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 naïvely 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 Burkehe 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.'"'

D

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 Shakespearian 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