He returned in 1805, to Muston, to which he was called by the bishop. At the end of five years he had been obliged to quit his beautiful retreat at Glemham. It was sold, the house pulled down, and another built in its place. For the four further years that he continued in Suffolk, he lived at the village of Rendham. At Muston, the shepherd being absent, all had gone wrong; the warning voice had been fulfilled. The Methodist and the Huntingtonian had, in the absence of the pastor, set up their tabernacles, and had become successful rivals. Crabbe was not destitute of professional feelings or zeal. He preached against these interlopers, and only increased the evil. The farmers here were shy of him, for they had heard that he was a Jacobin, of all things! that is, he was no advocate for the terrible war which was raging with France, and which kept up the price of their corn. In this cold, clayey, and farming county, he continued nine years. Here he issued to the world his Parish Register and his Borough, perhaps, after all, his very best work, for it is full of such a variety of life, all drawn with the force and clearness of his prime; here also he published his Tales in verse; but here, too, he lost his wife, who had been an invalid for many years. It was therefore become to him a sad place. His health and spirits failed him; and it was a fortunate circumstance, that at this juncture, the living of Trowbridge was conferred on him by the Duke of Rutland. He removed thither in June, 1814.
From long before the time of Mr. Crabbe's removal to Trowbridge, he had been in the habit of making, during the season, occasionally a visit to London. His fame, especially after the publication of The Borough, was established. His power of painting human life and character, the bold and faithful pencil with which he did this, the true sympathies with the poor and afflicted and neglected which animated him, were all fully perceived and acknowledged; and he found himself a welcome guest in the highest circles of both aristocracy and literature. He who had been the humble curate of Belvoir, subject to slights and insults from pompous domestics, which are difficult to complain of, but are deeply felt, had, long before quitting the neighborhood of the castle, been the honored guest in the midst of the proudest nobles. In London, all the literary coteries were eager to have him. Holland-house, Lansdowne-house, the Duke of Rutland's, and other great houses, found him a frequent guest amid lords and ladies, dukes and duchesses; and at Holland-house, and Mr. Rogers's, he was surrounded by all that was at the time brilliant and famous in the political and literary world. These visits, after the death of his wife, became annual, and the old man wonderfully enjoyed them. The extracts which his son has given from his journal, teem with men and women of title and name. He is dining or breakfasting with Lady Errol, Lady Holland, the Duchess of Rutland. He meets Mr. Fox, Mr. Canning, Foscolo; Lords Haddington, Dundas, Strangford, etc.; Moore, Campbell, Sir Walter Scott, Sir James Mackintosh; Ladies Spencer and Besborough; Duke and Duchess of Cumberland; in fact, every body. He became much attached to the Hoares, of Hampstead, and used to take up his quarters there, and with them make summer excursions to Hastings, the isle of Wight, and the like places. With them he saw Miss Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, etc. So popular was he become, that John Murray gave him £3000 for his Tales of the Hall, and he carried the bills for that sum home in his waistcoat pocket. His meeting with Sir Walter Scott caused him to accept a pressing invitation from him to Scotland, whither he happened to go at the time of George IV.'s visit to Edinburgh; by which means, though he saw all the gala of the time, and all Highland costumes, he missed seeing Scott at Abbotsford. At Scott's house, in Castle-street, occurred his adventure with the three Highland chiefs, which has caused much merriment. He came down one morning and found these three portly chiefs in full Highland costume, talking at a great rate, in a language which he did not understand; and not thinking of Gaelic, concluded that they were foreigners. They, on their part, seeing an elderly gentleman, dressed in a somewhat antiquated style, with buckles in his shoes, and perfectly clerical, imagined him some learned abbé, who had come on a visit to Sir Walter. The consequence was, that Sir Walter, entering the breakfast-room with his family, stood a moment in amazement to hear them all conversing together in execrable French; and then burst into a hearty laugh, saying,—"Why, you are all fools together! This is an Englishman, and these Highlanders, Mr. Crabbe, can speak as good English as you can." The amazement it occasioned may be imagined.
Trowbridge is not the sort of place that you would imagine a poet as voluntarily choosing as a place of residence. It is a manufacturing town of about twelve thousand inhabitants, chiefly of the working class, with a sprinkling of shop-keepers and wealthy manufacturers. It has no striking features, but, to a person proceeding thither from London, has a mean, huddled, and unattractive aspect. The country round is a good dairy country, but is not by any means striking. Crabbe, however, found there families of intelligence and great kindness. His sons married well among them, and John acted as his curate; George, the writer of his biography, had the living, and occupied the parsonage of Pucklechurch, about twenty miles only distant. These were all circumstances, with a good parsonage, and a wide field of usefulness in comforting and relieving his poor parishioners, as well as instructing them, which were calculated to make a man like Crabbe happy. By all classes he soon became much beloved; and was, in all senses, a most excellent pastor. In his own children he seems to have been peculiarly blest; his two sons, clergymen, being all that he could desire, and they and his grandchildren held him in the warmest and most reverential affection.
