one-horse chaise, driven by Mrs. Crabbe, and occasionally, in a velveteen jacket and belt, crying out Ware hen' to the cockney sportsmen in the pheasant-coppices of Belvoir. This was a very happy period of his life; and by the interest of his Duchess with the Chancellor, he exchanged his Dorsetshire livings for the rectory of Muston in Leicestershire, with the neighbouring parish of Allington. Here he resided very contentedly and very comfortably, refusing the care of Lord Bute's sons, which was offered to him, till, in consequence of Mr. Tovell's death, he determined to leave Leicestershire, and settle himself at Parham, in what Bishop Hall calls "the sweet and civil county of Suffolk." The house where Mr. Crabbe resided is very near the seat of Mr. Dudley North; and at his hospitable table he met all the illustrious men of the Whig party, till he became well acquainted with them. Fox once playfully pushed the poet first, when passing to the dining-room, saying, "If he had had his deserts, he would have walked before us all." He soon after took the curacies of Swefting and Glemham, and moved to a house of Mr. North's in the latter parish, which had been inhabited by Lady Harbord. It was pulled down soon after Mr. Crabbe left: it stood at the bottom of the park, near the village, and the house in which Mr. Moseley's gamekeeper now resides, formed its stables. We cannot say that we agree with his son as to the beauties of the situation; but, as we said before, there is no talking about scenery to Suffolk people. Mr. Crabbe says, that Glemham will always be the Alhambra of his imagination; and justly too, for it is excessively moorish. However, we have nothing to do, thank God, with people's tastes we have heard of painters, who have preferred Lincolnshire to any county in England. What is more to the purpose than the picturesque, is the useful; and Mr. Crabbe and his family, while resident in this parish, lived a life that any one might envy, or rather that all might love to imitate. It is true that he did not visit much with the neighbourhood, his circumstances probably not allowing him to exchange the civilities of hospitality in a part of the county where they are on an expensive scale; but he walked out with his children whom he loved, he read to his family, he physicked the poor, he botanized, he collected fossils and minerals, in short, he was a very good, amiable, contented, and happy man. Crabbe was a popular preacher in Suffolk, where people are not so 'peevish' in their religion as in great towns, and like practical rather than doctrinal discourses; plain, simple, natural in his style and manner'careless of band or hood-a little quick in his delivery; and caring so little about form, that if it was growing dark, he would finish his service in a pew; and if he wanted his tithes, he would say, as he stepped from the pulpit, “I must have some money, gentlemen. In fact, he was exceedingly liked and respected, and Parson Crabbe' is talked of to this day by all the elder people in all the villages from Aldborough to Glemham; -by the farmers for his frank and friendly simplicity; and by the wives and daughters for his elegant attentions, and engaging courtesy. From this place he moved to the village of Rendham, to a house at the bottom of the hill, just opposite the new parsonage, which is now inhabited by a farrier, and which always went by the name of Lady Whincup's; where he

The house where Mr. Crabbe resided at Parham is now called Parham Lodge, and is tenanted by Colonel Windsor. It has been much altered and modernized since the poet resided there; the moat has been filled up, and some handsome rooms added. Its situation is extremely pleasant, and it commands more extensive and varied views than any other mansion in the neighbourhood.

remained four years;* and he then returned to his living at Leicestershire, at the call of the episcopal trump, after an absence of twelve years, and had the misery to find his hungry flock gone astray after Methodists and Huntingdonians; and that kind of square-sashed suspicious-looking building erected in the village, the sight of which makes a rector's heart sink within him. He now printed his Parish Register,' which was received with approbation by all; but the Borough raised his reputation still higher : and then appeared his Tales in Verse." Sadly was this life of virtue and of knowledge broken into by the greatest of afflictions to him-the death of his wife, in her 63d year. Her bodily infirmities had long been great, and she sank at last under the severity of the disease. In fact, a large portion of her marriage life was clouded by her lamentable disorder; so that on a letter of her's the following writing of the Poet has been found:-"Nothing can be more sincere than this; and nothing more reasonable and affectionate,-AND YET HAPPINESS WAS DENIED."

The Duke of Rutland soon after this presented Crabbe to the livings of Trowbridge in Wilts, and Croxton near Belvoir; he accordingly quitted Muston for the former place, and, would you believe it-ye admirers of the Poet!-the barbarians, his parishioners, "carried their unkind feelings so far towards him, as to ring the bells for his successor before he himself had quitted his residence." Before he finally quitted Leicestershire, he stole a visit, a short delicious one, to the beloved village that gave him birth; and after a solitary ramble in the lanes of Parham and the secluded woods of Glemham (the very lanes and fields we yesterday traversed), he returned with the following lines written in his note book:

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 my 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 its prey,
And joy is buried in her grave.

