And festive joy sedate; that ancient garb He leaps, and, lighting, shakes a dusty cloud all round. Youths, maids, and matrons, take their several ways; The Impressed Sailor Boy. [From the 'Birds of Scotland."] Down which a little stream had furrowed deep, The aged folks; upon the inverted quern To My Son. Twice has the sun commenced his annual round, What lore I taught him, roaming wood and wild, The Thanksgiving off Cape Trafalgar. Upon the high, yet gently rolling wave, The floating tomb that heaves above the brave, Soft sighs the gale that late tremendous roared, Whelming the wretched remnants of the sword. And now the cannon's peaceful thunder calls The victor bands to mount their wooden walls, And from the ramparts, where their comrades fell, The mingled strain of joy and grief to swell: Fast they ascend, from stem to stern they spread, And crowd the engines whence the lightnings sped: The white-robed priest his upraised hands extends; Hushed is each voice, attention leaning bends; Then from each prow the grand hosannas rise, Float o'er the deep, and hover to the skies. Heaven fills each heart; yet home will oft intrude, And tears of love celestial joys exclude. The wounded man, who hears the soaring strain, Lifts his pale visage, and forgets his pain; While parting spirits, mingling with the lay, On hallelujahs wing their heavenward way. Geo: Crasse. witnessing the celebrity of his son, and to transcribe, with parental fondness, in his own handwriting, his poem of The Library. Crabbe has described the unpromising scene of his nativity with his usual force and correctness: Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor; So looks the nymph whom wretched arts adorn, The poet was put apprentice in his fourteenth year to a surgeon, and afterwards practised in Aldborough; Birthplace of Crabbe. to only three pounds. Having completed some poetical pieces, he offered them for publication, but they were rejected. In the course of the year, however, he issued a poetical epistle, The Candidate, addressed to the authors of the Monthly Review. It was coldly received, and his publisher failing at the same time, the young poet was plunged into great perplexity and want. He wrote to the premier, Lord North, to the lord-chancellor Thurlow, and to other noblemen, requesting assistance; but in no case was an answer returned. At length, when his affairs were desperate, he applied to Edmund Burke, and in a modest yet manly statement, disclosed to him the situation in which he stood. Burke received him into his own house, and exercised towards his happy roof, the poet met Mr Fox, Sir Joshua him the most generous hospitality. While under friends. In the same year (1781) he published his Reynolds, and others of the statesman's distinguished poem, The Library,' which was favourably noticed by the critics. Lord Thurlow (who now, as in the case of Cowper, came with tardy notice and ungraceful generosity) invited him to breakfast, and at parting, presented him with a bank-note for a hundred pounds. Crabbe entered into sacred orders, and was licensed as curate to the rector of his native parish of Aldborough. In a short time, Burke procured for him the situation of chaplain to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir castle. This was a great advancement for the poor poet, and he never afterwards was in fear of want. He seems, however, to have felt all the ills of dependence on the great, and in his poem of The Patron, and other parts of his writings, has strongly depicted the evils of such a situation. In 1783 appeared his poem, The Village, which had been seen and corrected by Johnson and Burke. Its success was instant and complete. Some of the descriptions in the poem (as that of the parish workhouse) were copied into all the periodicals, and took that place in our national literature which they still retain. Thurlow presented him with two small 6 the unassumingness of his manners with the originality of his powers. In what may be called the ready-money small-talk of conversation, his facility might not perhaps seem equal to the known calibre of his talents; but in the progress of conversation, I recollect remarking that there was a vigilant shrewdso quietly.' This fine remark is characteristic of Crabbe's genius, as well as of his manners. It gathered its materials slowly and silently with intent but unobtrusive observation. The Tales of the Hall' were received with that pleasure and approbation due to an old and established favourite, but with less enthusiasm than some of his previous works. In 1822, the now venerable poet paid a visit to Sir Walter Scott in Edinburgh; and it is worthy of remark, that, as to the city itself, he soon got wearied of the New Town, but could amuse himself for ever in the Old. His latter years were spent in the discharge of his clerical duties, and in the enjoyment of social intercourse. His attachment to botany and geology seemed to increase with age; and at threescore and ten, he was busy, cheerful, and affectionate. His death took place at Trowbridge on the 3d of February 1832, and his parishioners erected a monument to his memory in the church of that place, where he had officiated for nineteen years. A complete collection of his works, with some new pieces and an admirable memoir, was published in 1834 by his son, the Rev. G. Crabbe. The livings then in his gift, telling him at the same time, with an oath, that he was as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen. The poet now married a young lady of Suffolk, the object of an