English Men of Letters: Crabbe Part 11

"Sorrow that is not sorrow, but delight; And miserable love, that is not pain To hear of, for the glory that redounds Therefrom to human kind, and what we are,"

fail to console us as we read these later stories of Crabbe. We part from too many of them not, on the whole, with a livelier faith in human nature. We are crushed by the exhibition of so much that is abnormally base and sordid.

The _Tales of the Hall_ are full of surprises even to those familiar with Crabbe's earlier poems. He can still allow couplets to stand which are perilously near to doggerel; and, on the other hand, when his deepest interest in the fortunes of his characters is aroused, he rises at times to real eloquence, if never to poetry's supremest heights. Moreover, the poems contain pa.s.sages of description which, for truth to Nature, touched by real imagination, are finer than anything he had yet achieved. The story ent.i.tled _Delay has Danger_ contains the fine picture of an autumn landscape seen through the eyes of the miserable lover--the picture which dwelt so firmly in the memory of Tennyson:

"That evening all in fond discourse was spent, When the sad lover to his chamber went, To think on what had pa.s.s'd, to grieve, and to repent: Early he rose, and looked with many a sigh On the red light that fill'd the eastern sky: Oft had he stood before, alert and gay, To hail the glories of the new-born day; But now dejected, languid, listless, low, He saw the wind upon the water blow, And the cold stream curl'd onward as the gale From the pine-hill blew harshly down the dale; On the right side the youth a wood survey'd, With all its dark intensity of shade; Where the rough wind alone was heard to move, In this, the pause of nature and of love, When now the young are rear'd, and when the old, Lost to the tie, grow negligent and cold-- Far to the left he saw the huts of men, Half hid in mist that hung upon the fen; Before him swallows, gathering for the sea, Took their short flights, and twitter'd on the lea; And near the bean-sheaf stood, the harvest done, And slowly blacken'd in the sickly sun; All these were sad in nature, or they took Sadness from him, the likeness of his look, And of his mind--he ponder'd for a while, Then met his f.a.n.n.y with a borrow'd smile."

The entire story, from which this is an extract, is finely told, and the fitness of the pa.s.sage is beyond dispute. At other times the description is either so much above the level of the narrative, or below it, as to be almost startling. In the very first pages of _Tales of the Hall_, in the account of the elder brother's early retirement from business, occur the following musical lines:

"He chose his native village, and the hill He climb'd a boy had its attraction still; With that small brook beneath, where he would stand And stooping fill the hollow of his hand To quench th' impatient thirst--then stop awhile To see the sun upon the waters smile, In that sweet weariness, when, long denied, We drink and view the fountain that supplied The sparkling bliss--and feel, if not express, Our perfect ease in that sweet weariness."

Yet it is only a hundred lines further on that, to indicate the elder brother's increasing interest in the graver concerns of human thought, Crabbe can write:

"He then proceeded, not so much intent, But still in earnest, and to church he went Although they found some difference in their creed, He and his pastor cordially agreed; Convinced that they who would the truth obtain By disputation, find their efforts vain; The church he view'd as liberal minds will view, And there he fix'd his principles and pew."

Among those surprises to which I have referred is the apparently recent development in the poet of a lyrical gift, the like of which he had not exhibited before. Crabbe had already written two notable poems in stanzas, _Sir Eustace Grey_ and that other painful but exceedingly powerful drama in monologue, _The Hall of Justice_. But since the appearance of his last volumes, Crabbe had formed some quite novel poetical friends.h.i.+ps, and it would seem likely that a.s.sociation with Rogers, though he saw and felt that elegant poet's deficiencies as a painter of human life, had encouraged him to try an experiment in his friend's special vein. One of the most depressing stories in the series is that of the elder brother's ill-fated pa.s.sion for a beautiful girl, to whom he had been the accidental means of rendering a vital service in rescuing her and a companion from the "rude uncivil kine" in a meadow.