At Trowbridge he recovered much of his health and spirits, and mixed in the best society of the place. It is true he was not very popular among the lower orders at first: they fancied he was a dandy-a gambler--a man of dissipation, and his habits and opinions did not suit them. Town clergy are brought up in more buckram habits of behaviour than the rural divines. Crabbe had no form of artificial society about him; they considered that he was often violating decorum in his conduct; he was also a Whig. But all this wore off in time, as his real worth, the simple goodness of his heart, the benevolence of his conduct, and the uprightness and integrity of his life, became more thoroughly known. Crabbe was now in his 62d year, and it was with feelings of most whimsical astonishment, that we read in p. 223 of the biography, of our Poet's falling in love, not with any particular * When Crabbe left Rendham, all his effects were sold. The sale lasted three or four days. The collection of Buth-stones (a fancy of Mrs. Crabbe's) was prodigious. His books were also sold: and his numerous Herbals are now scattered among the farm-houses of the county.

charmer, but with a sort of youthful tenderness of heart, embracing in its affections all that is lovely and beautiful in the gentle sex. He grew pensive and melancholy, and lived on small lady-like dishes, and walked delicately, and became absent, and wrote sonnets to his mistress's eye-brow. Unhappy is the wretch who feels

The trembling lover's ardent flame,
And yet the treacherous hope conceals,
By using Friendship's colder name.
He must the lover's pangs endure,

And still the outward sign suppress;
Nor may expect the smiles that cure

The wounded heart's concealed distress, &c.

Another is still deeper dipped in woe.

And wilt thou never smile again,

Thy cruel purpose never shaken;
Hast thou no feeling for my pain-
Refused, disdained, despised, forsaken ?
Thy uncle, crafty, careful, cold,

His wealth upon my mind imprinted;
His fields describ'd, and prais'd his fold,

And jested, boasted, promis'd, hinted, &c.

However, this flame expired without absolutely calcining the poet's heart; the safety-valve of poetry let it loose, and none but imaginary Phillisses and Phoebes were seen at the Parsonage.

In the summer he went to town. "Et quæ tanta fuit Romam tibi causa videndi?" he went to modern Rome to sell his new poem; and to his delight and astonishment Mr. Rogers brought him three thousand pounds in bills from Murray. These he stuffed into his breeches-pocket, and never could be induced to entrust them to any other place. He dined at Lord Holland's, and Mr. Rogers's, and William Spencer's; and lived with the Hoares, at Hampstead; and was made as much of as man or poet could be. He says, Lady Holland actually bore his company a third time. Campbell he liked (who does not?) as much as he disliked poor Foscolo. He was much amused with meeting Beau Brummell, a novel sort of curiosity to him, a variety of the species "man" he had never heard of. He was carried about by Lady Caroline Lamb without tainting his reputation, and much edified and instructed in certain particulars by Lord Petersham and Colonel Berkeley. Thus pleasantly and cheerfully the old man's days were moving off; the world of fashion, and even of letters, was new to him; and when he was approaching seventy, he was in fact making his way into society. His biographer allows that his conversation was not distinguished for brilliancy of wit, or refinement of observation, or promptitude of repartee; it was, in fact, below his poetical reputation and no wonder, considering the imperfections of his education, and the rural recluseness of his life.

We had the pleasure of meeting him once, and only once,- Virgilium tantum vidi,"-at the table of the late Mr. Heber. He was affable, and good-humoured, and polite; but certainly left no impression upon us of a man who had his stores of knowledge at command, or who possessed that quickness of association that supplies the rapid demands of conversational eloquence. We recollect that he had the provincial accent of Suffolk very strongly in his enunciation, which up to the present day may be heard in the pulpits of the older divines; and which sometimes accompanies also an improved grammar and prosody peculiar to the county.

In 1822 Crabbe fulfilled the promise which he made to Sir Walter Scott, of visiting him in Scotland; unfortunately, the King had fixed the

same time for his journey so that, instead of finding the great Wizard of the North in his enchanted castle at Abbotsford, he was obliged to go to him in Castle Street, Edinburgh. Sir Walter was of course ever and always at the royal banquets, but took care to confide Parson Crabbe to Mr. Lockhart's kind superintendence. Here he met the chieftains and the clans; Glengary, and Lord Errol, and the Macleod, and the Frazer, and the Gordon, and the Ferguson; and lived for six weeks surrounded with plaids and tartans, and Gaels, and harps, and pibrochs; and Sir Walter the life and soul of the whole. Crabbe cared little for Holyrood or Arthur's Seat, or the New Town; but he liked the old lanes and dirty streets of old Edinburgh, and repeatedly haunted a place called " Cobbler's Lane." He dined with Mackenzie, the Man of Feeling,' and met Professor Wilson, whom he calls" that extraordinary man," and the Ettrick Shepherd, who amused him by drinking ale, " when all of us were sipping champagne; and then he went over to the Whig party, to Lord Advocate Jeffery, and Mr. John Murray, and Professor Leslie, and all the other northern con-stellations. He made sad work of Scotch topography, he confounded the Inchcolm of the Frith of Forth, with the Icolmkill of the Hebrides; but so did John Kemble. Then he did not know that people in Scotland talked any thing but Suffolk; so, the morning after his arrival, the following scene took place. "When he came into the breakfast-parlour, Sir Walter had not appeared, and Mr. Crabbe had before him two or three portly personages, all in the full Highland garb. These gentlemen were talking a language he did not understand, so he never doubted that they were foreigners. The Celts, on their part, conceived Mr. Crabbe, dressed as he was in rather an old fashioned style of clerical propriety, with buckles in his shoes for instance, to be some learned Abbé, who had come on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Waverley; and the result was, when a little afterwards Sir Walter and his family entered the room, they found the Poet and these worthy lairds, hammering away with pain and labour, to make themselves mutually understood, in most execrable French. Great was the relief, and potent the laughter, when the host interrupted the colloquy with his plain English Good morning.' It surprised Mr. Lockhart to find that Crabbe had never heard of Allan Ramsay; and for the first time he read "The Gentle Shepherd." He seemed to feel the excellencies of Dunbar's poetry. He thought there was a great interval between Ramsay and Burns; and so there is. But his chief amusement was in rambling at night-time among the lanes and closes of old Edinburgh, where he was detected in this fancy by his host; and a friendly caddie was hired to follow him at a distance, and see that the Poet came to no harm among the braw Scotch lassies and their gude men.

