nothing; otherwise it may be supposed that a warning of such a kind would have had no small influence upon a mind rather vexed with the present than expecting much from the future, and not sufficiently happy and at ease to draw consolation from vanity-much less from a comparison in which vanity would have found no trifling mortification."*

When his father was at length informed that he felt it to be of no use to struggle longer against the difficulties of his situation, the old man severely reproached him with the expenses the family had incurred, in order to afford him an opening into a walk of life higher than their own; but when he, in return, candidly explained how imperfectly he had ever been prepared for the exercise of his profession, the Salt-master in part admitted the validity of his representation, and no further opposed his resolution.

But the means of carrying this resolution into effect were still to seek. His friends were all as poor as himself; and he knew not where to apply for assistance. In this dilemma, he at length addressed a letter to the late Mr. Dudley North, brother to the candidate for Aldborough, requesting the loan of a

* "Talking," says my brother John," of the difficulties of his early years, when, with a declining practice, riding from one cottage to another, and glad to relieve his mind by fixing it on the herbs that grew on the way-side, he often made the assertion, which I could never agree to, that it was necessity that drove him to be an author; and more than once he quoted the line

'Some fall so hard that they rebound again.""

small sum; “and a very extraordinary letter it was," said Mr. North to his petitioner some years afterwards: "I did not hesitate for a moment."

The sum advanced by Mr. North, in compliance with his request, was five pounds; and, after settling his affairs at Aldborough, and embarking himself and his whole worldly substance on board a sloop at Slaughden, to seek his fortune in the Great City, he ound himself master of a box of clothes, a small case of surgical instruments, and three pounds in noney. During the voyage he lived with the sailors of the vessel, and partook of their fare.

In looking back to the trifling incidents which I have related in this chapter, I feel how inadequate is the conception they will convey of feelings so deep and a mind so exuberant. These were the only circumstances that I heard him or others mention relative to that early period; but how different would have been the description, had he himself recorded the strongest of his early impressions! Joining much of his father's violence with a keen susceptibility of mortification, his mind must have been at times torn by tumultuous passions; always tempered, however, by the exceeding kindness of his heart. There can scarcely be a more severe trial than for one conscious of general superiority to find himself an object of contempt, for some real and palpable defects. With a mind infinitely above his circumstances, he was yet incompetent to his duties, both in talent and knowledge; and he felt that the opinion of the public, in this respect, was but too

just. Nor were those the only trials he had to endure; but the strong and painful feelings to which he was subjected in the very outset of life, however distressing then, were unquestionably favourable to his education as a poet, and his moral character as

a man.

The following lines, from a manuscript volume, appear to have been composed after he had, on this occasion, bidden farewell to Miss Elmy:

"The hour arrived! I sigh'd and said,
How soon the happiest hours are fled !
On wings of down they lately flew,
But then their moments pass'd with you;
And still with you could I but be,
On downy wings they'd always flee.

"Say, did you not, the way you went,

Feel the soft balm of gay content?
Say, did you not all pleasures find,
Of which you left so few behind?
I think you did: for well I know
My parting prayer would make it so

"May she, I said, life's choicest goods partake,
Those, late in life, for nobler still forsake-

The bliss of one, th' esteem'd of many live,

With all that Friendship would, and all that Love can give!"

I shall conclude this chapter with the stronger verses in which he, some months after, expressed the gloomier side of his feelings on quitting his native place the very verses, he had reason to believe, which first satisfied Burke that he was a true poet:

"Here wand'ring long, amid these frowning fields

I sought the simple life that Nature yields;

Rapine, and wrong, and fear usurp'd her place,
And a bold, artful, surly, savage race,

Who, only skill'd to take the finny tribe,
The yearly dinner, or septennial bribe,
Wait on the shore, and, as the waves run high,
On the tost vessel bend their eager eye,
Which, to their coast directs its vent'rous way,
Theirs or the ocean's miserable prey.

"As on their neighbouring beach yon swallows stand,
And wait for favouring winds to leave the land,
While still for flight the ready wing is spread -
So waited I the favouring hour, and fled :
Fled from these shores, where guilt and rapine reign,
And cried, Ah! hapless they who still remain, –
Who still remain to hear the ocean roar,
Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore,
Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway,
Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away,
When the sad tenant weeps from door to door,
And begs a poor protection from the poor."

The Village.

CHAPTER III.

1780.

MR. CRABBE'S DIFFICULTIES AND DISTRESSES IN LONDON. PUBLICATION OF HIS POEM, THE CANDIDATE."-HIS UNSUCCESSFUL APPLICATIONS TO LORD NORTH, LORD SHELBURNE, AND OTHER EMINENT INDIVIDUALS. HIS JOURNAL TO MIRA.

ALTHOUGH the chance of his being so successful in his metropolitan début as to find in his literary talents the means of subsistence must have appeared slender in the eyes of Mr. Crabbe's Suffolk friends, and although he himself was any thing but sanguine in his anticipations;—yet it must be acknowledged, that he arrived in London at a time not unfavourable for a new candidate in poetry. The field may be said to have lain open before him. The giants Swift and Pope had passed away, leaving each in his department examples never to be excelled; but the style of each had been so long imitated by infe rior persons, that the world was not unlikely to welcome some one who should strike into a newer path. The strong and powerful satirist, Churchill, the classic Gray, and the inimitable Goldsmith, had also departed; and, more recently still, Chatterton had paid the bitter penalty of his imprudence, under circumstances which must surely have rather disposed the patrons of talent to watch the next op