To the image of this girl, though he never set eyes on her again for many years, he had remained faithful. The next meeting, when at last it came, brought the most terrible of disillusions. Sent by his chief to transact certain business with a wealthy banker ("Clutterbuck & Co."), the young merchant calls at a villa where the banker at times resided, and finds that the object of his old love and his fondest dreams is there installed as the banker's mistress. She is greatly moved at the sight of the youthful lover of old days, who, with more chivalry than prudence, offers forgiveness if she will break off this degrading alliance. She cannot resolve to take the step. She has become used to luxury and continuous amus.e.m.e.nt, and she cannot face the return to a duller domesticity. Finally, however, she dies penitent, and it is the contemplation of her life and death that works a life-long change in the ambitions and aims of the old lover. He wearies of money-making, and retires to lead a country life, where he may be of some good to his neighbours, and turn to some worthy use the time that may be still allowed him. The story is told with real pathos and impressive force.

But the picture is spoiled by the tasteless interpolation of a song which the unhappy girl sings to her lover, at the very moment apparently when she has resolved that she can never be his:

"My Damon was the first to wake The gentle flame that cannot die; My Damon is the last to take The faithful bosom's softest sigh; The life between is nothing worth, O! cast it from thy thought away; Think of the day that gave it birth, And this its sweet returning day.

"Buried be all that has been done, Or say that nought is done amiss; For who the dangerous path can shun In such bewildering world as this?

But love can every fault forgive, Or with a tender look reprove; And now let nought in memory live, But that we meet, and that we love."

The lines are pretty enough, and may be described as a blend of Tom Moore and Rogers. A similar lyric, in the story called _The Sisters_, might have come straight from the pen which has given us "Mine be a cot beside a hill," and is not so wholly irrelevant to its context as the one just cited.

Since Crabbe's death in 1832, though he has never been without a small and loyal band of admirers, no single influence has probably had so much effect in reviving interest in his poetry as that of Edward FitzGerald, the translator of Omar Khayyam. FitzGerald was born and lived the greater part of his life in Suffolk, and Crabbe was a native of Aldeburgh, and lived in the neighbourhood till he was grown to manhood.

This circ.u.mstance alone might not have specially interested FitzGerald in the poet, but for the fact that the temperament of the two men was somewhat the same, and that both dwelt naturally on the depressing sides of human life. But there were other coincidences to create a strong tie between FitzGerald and the poet's family. When FitzGerald's father went to live at Boulge Hall, near Woodbridge, in 1835, Crabbe's son George had recently been presented to the vicarage of the adjoining parish of Bredfield (FitzGerald's native village), which he continued to hold until his death in 1857. During these two and twenty years, FitzGerald and George Crabbe remained on the closest terms of friends.h.i.+p, which was continued with George Crabbe's son (a third George), who became ultimately rector of Merton in Norfolk. It was at his house, it will be remembered, that FitzGerald died suddenly in the summer of 1883. Through this long a.s.sociation with the family FitzGerald was gradually acquiring information concerning the poet, which even the son's _Biography_ had not supplied. Readers of FitzGerald's delightful _Letters_ will remember that there is no name more constantly referred to than that of Crabbe.

Whether writing to f.a.n.n.y Kemble, or Frederick Tennyson, or Lowell, he is constantly quoting him, and recommending him. During the thirty years that followed Crabbe's death his fame had been on the decline, and poets of different and greater gifts had taken his place. FitzGerald had noted this fact with ever-increasing regret, and longed to revive the taste for a poet of whose merits he had himself no doubt. He discerned moreover that even those who had read in their youth _The Village_ and _The Borough_ had been repelled by the length, and perhaps by the monotonous sadness, of the _Tales of the Hall_. It was for this reason apparently (and not because he a.s.signed a higher place to the later poetry than to the earlier) that he was led, after some years of misgiving, to prepare a volume of selections from this latest work of Crabbe's which might have the effect of tempting the reader to master it as a whole. Owing to the length and uniformity of Crabbe's verse, what was ordinarily called an "anthology" was out of the question. FitzGerald was restricted to a single method. He found that readers were impatient of Crabbe's _longueurs_. It occurred to him that while making large omissions he might preserve the story in each case, by subst.i.tuting brief prose abstracts of the portions omitted. This process he applied to the Tales that pleased him most, leaving what he considered Crabbe's best pa.s.sages untouched. As early as 1876 he refers to the selection as already made, and he printed it for private circulation in 1879.