early attachment, and taking the curacy of Stathern, adjoining Belvoir castle, he bade adieu to the ducal mansion, and transferred himself to the humbleness that almost eluded you, by keeping its watch parsonage in the village. Four happy years were spent in this retirement, when the poet obtained the exchange of his two small livings in Dorsetshire for two of superior value in the vale of Belvoir. Crabbe remained silent as a poet for many years. Out of doors,' says his son, he had always some object in view-a flower, or a pebble, or his note-book in his hand; and in the house, if he was not writing, he was reading. He read aloud very often, even when walking, or seated by the side of his wife in the huge old-fashioned one-horse chaise, heavier than a modern chariot, in which they usually were conveyed in their little excursions, and the conduct of which he, from awkwardness and absence of mind, prudently relinquished to my mother on all occasions.' In 1807 he published his Parish Register, which had been previously submitted to Mr Fox, and parts of this poem (especially the story of Phoebe Dawson) were the last compositions of their kind that 'engaged and amused the capacious, the candid, the benevolent mind of this great man.' The success of this work was not only decided, but nearly unprecedented. In 1810 he came forward with The Borough, a poem of the same class, and more connected and complete; and two years afterwards he produced his Tales in Verse, containing perhaps the finest of all his humble but happy delineations of life and character. The public voice,' says his biographer, was again highly favourable, and some of these relations were spoken of with the utmost warmth of commendation, as, the Parting Hour, the Patron, Edward Shore, and the Confidant.' In 1814 the Duke of Rutland appointed him to the living of Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, and he went thither to reside. Iis income amounted to about £800 per annum, a large portion of which he spent in charity. He still continued his attachment to literature, and in 1817 and 1818, was engaged on his last great work, the Tales of the Hall. He fancied that autumn was, on the whole, the most favourable season for him in the composition of poetry; but there was something in the effect of a sudden fall of snow that appeared to stimulate him in a very extraordinary manner.' In 1819 the Tales were pub-romance or imagination, our vanity is shocked and lished by Mr Murray, who, for them and the remaining copyright of all Crabbe's previous poems, gave the munificent sum of £3000. In an account of the negotiation for the sale of these copyrights, written by Mr Moore for the life of his brother poet, we have the following amusing illustration of Crabbe's simplicity of manner :- When he received the bills for £3000, we (Moore and Rogers) earnestly advised that he should, without delay, deposit them in some safe hands; but no-he must "take them with him to Trowbridge, and show them to his son John. They would hardly believe in his good luck at home if they did not see the bills." On his way down to Trowbridge, a friend at Salisbury, at whose house he rested (Mr Everett, the banker), seeing that he carried these bills loosely in his waistcoat pocket, requested to be allowed to take charge of them for him; but with equal ill success. "There was no fear," he said, "of his losing them, and he must show them to his son John."" Another poetical friend, Mr Campbell, who met him at this time in London, remarks of him-His mildness in literary argument struck me with surprise in so stern a poet of nature, and I could not but contrast The Village,' 'Parish Register,' and shorter tales of Crabbe are his most popular productions. Tales of the Hall' are less interesting. They relate principally to the higher classes of society, and the poet was not so happy in describing their peculiarities as when supporting his character of the poet of the poor. Some of the episodes, however, are in his best style-Sir Owen Dale, Ruth, Ellen, and other stories, are all marked with the peculiar genius of Crabbe. The redeeming and distinguishing feature of that genius was its fidelity to nature, even when it was dull and unprepossessing. His power of observation and description might be limited, but his pictures have all the force of dramatic representation, and may be compared to those actual and existing models which the sculptor or painter works from, instead of vague and general conceptions. They are often too true, and human nature being exhibited in its naked reality, with all its defects, and not through the bright and alluring medium of our pride mortified. His anatomy of character and passion harrows up our feelings, and leaves us in the end sad and ashamed of our common nature. The personal circumstances and experience of the poet affected the bent of his genius. He knew how untrue and absurd were the pictures of rural life which figured in poetry. His own youth was dark and painful-spent in low society, amidst want and misery, irascible gloom and passion. Latterly, he had more of the comforts and elegances of social life at his command than Cowper, his rival as a domestic painter. He not only could have wheeled his sofa round,' 'let fall the curtains, and, with the bubbling and loud hissing urn' on the table welcome peaceful evening in,' but the amenities of refined and intellectual society were constantly present with him, or at his call. Yet he did not, like Cowper, attempt to describe them, or to paint their manifold