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 livelylooking 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 were 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 ever tasted butchermeat 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."