert becomes Shotover; Beauchamp, Beecham; Bocage Walk, Birdcage Walk. Even in the case of common nouns, quelques choses is changed into kickshaws; and petits gâteux (gâtels) becomes petticoattails. sitive to female influence, that one old lady used to boast that she "could screw Crabbe up and down like a fiddle." But he had plenty of manly courage, and could face an armed man or a mob with perfect equanimity and coolness. His son says, "he had the most complete exemption from fear or solicitude." In 1807, the Parish Register was published; and this was the last book that the great Fox read before his death. Sir W. Scott praised it; and the critics; and its success was very great. 21. In 1810 he published The Borough. In 1814 his wife died; and he removed to Trowbridge, in Wiltshire. In 1817 he paid a long visit to London; and every one was eager to see and meet the author of The Parish Register, and the contemporary of eighteenth century men. The poor author who had associated with Burke and Reynolds and Johnson, now became the friend of Sir W. Scott, and Moore, and Brougham. The "gentleman with the sour name and the sweet countenance" was now everywhere sought after, as the most amiable, quaint, and shrewd companion; and "most people found his conversation irresistibly amusing." In 1819 Mr. Murray published his Tales of the Hall, and also bought all his copyrights for the “munificent sum of £3000." The money was paid in bills, which “he must take there with him," in his waistcoat pocket, "to Trowbridge, and show them to his son John." A visit to Scotland and Sir Walter Scott varied the quiet of his country life. At Edinburgh he was struck by the sternness of the Scotch Sunday; "The silence,” he says, "of these well-dressed crowds is grand." For forty years he was a good parish priest, never having omitted duty for a single Sunday; and he continued to officiate till within two Sundays of his death. He suffered agonies from neuralgia; but this never diminished his activity or his kindness, or his readiness to help others. He died on the 3rd of February, 1832. The anthem sung at his funeral literally described his character: He delivered the poor that cried, the fatherless, and him that had none to help him: Kindness and meekness and comfort were in his tongue. He never was in debt; he spent very little of his income on himself, and all that he could save he gave away. 66 Pope in worsted stockings," the 66 'Hogarth of Song," and, by Byron, Nature's sternest painter, yet the best." The comparison with Hogarth is a correct one. Like Hogarth, Crabbe was thoroughly English, both in matter and manner; and like him also in the fact that he painted only what he had himself seen and knew. All Crabbe's characters are drawn from life and from personal knowledge. He loved to describe the gloomy, the miserable, and the hard; and he knew the poor and the workhouse through and through. His subjects were thieves, tramps, poachers, smugglers, gipsies, gamblers, and drunkards, hopeless and helpless people; and in his day, village-life and workhouse life-with a non-resident clergy, and the poor laws and game laws of the eighteenth century—were at their worst and darkest. His pictures are too true; and the contrast between the form-which he borrowed from Pope, and which we are accustomed to associate with lighter subjects —and the matter of his poems is often very striking. At the end of last century, we can see -yon house that holds the parish poor, Whose walls of mud scarce bear the broken door; And the dull wheel hums doleful through the day. 23. Crabbe's style, like the style of every genuine writer and thinker, is not to be dissociated from his matter. Both are hard, stern, and severe. But he had caught from Pope a few mannerisms. He had too great a fondness for the epigrammatic and the antithetic. A housekeeper goes about the house Heaven in her eye, and in her hand her keys. A man has reached his forty-seventh year, and in the most roundabout way we are told Six years had passed, and forty ere the six, Sometimes he falls to the flattest of flat prose: Something had happened wrong about a bill, And seek the firm of Clutterbuck & Co. The most vivid notion of his style will be received from the imita tion of it in the "Rejected Addresses," and one that is also not unjust. He himself said of it: "In their versification they have (b) And bucks, with pockets empty as their pate, The extreme matter-of-factness, and the kind of names used by Theirs is yon1 house that holds the parish poor, And crippled age, with more than childhood fears; Here too the sick their final doom receive," And the cold charities of man to man: Whose laws indeed for ruined age provide, And strong compulsion plucks the scraps from pride; 7 And pride embitters what it can't deny. Say ye, oppressed by some fantastic woes,8 |