charms. When he took up his pen, his mind turned to Aldborough and its wild amphibious race-to the parish workhouse, where the wheel hummed doleful through the day-to erring damsels and luckless swains, the prey of overseers or justices or to the haunts of desperate poachers and smugglers, gipsies and 6 gamblers, where vice and misery stalked undisguised in their darkest forms. He stirred up the dregs of human society, and exhibited their blackness and deformity, yet worked them into poetry. Like his own Sir Richard Monday, he never forgot the parish. It is true that village life in England in its worst form, with the old poor and game laws and nonresident clergy, was composed of various materials, some bright and some gloomy, and Crabbe drew them all. His Isaac Ashford is as honourable to the lowly English poor as the Jeanie Deans or Dandie Dinmont of Scott are to the Scottish character. His story of the real mourner, the faithful maid who watched over her dying sailor, is a beautiful tribute to the force and purity of humble affection. In the Parting Hour' and the 'Patron' are also passages equally honourable to the poor and middle classes, and full of pathetic and graceful composition. It must be confessed, however, that Crabbe was in general a gloomy painter of lifethat he was fond of depicting the unlovely and unamiable-and that, either for poetic effect or from painful experience, he makes the bad of life predominate over the good. His pathos and tenderness are generally linked to something coarse, startling, or humiliating to disappointed hopes or unavailing sorrow Still we tread the same coarse way, mounted his horse and rode alone sixty miles from his house, that he might inhale its freshness and gaze upon its waters. [The Parish Workhouse and Apothecary.] Theirs is yon house that holds the parish poor, Here too the sick their final doom receive, The minuteness with which he dwells on such subjects sometimes makes his descriptions tedious, and apparently unfeeling. He drags forward every defect, every vice and failing, not for the purpose of educing something good out of evil, but, as it would seem, merely for the purpose of completing the picture. In his higher flights, where scenes of strong passion, vice or remorse, are depicted, Crabbe is a moral poet, purifying the heart, as the object of tragedy has been defined, by terror and pity, and by fearful delineations of the misery and desolation caused by unbridled passion. His story of Sir Such is that room which one rude beam divides, Eustace Grey is a domestic tragedy of this kind, And naked rafters form the sloping sides; related with almost terrific power, and with lyrical Where the vile bands that bind the thatch are seen, energy of versification. His general style of versifi- And lath and mud are all that lie between; cation is the couplet of Pope (he has been wittily Save one dull pane, that, coarsely patched, gives way called Pope in worsted stockings'), but less flow-To the rude tempest, yet excludes the day: ing and melodious, and often ending in points and quibbles. Thus, in describing his cottage furniture, he says No wheels are here for either wool or flax, Heaven in her eye, and in her hand her keys. The glittering waters on the shingles rolled. He was a great lover of the sea, and once, as his son relates, after being some time absent from it, Here, on a matted flock, with dust o'erspread, But soon a loud and hasty summons calls, Paid by the parish for attendance here, ❘ Of man; and silent sinks into the grave. [Isaac Ashford, a Noble Peasant.] [From the Parish Register."] Next to these ladies, but in nought allied, At no man's question Isaac looked dismayed: (Bane of the poor! it wounds their weaker mind He had no party's rage, no sect'ry's whim; At length he found, when seventy years were run, His strength departed and his labour done; When, save his honest fame, he kept no more; But lost his wife and saw his children poor; 'Twas then a spark of-say not discontentStruck on his mind, and thus he gave it vent: 'Kind are your laws ('tis not to be denied), That in yon house for ruined age provide, And they are just; when young, we give you all, And then for comforts in our weakness call. Why then this proud reluctance to be fed, To join your poor and eat the parish-bread? But yet I linger, loath with him to feed Who gains his plenty by the sons of need: He who, by contract, all your paupers took, And gauges stomachs with an anxious look: On some old master I could well depend; See him with joy and thank him as a friend; But ill on him who doles the day's supply, And counts our chances who at night may die : Yet help me, Heaven! and let me not complain Such were his thoughts, and so resigned he grew; I feel his absence in the hours of prayer, And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there; I see no more those white locks thinly spread Round the bald polish of that honoured head; No more that awful glance on playful wight Compelled to kneel and tremble at the sight; To fold his fingers all in dread the while, Till Mister Ashford softened to a smile; No more that meek and suppliant look in prayer, Nor the pure faith (to give it force) are there:.... But he is blest, and I lament no more, A wise good man contented to be poor. [Phabe Dawson.] [From the Parish Register."] Two summers since, I saw at Lammas fair, They wished her well, whom yet they wished away; But yet on Sunday-eve, in freedom's hour, At length, the youth ordained to move her breast, By trade a tailor, though, in scorn of trade, |