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"The drawing-room, a corresponding dining-parlour, and a handsome sleeping apartment upstairs, were all tabooed ground, and made use of on great and solemn occasions only such as rent-days, and an occasional visit with which Mr. Tovell was honoured by a neighbouring peer. At all other times the family and their visitors lived entirely in the old-fashioned kitchen along with the servants.
This task, however, Crabbe rightly declined, being diffident as to his scholarship. In October of this year Crabbe was again working hard at his botany for like the Friar in Romeo and Juliet his time was always much divided between the counselling of young couples and the "culling of simples" when his household received the tidings of the death of John Tovell of Parham, after a brief illness.
It was momentous news to Crabbe's family, for it involved "good gifts," and many "possibilities." Crabbe was left executor, and as Mr. Tovell had died without children, the estate fell to his two sisters, Mrs. Elmy and an elderly spinster sister residing in Parham. As Mrs.
Levett died young in 1774, and did not live to marry, but during his brief friendship with Crabbe was the means of introducing him to the lady who, after many years of patient waiting, became his wife. In the village of Great Parham, not far from Framlingham, lived a Mr. Tovell, of Parham Hall, a substantial yeoman, farming his own estate. With Mr. and Mrs.
The Tovells' house at Parham, which has been long ago pulled down, and rebuilt as Paritam Lodge, on very different lines, was of ample size, with its moat, so common a feature of the homestead in the eastern counties, "rookery, dove-cot, and fish-ponds"; but the surroundings were those of the ordinary farmhouse, for Mr. Tovell himself cultivated part of his estate.
On the arrival of the family at Parham, poor Crabbe discovered that even an accession of fortune had its attendant drawbacks. Mrs. Tovell and her sister-in-law, sitting by the fireside weeping, did not even rise up to welcome my parents, but uttered a few chilling words and wept again. All this appeared to me as inexplicable as forbidding.
Tovell and their only child, a daughter, lived an orphan niece of Mr. Tovell's, a Miss Sarah Elmy, Miss Brereton's bosom-friend, and constant companion. Mr. Levett had in consequence become the friend of the Tovell family, and conceived the desire that his young friend, Crabbe, should be as blessed as himself.
John Tovell, at Parham, and moreover as this rural inland village played a considerable part in the development of Crabbe's poetical faculty, it may be well to quote his son's graphic account of the domestic circumstances of Miss Elmy's relatives. Mr. Tovell was, like Mr.
Tovell, or to Miss Elmy's widowed mother who lived not far away at Beccles, but the young lady herself returned her lover's affection from the first, and never faltered.
Tovell had been much given to hospitality, and that of a convivial sort. Such of the neighbours as were of kindred tastes had been in the habit of "dropping in" of an evening two or three times a week, when, if a quorum was present, a bowl of punch would be brewed, and sometimes a second and a third.
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