The Project Gutenberg EBook of Crabbe, (George), by Alfred Ainger This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Crabbe, (George) English Men of Letters Series Author: Alfred Ainger Release Date: February 15, 2004 [EBook #11088] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CRABBE, (GEORGE) *** Produced by Garrett Alley and PG Distributed Proofreaders ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS CRABBE ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS CRABBE BY ALFRED AINGER NINETEEN HUNDRED AND THREE PREFATORY NOTE The chief, and almost sole, source of information concerning Crabbe is the Memoir by his son prefixed to the collected edition of his poems in 1834. Comparatively few letters of Crabbe's have been preserved, but a small and interesting series will be found in the "Leadbeater Papers" (1862), consisting of letters addressed to Mary Leadbeater, the daughter of Burke's friend, Richard Shackleton. I am indebted to Mr. John Murray for kindly lending me many manuscript sermons and letters of Crabbe's and a set of commonplace books in which the poet had entered fragments of cancelled poems, botanical memoranda, and other miscellaneous matter. Of especial service to me has been a copy of Crabbe's Memoir by his son with abundant annotations by Edward FitzGerald, whose long intimacy with Crabbe's son and grandson had enabled him to illustrate the text with many anecdotes and comments of interest chiefly derived from those relatives. This volume has been most kindly placed at my disposal by Mr. W. Aldis Wright, FitzGerald's literary executor. Finally, I have once again to thank my old friend the Master of Peterhouse for his careful reading of my proof sheets. A.A. July 1903 CONTENTS PREFATORY NOTE CHAPTER I EARLY LIFE IN ALDEBURGH CHAPTER II POVERTY IN LONDON CHAPTER III FRIENDSHIP WITH BURKE CHAPTER IV LIFE AT BELVOIR CASTLE CHAPTER V IN SUFFOLK AGAIN CHAPTER VI "THE PARISH REGISTER" CHAPTER VII "THE BOROUGH" CHAPTER VIII "TALES" CHAPTER IX VISITING IN LONDON CHAPTER X "TALES OF THE HALL" 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!" Burk...