When Verse her wintry prospect weeps,
When Pope is gone, and mighty Milton sleeps,
When Gray in lofty lines has ceased to soar,
And gentle Goldsmith charms the Town no more.
(Lines of 1780.) But the opening was occupied by Cowper, and Crabbe was as destitute as Chatterton, when a letter written by him to Burke excited the sympathy of that generous heart in 1781. Burke offered encouragement and hospitality, Thurlow gave money; Crabbe was introduced to Fox, Reynolds and Dr. Johnson, took orders, was made curate of his native village, liked it not, and became chaplain of the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir. Later he held a variety of livings, and, for a poet so satirical about clerical neglect of the poor, was, inconsistently, a pluralist and an absentee, till his Bishop made him mend his ways.
His first poem of any note, "The Library" (1781-2) has no great merit: we see that the novel, to Crabbe's mind, was represented by the old heroic romance,
bloody deeds
Black suits of armour, masks, and foaming steeds.
In "The Village" (1783) Crabbe showed his true self in realistic descriptions of wretchedness. He first tells the Pastoral Muse that her day is over:—
I paint the cot,
As Truth will paint it, and as bards will not.
There follows a perfect masterpiece of landscape in his manner, "the thin harvest with its withered ears" beyond the "burning sands"; the blighted rye, the thistles, poppies, blue bugloss, slimy mallow, the tares, the charlock. The peasants are "a wild amphibious race" of smugglers and fishers; the farm-labourers
hoard up aches and agues for their age,
and
mend the broken hedge with icy thorn.