Finally, in 1882, he added a preface of his own, and published it with Quaritch in Piccadilly.

In his preface FitzGerald claims for Crabbe's latest work that the net impression left by it upon the reader is less sombre and painful than that left by his earlier poems. "It contains," he urges, "scarce anything of that brutal or sordid villainy of which one has more than enough in the poet's earlier work." Perhaps there is not so much of the "brutal or sordid," but then in _The_ _Parish Register_ or _The Borough_, the reader is in a way prepared for that ingredient, because the personages are the lawless and neglected poor of a lonely seaport.

It is because, when he moves no longer among these, he yet finds vice and misery quite as abundant in "a village with its tidy homestead, and well-to-do tenants, within easy reach of a thriving country-town," that a certain shock is given to the reader. He discovers that all the evil pa.s.sions intrude (like pale Death) into the comfortable villa as impartially as into the hovels at Aldeburgh. But FitzGerald had found a sufficient alleviation of the gloom in the framework of the Tales. The growing affection of the two brothers, as they come to know and understand each other better, is one of the consistently pleasant pa.s.sages in Crabbe's writings. The concluding words of FitzGerald's preface, as the little volume is out of print and very scarce, I may be allowed to quote:--

"Is Crabbe then, whatever shape he may take, worth making room for in our over-crowded heads and libraries?

If the verdict of such critics as Jeffrey and Wilson be set down to contemporary partiality or inferior 'culture,' there is Miss Austen, who is now so great an authority in the representation of genteel humanity, so unaccountably smitten with Crabbe in his worsted hose that she is said to have pleasantly declared he was the only man whom she would care to marry.

If Sir Walter Scott and Byron are but unaesthetic judges of the poet, there is Wordsworth who was sufficiently exclusive in admitting any to the sacred brotherhood in which he still reigns, and far too honest to make any exception out of compliment to any one on any occasion--he did nevertheless thus write to the poet's son and biographer in 1834: 'Any testimony to the merit of your revered father's works would, I feel, be superfluous, if not impertinent. They will last from their combined merits as poetry and truth, full as long as anything that has been expressed in verse since they first made their appearance'--a period which, be it noted, includes all Wordsworth's own volumes except _Yarrow Revisited_, _The Prelude_, and _The Borderers_. And Wordsworth's living successor to the laurel no less partic.i.p.ates with him in his appreciation of their forgotten brother. Almost the last time I met him he was quoting from memory that fine pa.s.sage in _Delay has Danger_, where the late autumn landscape seems to borrow from the conscience-stricken lover who gazes on it the gloom which it reflects upon him; and in the course of further conversation on the subject Mr. Tennyson added, 'Crabbe has a world of his own'; by virtue of that original genius, I suppose, which is said to ent.i.tle and carry the possessor to what we call immortality."

Besides the stories selected for abridgment in the volume there were pa.s.sages, from Tales not there included, which FitzGerald was never weary of citing in his letters, to show his friends how true a poet was lying neglected of men. One he specially loved is the description of an autumn day in _The Maid's Story_:--

"There was a day, ere yet the autumn closed, When, ere her wintry wars, the earth reposed; When from the yellow weed the feathery crown, Light as the curling smoke, fell slowly down; When the winged insect settled in our sight, And waited wind to recommence her flight; When the wide river was a silver sheet, And on the ocean slept th' unanchor'd fleet, When from our garden, as we looked above, There was no cloud, and nothing seemed to move."

Another pa.s.sage, also in Crabbe's sweeter vein, forms the conclusion of the whole poem. It is where the elder brother hands over to the younger the country house that is to form the future home of his wife and children:--

"It is thy wife's, and will thy children's be, Earth, wood, and water! all for thine and thee.

