Fashions of poets and of poetry may go by, but such scenes on those North Sea shores will never go by. Crabbe was son of a customs' man, of small, turbulent character, and the boy had starveling education; he picked up so much as qualified him at length for surgeon (or doctor, as we say) in that small shore town, but gained little: so, threw all behind him—a girl he loved, and a town he did not love—and with three guineas in his pocket, and a few manuscript poems, set off for London. He was there, indeed, in the very times we have talked of; when wits met at the Turk's Head, when Fox thundered in Parliament, when Sterne was just dead; but who should care for this stout young fellow from the shore? One man—one only, does care; it is the warm Irish-hearted Edmund Burke, who being appealed to and having read the verses which the adventurer brought to his notice, befriends him, takes him to his house, makes him know old Dr. Johnson; and his first book is launched and talked of under their patronage. Then this great friend Burke conspires religiously with the Bishop of Norwich to plant the poet in the Church. Why not? He has some Latin; he means well, and can write a sermon. So we find him returned to that wild North Sea shore with a little church to feed, and the church people, in their turn, to feed him. But the arrangement does not run smoothly; those verses of his, unlike most rural verse, have shown all the darker colors of peasant life; if full of sympathy, they were full of bitter, homely truth. The muck, the mire, the griefs, the crimes, the unthrift, the desolation, have given sombre tint to his village pictures; perhaps those shore people resent it; perhaps he is incapable of the cheeriness which should brighten charity; at any rate he goes away under private preferment to a private chaplaincy at Belvoir Castle, the seat of the Duke of Rutland.
There is not a more princely house among the baronial homes of England. It sits among wooded hills—which to the eye of a Suffolk man would be mountains—where Lincolnshire and Leicestershire join: the towers of Lincoln Cathedral are in sight at the north, and Nottingham Castle in the west: and there is a glitter in some near valley of an affluent of the Trent, shining amid billows of foliage; while within the stately home,[[9]] the Suffolk doctor could have regaled himself with examples of Rubens and of Murillo, of Teniers, Poussin, and Vandyke.
The Duke of Rutland was a kindly man, a sentimental lover of literature, enjoying the verse of Crabbe, and proud of patronizing him, but lacking the supreme art of putting him at ease among his titled visitors; perhaps enjoying from his high poise, the disturbing embarrassments with which the good-natured poet was beset under the bewildering attentions of some butler, who outshone the host in his trappings, and in his lordly condescension to the level of an apothecary's apprentice.
It was not altogether pleasant for Crabbe; and when afterward he had married his old flame of Aldborough, and by invitation of the Duke (who was absent in Ireland) was allowed to partake of the hospitalities of the castle, the ironical obsequience of the flunkeys all, drove him away from the baronial roof. Through the influence of friends he secures livings,—first in Dorset, and afterward in Leicestershire (1789), almost within sight of Belvoir towers. Hereabout, or in near counties, where he has parochial duties, he vegetates slumberously, for twenty years or more. He preaches, practises his old apothecary craft, drives (his wife holding the reins), idles, writes books and burns them, grows old, has children, loves flowers, and on one occasion, mounts his horse and gallops sixty miles for a scent of the salt air which he had snuffed as a boy. Meanwhile the old haunts in London, which he knew for so brief a day, know him no more; his old friends are dead, his hair is snowy, his purposes wavering.
But his children are of an age now to spur him to further literary effort; with the opening of the present century he rallies his power for new songs; and thereafter the slowly succeeding issues of the Parish Register, The Borough, and the Tales of the Hall, pave a new way for him into the courts of Fame. He secures another and more valuable living in the South of England (Wiltshire), where the incense of London praises can reach him more directly. One day in 1819 he goes away from his publishers with bills for £3,000[[10]] in his pocket; must take them home to show them to his boy, John; he loves that boy and other children over much—more, it is to be feared, than he had ever done that mother, the old flame of Aldborough, in respect of whom there had been intimations of incompatibility; hence, perhaps, the interjection of that sixty-mile ride for a snuff of the freedom of the waves. He died at last down in Trowbridge (his new living), a little way southward of Bradford in Wiltshire; and his remains lie in the chancel of the pretty church there.
We must think of him, I believe, as a good, honest-minded, well-meaning man; dull, I dare say as a preacher; diffuse, meandering, homely and lumbering as a poet; yet touching with raw and lively colors the griefs of England's country-poor; and with a realism that is hard to match, painting the flight of petrels and of the curlew, and the great sea waves that gather and roll and break along his lines.
William Cowper.
Cowper.
The other poet, to whom allusion has been made, living beside him, in that country of England, yet not near him nor known to him, was William Cowper. You know him better: you ought to know him better. Yet he would have managed a church—if a parish had been his—worse than Crabbe did. I fear he would not have managed children so prudently; and if he had ever married, I feel quite sure that his wife would have managed him.