I. I have spoken of Crabbe’s scientific education—such as it was—and of his power of observation, and I find, even in later life, more of the doctor than the parson. It is for this reason that his work is of more value than that of greater poets in reflecting his age. For Crabbe was not one of those who let “fancy lead the way,” but dealt with sober realities of experience, and even refrained from generalising or theorising. For the religious life of the period Crabbe’s poems are an invaluable document of which historians have, I suggest, made too little use. There is no reason to suppose that our author took Orders simply to secure literary leisure. His early diaries prove him a most devout man, and the fact that he occupied himself twenty-two years in parish work, without publishing, shows his devotion to his profession. Yet he apparently saw no harm in accepting two livings in Dorsetshire from the Lord Chancellor, which he scarcely ever went near, but took other work in the Vale of Belvoir. Nor did he feel any compunctions later in leaving his parishes in the Midlands to the care of a non-resident clergyman in order to live on his wife’s property in Suffolk; and he evidently considered the then Duke of Rutland unduly slow in providing for him. He was not always popular with his parishioners. This was not unnatural at Aldeburgh, where he had been known under less prosperous circumstances, but he met with a good deal of opposition when, after his long residence in Suffolk, he returned to Muston; and at Trowbridge he was at first considered too worldly for his flock, and only slowly won their sincere respect. A strict moralist, he had no dislike of social pleasure, and as a staunch Whig he shrank from enthusiasm of every kind. The serious and the profane alike distrusted him. The worldly remonstrated at his description of the workhouse chaplain, to which allusion has been made, and in deference to the complaints of the religious world the vigorous lines in “The Library”:
“Calvin grows gentle in this silent coast,
Nor finds a single heretic to roast,”
make way for a weaker couplet with a half line plagiarised from Dryden:
“Socinians here and Calvinists abide
And thin partitions angry chiefs divide.”
Let us consider the clergy and religious teachers generally as he describes them.
I can only allude to the five rectors, whom old Dibble, the village clerk in the “Parish Register,” remembered. First comes “Good Master Addle,” who
“Filled the seven-fold surplice fairly out,”
and “dozing died”; Next was Parson Peele, whose favourite text was “I will not spare you,” and with “piercing jokes, and he’d a plenteous store,” raised the tithes all round. Dr. “Grandspear” followed Peele, a man who never stinted his “nappy beer,” and whom even cool Dissenters wished and hoped that a man so kind, “A way to heaven, though not their own, might find.” After him came the “Author Rector”—