There wilt thou soon thy own Matilda view, She knows our deed, and she approves it too; Before her all our views and plans were laid, And Jacques was there to explain and to persuade.

Here on this lawn thy boys and girls shall run, And play their gambols when their tasks are done, There, from that window shall their mother view The happy tribe, and smile at all they do; While thou, more gravely, hiding thy delight Shalt cry, 'O! childis.h.!.+' and enjoy the sight."

FitzGerald's selections are made with the skill and judgment we should expect from a critic of so fine a taste, but it may be doubted whether any degree of skill could have quite atoned for one radical flaw in his method. He seems to have had his own misgivings as to whether he was not, by that method, giving up one real secret of Crabbe's power. After quoting Sir Leslie Stephen's most true remark that "with all its short-and long-comings Crabbe's better work leaves its mark on the reader's mind and memory as only the work of genius can, while so many a more splendid vision of the fancy slips away, leaving scarce a mark behind." FitzGerald adds: "If this abiding impression result (as perhaps in the case of Richardson or Wordsworth) from being, as it were, soaked in through the longer process by which the man's peculiar genius works, any abridgement, whether of omission or epitome, will diminish from the effect of the whole." FitzGerald is unquestionably in sight of a truth here. The parallel with Wordsworth is indeed not exact, for the best of Wordsworth's poetry neither requires nor admits of condensation. _The Excursion_ might benefit by omission and compression, but not _The Solitary Reaper_, nor _The Daffodils_. But the example of Richardson is fairly in point. Abridgments of _Clarissa Harlowe_ have been attempted, but probably without any effect on the number of its readers. The power of Richardson's method does actually lie in the "soaking process" to which FitzGerald refers. Nor is it otherwise with Crabbe. The fascination which his readers find in him--readers not perhaps found in the ranks of those who prefer their poetry on "hand-made paper"--is really the result of the slow and patient dissection of motive and temptation, the workings of conscience, the gradual development of character. These processes are slow, and Crabbe's method of presenting them is slow, but he attains his end. A distinction has lately been drawn between "literary Poetry," and "Poetry which is Literature."

Crabbe's is rarely indeed that of the former cla.s.s. It cannot be denied that it has taken its place in the latter.

The apology for Crabbe's lengthiness might almost be extended to the singular inequalities of his verse. FitzGerald joins all other critics in regretting his carelessness, and indeed the charge can hardly be called harsh. A poet who habitually insists on producing thirty lines a day, whether or no the muse is willing, can hardly escape temptations to carelessness. Crabbe's friends and other contemporaries noted it, and expressed surprise at the absence in Crabbe of the artistic conscience.

Wordsworth spoke to him on the subject, and ventured to express regret that he did not take more pains with the workmans.h.i.+p of his verse, and reports that Crabbe's only answer was "it does not matter." Samuel Rogers had related to Wordsworth a similar experience. "Mr. Rogers once told me that he expressed his regret to Crabbe that he wrote in his later works so much less correctly than in his earlier. 'Yes,' replied he, 'but then I had a reputation to make; now I can afford to relax.'"

This is of course very sad, and, as has already been urged, Crabbe's earlier works had the advantage of much criticism, and even correction from his friends. But however this may be, it may fairly be urged that in a "downright" painter of human life, with that pa.s.sion for realism which Crabbe was one of the first to bring back into our literature, mere "polish" would have hindered, not helped, the effects he was bent on producing. It is difficult in polis.h.i.+ng the heroic couplet not to produce the impression of seeking epigrammatic point. In Crabbe's strenuous and merciless a.n.a.lyses of human character his power would have been often weakened, had attention been diverted from the whole to the parts, and from the matter to the manner. The "finish" of Gray, Goldsmith, and Rogers suited exquisitely with their pensive musings on Human Life. It was otherwise with the stern presentment of such stories of human sin and misery as _Edward Sh.o.r.e_ or _Delay has Danger._

