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CHAPTER IX

VISITING IN LONDON

(1812-1819)

In the margin of FitzGerald's copy of the Memoir an extract is quoted from Crabbe's Diary: "1810, Nov. 7.

Finish Tales. Not happy hour." The poet's comment may have meant something more than that so many of his tales dealt with sad instances of human frailty. At that moment, and for three years longer, there hung over Crabbe's family life a cloud that never lifted -the hopeless illness of his wife. Two years before, Southey, in answer to a friend who had made some reference to Crabbe and his poetry, writes:

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"With Crabbe's poems I have been acquainted for about twenty years, having read them when a schoolboy on their first publication, and, by the help of Elegant Extracts, remembered from that time what was best worth remembering. You rightly compare him to Goldsmith. He is an imitator, or rather an antithesizer of Goldsmith, if such a word may be coined for the occasion. His merit is precisely the same as Goldsmith's-that of describing things clearly and strikingly; but there is a wide difference between the colouring of the two poets. Goldsmith threw a sunshine over all his pictures, like that of one of our water-colour artists when he paints for ladies—a light and a beauty not to be found in Nature, though not more brilliant or beautiful than what Nature really affords; Crabbe's have a gloom which is also not in Nature not the shade of a heavy day, of mist, or of clouds,

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but the dark and overcharged shadows of one who paints by lamplight — whose very lights have a gloominess. this is explained by his history.”

Southey's letter was written in September 1808, before either The Borough or the Tales was published, which may account for the inadequacy of his criticism on Crabbe's poetry. But the above passage throws light upon a period in Crabbe's history to which his son naturally does little more than refer in general and guarded terms. In a subsequent passage of the letter already quoted, we are reminded that as early as the year 1803 Mrs. Crabbe's mental derangement was familiarly known to her friends.

But now, when his latest book was at last in print, and attracting general attention, the end of Crabbe's long watching was not far off. In the summer of 1813 Mrs. Crabbe had rallied so far as to express a wish to see London again, and the father and mother and two sons spent nearly three months in rooms in a hotel. Crabbe was able to visit Dudley North, and other of his old friends, and to enter to some extent into the gaieties of the town, but also, as always, taking advantage of the return to London to visit and help the poor and distressed, not unmindful of his own want and misery in the great city thirty years before. The family returned to Muston in September, and towards the close of the month Mrs. Crabbe was released from her long disease. On the north wall of the chancel of Muston Church, close to the altar, is a plain marble slab recording that not far away lie the remains of "Sarah, wife of the Rev. George Crabbe, late Rector of this Parish."

Within two days of the wife's death Crabbe fell ill

of a serious malady, worn out as he was with long anxiety and grief. He was for a few days in danger of his life, and so well aware of his condition that he desired that his wife's grave "might not be closed till it was seen whether he should recover." He rallied, however, and returned to the duties of his parish, and to a life of still deeper loneliness. But his old friends at Belvoir Castle once more came to his deliverance. Within a short time the Duke offered him the living of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, a small manufacturing town, on the line (as we should describe it to-day) between Bath and Salisbury. The value of the preferment was not as great as that of the joint livings of Muston and Allington, so that poor Crabbe was once more doomed to be a pluralist, and to accept, also at the Duke's hands, the vicarage of Croxton Kerrial, near Belvoir Castle, where, however, he never resided.

And now the time came for Crabbe's final move, and rector of Trowbridge he was to remain for the rest of his life. He was glad to leave Muston, which now had for him the saddest of associations. He had never been happy there, for reasons we have seen. What Crabbe's son calls "diversity of religious sentiment" had produced "a coolness in some of his parishioners, which he felt the more painfully because, whatever might be their difference of opinion, he was ever ready to help and oblige them all by medical and other aid to the utmost extent of his power." So that in leaving Muston he was not, as was evident, leaving many to lament his departure. Indeed, malignity was so active in one quarter that the bells of the parish church were rung to welcome Crabbe's successor before Crabbe and his sons had quitted the house!

For other reasons, perhaps, Crabbe prepared to leave his two livings with a sense of relief. His wife's death had cast a permanent shadow over the landscape. The neighbouring gentry were kindly disposed, but probably not wholly sympathetic. It is clear that there was a certain rusticity about Crabbe; and his politics, such as they were, had been formed in a different school from that of the county families. A busy country town was likely to furnish interests and distractions of a different kind. But before finally quitting the neighbourhood he visited a sister at Aldeburgh, and, his son writes, "one day was given to a solitary ramble among the scenery of bygone years. Parham and the woods of Glemham, then in the first blossom of May. He did not return until night; and in his note-book I find the following brief record of this mournful visit:

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"Yes, I behold again the place,

The seat of joy, the source of pain;
It brings in view the form and face
That I must never see again.

"The night-bird's song that sweetly floats
On this soft gloom - this balmy air-
Brings to the mind her sweeter notes
That I again must never hear.

"Lo! yonder shines that window's light,
My guide, my token, heretofore;
And now again it shines as bright,

When those dear eyes can shine no more.

"Then hurry from this place away!

It gives not now the bliss it gave;
For Death has made its charm his prey,
And joy is buried in her grave.''

In family relationships, and indeed all others, Crabbe's tenderness was never wanting, and the verse that follows was found long afterwards written on a paper in which his wife's wedding-ring, nearly worn through before she died, was wrapped:

"The ring so worn, as you behold,

So thin, so pale, is yet of gold :
The passion such it was to prove ;

Worn with life's cares, love yet was love."

Crabbe was inducted to the living of Trowbridge on the 3rd of June 1814, and preached his first sermon two days later. His two sons followed him, as soon as their existing engagements allowed them to leave Leicestershire. The younger, John, who married in 1816, became his father's curate, and the elder, who married a year later, became curate at Pucklechurch, not many miles distant. As Crabbe's old cheerfulness gradually returned he found much congenial society in the better educated classes about him. His reputation as a poet was daily spreading. The Tales passed from edition to edition, and brought him many admirers and sympathisers. The "busy, populous clothing town," as he described Trowbridge to a friend, provided him with intelligent neighbours of a class different from any he had yet been thrown with. And yet once more, as his son has to admit, he failed to secure the allegiance of the church-going parishioners. His immediate predecessor, a curate in charge, had been one of those in whom a more passionate missionary zeal had been stirred by the Methodist movement "endeared to the more serious inhabitants by warm zeal and a powerful talent for preaching extempore." The

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