When he returned, he had a very severe fit of the "tic doloureux," a terrific disease which had visited him for a year or two before, though he would never acknowledge its name. He returned to Trowbridge, and his life passed in the same tranquil tenor as before. He occasionally visited London, or rather Hampstead, where the kind and enlightened family of the Hoares were always ready to welcome him to their fragrant garden and hospitable table. He visited Mr. Wilberforce, and Miss Baillie, and Mrs. Siddons, and Miss Edgeworth; he dined, as usual, with Mr. Rogers and Lord Holland; he met Wordsworth, and our Bard of the royal laurels; and he conversed with the author of the Rejected Addresses,' who describes him as Pope in worsted stockings." When he was tired of Hampstead he went to the Hummums; and when wearied of both, returned with delight to his home and to his children's children. In the year 1830 he

went with the family of the Hoares to Hastings, where a gig ran over him, but providentially without injury. And here it was, on a cold November morning, that he took his last farewell of his favourite element, the sea. On returning to town he made a morning call on Miss Baillie, in Cavendish-square ; he was affected even to tears on parting from the family; and when he got into the carriage he said, with great emotion, "I shall never meet this party again." In the society of his son's family, at Pucklechurch, the good old man found his true delight. The children ardently loved him; to children he was always affectionate and attentive; to his own he was a parent who had no superior. Here," says his son, "in the morning, even in the roughest weather, he bent his way, always preferring to be alone, to some of our quarries of blue lias abounding in fossils, stopping to cut up a shrub not quite common, that grew in his path, and he would return loaded with them. The dirty fossils were placed in our best bed-room, to the great diversion of the female part of my family; the herbs stuck in the borders among my choicest flowers, that he might see them when he came again. I never displaced one of them." How loved, how revered, how tenderly and affectionately regarded he was by his family, we may conceive by the following passage, too interesting to omit. "We dreaded his departure. It was justly remarked by one of his nieces, that he left a feeling of more melancholy vacancy when he quitted a house, than any other person. I hope,' said she, one day very earnestly, that my uncle will not come into Suffolk this year, for I shall dread his going away all the time he is with us.' He generally left the young people all in tears, feeling strongly and not having the power to conceal it; the stooping form, the trembling step, the tone and manner of his farewell, especially for the last few years, so hurried, so foreboding, so affectionate, overcame us all.”

He now grew evidently weaker; age was making slow but certain advances on his debilitated frame. He was afraid even to go to Pucklechurch, lest his infirmities should cause trouble to the family. Yet he visited his Hampstead friends at Clifton, towards the close of 1831, and was there during the destructive and infamous riots at Bristol. When he parted from them, it was for the last time; he appeared at his return improved in health and strength; alas! these appearances were most deceit

Yet he preached in a voice loud, firm, and impressive. His son said to him, “ Why, Sir, I will venture a good sum that you are assisting me ten years hence." "Ten weeks," was his answer, and that was almost literally the period when he ceased to assist any one. He grew stouter, and took his meals with a keen appetite, and walked more upright than he had done for three years before; but on the 29th January 1832, he caught a sharp cold, accompanied with oppression and pain and fever; he was bled, and appeared better, but the symptoms changed so rapidly that by the next morning all hope was over. He was aware of his situation, and his affectionate and anxious biographer adds, "I feared that his spirits would be woefully depressed; that the love of life might remain in all its force, and that the dread of death might be strong and distressing. I now state with feelings of indescribable delight, that I had been foreboding a weight of evil which was not, and that we had only to lament his bodily sufferings, and our incalculable loss; during the days that preceded his departure, we had not one painful feeling arising from the state of his mind. That was more firma than I ever remembered under any circumstances. He knew there was no chance of his recovery, and yet he talked at intervals of his death, and of certain consequent arrangements, with a strong com