CHAPTER XI

LAST YEARS AT TROWBRIDGE

(1819-1832)

The last thirteen years of Crabbe's life were spent at Trowbridge, varied by occasional absences among hiss friends at Bath, and in the neighbourhood, and by annual visits of greater length to the family of Samuel h.o.a.re at Hampstead. Meantime his son John was resident with him at Trowbridge, and the parish and paris.h.i.+oners were not neglected. From Mrs. h.o.a.re's house on Hampstead Heath it was not difficult to visit his literary friends in London; and Wordsworth, Southey, and others, occasionally stayed with the family. But as early as 1820, Crabbe became subject to frequent severe attacks of neuralgia (then called _tic douloureux_), and this malady, together with the gradual approach of old age, made him less and less able to face the fatigue of London hospitalities.

Notwithstanding his failing health, and not infrequent absence from his parish--for he occasionally visited the Isle of Wight, Hastings, and other watering-places with his Hampstead friends--Crabbe was living down at Trowbridge much of the unpopularity with which he had started. The people were beginning to discover what sterling qualities of heart existed side by side with defects of tact and temper, and the lack of sympathy with certain sides of evangelical teaching. His son tells us, and may be trusted, that his father's personal piety deepened in his declining years, an influence which could not be ineffectual. Children, moreover, were growing up in the family, and proved a new source of interest and happiness. Pucklechurch. was not far away, and his son George's eldest girl, Caroline, as she approached her fourth birthday, began to receive from him the tenderest of letters.

The most important incident in Crabbe's life during this period was his visit to Walter Scott in Edinburgh in the early autumn of 1822. In the spring of that year, Crabbe had for the first time met Scott in London, and Scott had obtained from him a promise that he would visit him in Scotland in the autumn. It so fell out that George the Fourth, who had been crowned in the previous year, and was paying a series of Coronation progresses through his dominions, had arranged to visit Edinburgh in the August of this year. Whether Crabbe deliberately chose the same period for his own visit, or stumbled on it accidentally, and Scott did not care to disappoint his proposed guest, is not made quite clear by Crabbe's biographer. Scott had to move with all his family to his house in Edinburgh for the great occasion, and he would no doubt have much preferred to receive Crabbe at Abbotsford. Moreover, it fell to Scott, as the most distinguished man of letters and archaeologist in Edinburgh, to organise all the ceremonies and the festivities necessary for the King's reception. In Lockhart's phrase, Scott stage-managed the whole business. And it was on Scott's return from receiving the King on board the Royal yacht on the 14th of August that he found awaiting him in Castle Street one who must have been an inconvenient guest. The incidents of this first meeting are so charmingly related by Lockhart that I cannot resist repeating them in his words, well known though they may be:--

"On receiving the poet on the quarter-deck, his Majesty called for a bottle of Highland whisky, and having drunk his health in this national liquor, desired a gla.s.s to be filled for him. Sir Walter, after draining his own b.u.mper, made a request that the king would condescend to bestow on him the gla.s.s out of which his Majesty had just drunk his health: and this being granted, the precious vessel was immediately wrapped up and carefully deposited in what he conceived to be the safest part of his dress. So he returned with it to Castle Street; but--to say nothing at this moment of graver distractions--on reading his house he found a guest established there of a sort rather different from the usual visitors of the time. The Poet Crabbe, to whom he had been introduced when last in London by Mr. Murray of Albemarle Street, after repeatedly promising to follow up the acquaintance by an excursion to the North, had at last arrived in the midst of these tumultuous preparations for the royal advent.

Notwithstanding all such impediments, he found his quarters ready for him, and Scott entering, wet and hurried, embraced the venerable man with brotherly affection. The royal gift was forgotten--the ample skirt of the coat within which it had been packed, and which he had hitherto held cautiously in front of his person, slipped back to its more usual position--he sat down beside Crabbe, and the gla.s.s was crushed to atoms. His scream and gesture made his wife conclude that he had sat down on a pair of scissors, or the like: but very little harm had been done except the breaking of the gla.s.s, of which alone he had been thinking. This was a damage not to be repaired: as for the scratch that accompanied it, its scar was of no great consequence, as even when mounting the 'cat-dath, or battle-garment' of the Celtic Club, he adhered, like his hero, Waverley, to _the trews_."