One of his great haunts were the quarries near Trowbridge, where he used to geologize assiduously; for, after his wife's death, he ceased to retain his taste for botany; her youthful botanical rambles with him no doubt now coming back too painfully upon him.
His parsonage was a good, capacious old house, of gray stone, and pointed gables, standing in a large garden surrounded by a high wall. It lies almost in the heart of the town, and within a hundred yards of the church-yard. In his time, I understand, the garden was almost a wood of lofty trees. Many of these have since been cut down. Still it is a pleasant and spacious retirement, with some fine trees about it. The church is a very old building, and threatening to tumble. At the time of my visit workmen were busy lowering the tower, and the northern aisle showed no equivocal marks of giving way, and must come down. The church-yard was also undergoing the process of leveling; the turf was removed, and it altogether looked dismal. A very civil and intelligent sexton, living by the church-yard gate, in a cottage overhung with ivy, showed me the church, and appeared much interested in the departed pastor and poet. I ascended into the pulpit, and imagined how often the author of The Borough had stood there and addressed his congregation. There is a monument to his memory in the chancel, by Baillie. The old man is represented as lying on his death-bed, by which are two celestial beings, as awaiting his departure. The likeness to Crabbe is said to be excellent. The inscription is as follows: "Sacred to the memory of the Rev. George Crabbe, LL.B., who died February the third, 1832, in the seventy-eighth year of his age, and the nineteenth of his services as rector of this parish. Born in humble life, he made himself what he was. By the force of his genius he broke through the obscurity of his birth; yet never ceased to feel for the less fortunate. Entering, as his works can testify, into the sorrows and privations of the poorest of his parishioners; and so discharging the duties of his station, as a minister and a magistrate, as to acquire the respect and esteem of all his neighbors. As a writer he is well described by a great cotemporary, as 'Nature's sternest painter, yet her best.'"
In the north aisle is also a tablet to the memory of the wife of his son George, who it appears died two years after Crabbe himself, and in the very year, 1834, in which her husband published his excellent and most interesting life of his father.
Trowbridge impressed me, as numbers of other places have done where men of genius have lived, with the fleeting nature of human connections. Crabbe, so long associated with Trowbridge, was gone; his sons were gone; neither of them succeeding him in the living; and all trace of him, except his monument, seemed already wiped out from the place. Another pastor occupied his dwelling and his pulpit; and the population seemed to bear no marks of a great poet having been among them; but were rich subjects for such a pen as that of Crabbe. The character of the place may be judged of by its head inn. It was a fair; and I found the court-yard of this old-fashioned inn set out with rows of benches, all filled with common people drinking. On one side of the yard was a large room, in which the fiddle went merrily, and a crowd of dancers hopped as merrily to it. At a window near that room, on the same side, a woman was delivering out pots of ale, as fast as somebody within could supply them, to the people in the yard. On the other side of the court lay, however, the main part of the inn. Here a gallery ran along which conducted to the different bedrooms, through the open air, and from this sundry spectators were surveying the scene below. All was noise; loud and eager talking; and odors not the most delectable, of beer, fish, and heaven knows what. The house was dirty, dark, and full of the same fumes. People, of all sorts, were passing up and down stairs, and in and out of the house in crowds. The travelers' room was the only place, I was informed, where there was much room or comfort. Thither I betook myself; and while my dinner was preparing, I heard the fine, strong, clear voice of a woman in an adjoining room, which I instantly recognized, by the style of singing, to be German. I walked into the said room to see who was the singer, and what was her audience. It was a strong-built, healthy-looking German girl, who was accompanying her singing on a guitar, in a little room close packed with the ordinary run of people. To these she was singing some of the finest airs of Germany, with no mean skill or voice; but in a language of which they did not understand a syllable. My appearance among them occasioned some temporary bustle; but this soon passed, and they politely offered me a chair. I stayed to hear several songs, and proposed some of the most rare and excellent that I knew, among them some Austrian airs, which, in every instance, the poor girl knew and sung with great effect. As I went out, two Frenchwomen were entering with a tambourine; and I soon heard them, accompanied by a fiddle, also performing their parts. Thus, through the whole day, the strolling musicians of the fair entered this little concert-room of the head inn of Trowbridge, and entertained the fair-going bacchanals. It was a scene which Crabbe would have made much of.
JAMES HOGG, THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD.
Among the many remarkable men which the humble walks of life in Scotland have furnished to the list of poets, Hogg, the Ettrick Shepherd, is one of the most extraordinary. There have been Allan Ramsay, the barber, Burns, the ploughman, Allan Cunningham, the stone cutter, Tannahill and Thom, the weavers. Had there been no Burns, Hogg would have been regarded as a miracle for a rural poet; yet how infinite is the distance between the two! Burns's poetry is full of that true philosophy of life, of those noble and manly truths which are expressions for eternity of what lives in every bosom, but can not form itself on every tongue.
"His lines are mottoes of the heart,