What follows in Lockhart's pages is also too interesting, as regards Scott's visitor himself, to be omitted. The Highland clans, or what remained of them, were represented on the occasion, and added greatly to the picturesqueness of the procession and other pageantry. And this is what occurred on the morning after the meeting of Scott and his guest:--

"By six o'clock next morning Sir Walter, arrayed in the 'Garb of old Gaul,' (which he had of the Campbell tartan, in memory of one of his great-grandmothers) was attending a muster of these gallant Celts in the Queen Street Gardens, where he had the honour of presenting them with it set of colours, and delivered a suitable exhortation, crowned with their rapturous applause. Some members of the Club, all of course in their full costume, were invited to breakfast with him. He had previously retired for a little to his library, and when he entered the parlour, Mr. Crabbe, dressed in the highest style of professional neatness and decorum, with buckles in his shoes, and whatever was then befitting an English clergyman of his years and station, was standing in the midst of half-a-dozen stalwart Highlanders, exchanging elaborate civilities with them in what was at least meant to be French. He had come into the room shortly before, without having been warned about such company, and hearing the party conversing together in an unknown tongue, the polite old man had adopted, in his first salutation, what he considered as the universal language. Some of the Celts, on their part, took him for some foreign Abbe or Bishop, and were doing their best to explain to him that they were not the wild savages for which, from the startled glance he had thrown on their hirsute proportions, there seemed but too much reason to suspect he had taken them; others, more perspicacious, gave in to the thing for the joke's sake; and there was high fun when Scott dissolved the charm of their stammering, by grasping Crabbe with one hand, and the nearest of these figures with the other, and greeted the whole group with the same hearty _good-morning_."

In spite, however, of banquets (at one of which Crabbe was present) and other constant calls upon his host's time and labour, the southern poet contrived to enjoy himself. He wandered into the oldest parts of Edinburgh, and Scott obtained for him the services of a friendly caddie to accompany him on some of these occasions lest the old parson should come to any harm. Lockhart, who was of the party in Castle Street, was very attentive to Scott's visitor, Crabbe had but few opportunities of seeing Scott alone. "They had," writes Lockhart, "but one quiet walk together, and it was to the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel and Mushat's Cairn, which the deep impression made on Crabbe by _The Heart of Midlothian_ had given him an earnest wish to see. I accompanied them; and the hour so spent--in the course of which the fine old man gave us some most touching anecdotes of his early struggles--was a truly delightful contrast to the bustle and worry of miscellaneous society which consumed so many of his few hours in Scotland. Scott's family were more fortunate than himself in this respect. They had from infancy been taught to reverence Crabbe's genius, and they now saw enough of him to make them think of him ever afterwards with tender affection."

Yet one more trait of Scott's interest in his guest should not be omitted. The strain upon Scott's strength of the King's visit was made more severe by the death during that fortnight of Scott's old and dear friend, William Erskine, only a few months before elevated to the bench, with the t.i.tle of Lord Kinedder. Erskine had been irrecoverably wounded by the circulation of a cruel and unfounded slander upon his moral character. It so preyed on his mind that its effect was, in Scott's words, to "torture to death one of the most soft-hearted and sensitive of G.o.d's creatures." On the very day of the King's arrival he died, after high fever and delirium had set in, and his funeral, which Scott attended, followed in due course. "I am not aware," says Lockhart, "that I ever saw Scott in such a state of dejection as he was when I accompanied him and his friend Mr. Thomas Thomson from Edinburgh to Queensferry in attendance upon Lord Kinedder's funeral. Yet that was one of the noisiest days of the royal festival, and he had to plunge into some scene of high gaiety the moment after we returned. As we halted in Castle Street, Mr. Crabbe's mild, thoughtful face appeared at the window, and Scott said, on leaving me, 'Now for what our old friend there puts down as the crowning curse of his poor player in _The Borough_:--

"To hide in rant the heart-ache of the night."'"

There is pathos in the recollection that just ten years later when Scott lay in his study at Abbotsford--the strength of that n.o.ble mind slowly ebbing away--the very pa.s.sage in _The Borough_ just quoted was one of those he asked to have read to him. It is the graphic and touching account in Letter XII. of the "Strolling Players," and as the description of their struggles and their squalor fell afresh upon his ear, his own excursions into matters theatrical recurred to him, and he murmured smiling, "Ah! Terry won't like that! Terry won't like that!!"

The same year Crabbe was invited to spend Christmas at his old home, Belvoir Castle, but felt unable to face the fatigue in wintry weather.

Meantime, among other occupations at home, he was finding time to write verse copiously. Twenty-one ma.n.u.script volumes were left behind him at his death. He seems to have said little about it at home, for his son tells us that in the last year of his father's life he learned for the first time that another volume of Tales was all but ready for the press.

"There are in my recess at home," he writes to George, "where they have been long undisturbed, another series of such stories, in number and quant.i.ty sufficient for another octavo volume; and as I suppose they are much like the former in execution, and sufficiently different in events and characters, they may hereafter, in peaceable times, be worth something to you." A selection from those formed the _Posthumous Poems_, first given to the world in the edition of 1834. The _Tales of the Hall_, it may be supposed, had not quite justified the publisher's expectations. John Murray had sought to revive interest in the whole bulk of Crabbe's poetry, of which he now possessed the copyright, by commissioning Richard Westall, R.A., to produce a series of ill.u.s.trations of the poems, thirty-one in number, engravings of which were sold in sets at two guineas. The original drawings, in delicate water-colour, in the present Mr. John Murray's possession, are sufficiently grim. The engravings, lacking the relief of colour, are even more so, and a rapid survey of the entire series amply shows how largely in Crabbe's subjects bulks the element of human misery. Crabbe was much flattered by this new tribute to his reputation, and dwells on it in one of his letters to Mrs. Leadbeater.

A letter written from Mrs. h.o.a.re's house at Hampstead in June 1825 presents an agreeable picture of his holiday enjoyments:--

"My time pa.s.ses I cannot tell how pleasantly when the pain leaves me. To-day I read one of my long stories to my friends and Mrs. Joanna Baillie and her sister. It was a task; but they encouraged me, and were, or seemed, gratified. I rhyme at Hampstead with a great deal of facility, for nothing interrupts me but kind calls to something pleasant; and though all this makes parting painful, it will, I hope, make me resolute to enter upon my duties diligently when I return.

I am too much indulged. Except a return of pain, and that not severe, I have good health; and if my walks are not so long, they are more frequent. I have seen many things and many people; have seen Mr. Southey and Mr. Wordsworth; have been some days with Mr. Rogers, and at last have been at the Athenaeum, and purpose to visit the Royal Inst.i.tution.

I have been to Richmond in a steamboat; seen also the picture-galleries and some other exhibitions; but I pa.s.sed one Sunday in London with discontent, doing no duty myself, nor listening to another; and I hope my uneasiness proceeded not merely from breaking a habit. We had a dinner social and pleasant, if the hours before it had been rightly spent; but I would not willingly pa.s.s another Sunday in the same manner.

I have my home with my friends here (Mrs. h.o.a.re's), and exchange it with reluctance for the Hummums occasionally.

Such is the state of the garden here, in which I walk and read, that, in a morning like this, the smell of the flowers is fragrant beyond anything I ever perceived before. It is what I can suppose may be in Persia or other oriental countries--a Paradisiacal sweetness. I am told that I or my verses, or perhaps both, have abuse in a boot of Mr. Colburn's publis.h.i.+ng, called _The Spirit of the Times_. I believe I felt something indignant; but my engraved seal dropped out of the socket and was lost, and I perceived this moved me much more than the _Spirit_ of Mr. Hazlitt."