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But no marriage, no man, no money and in place of it all, sickness and poverty and the care of the unwelcome child why, I've never known a harder thing!" Crabbe's expectations had often been referred to among the villagers and had grown to astonishing dimensions in the minds of the simple, but the idea of Miss Clairville's share in them was new and afforded plenty of material for conjecture.
Crabbe's treatment of peasant life has often been compared to that of divers painters the Dutch school, Hogarth, Wilkie, and others and the following curiously suggests Frederick Walker's fine drawing, The Vagrants: The Patron, one of the most carefully elaborated of the Tales, is on an old and familiar theme.
And at the same time the spread of education, and the improved poor-laws and other legislation, by raising the condition of other parts of England, have tended to obliterate the contrast which was so marked in Wordsworth's day. How marked that contrast was, a comparison of Crabbe's poems with Wordsworth's will sufficiently indicate.
As the poem consists of fifty-five eight-lined stanzas, of somewhat complex construction, the accuracy of Crabbe's account is doubtful. If its inspiration was in some degree due to opium, we know from the example of S.T. Coleridge that the opium-habit is not favourable to certainty of memory or the accurate presentation of facts.
"And as the hare, whom hounds and horns pursue, Pants to the place from which it first she flew," they also suggest a contrast. Burke's experienced eye would detect that if there was something in Crabbe's more Pope-like couplets that was not found in Pope, so there was something here more poignant than even in Goldsmith.
Crabbe's first poems were published so long ago as the year 1782, and received the approbation of Dr. Johnson only a little before he died. This was a testimony from an enemy; for Dr. Johnson was not an admirer of the simple in style or minute in description.
In any case, within a year Crabbe's scanty means were exhausted, and he was once more in Aldeburgh, and assistant to an apothecary of the name of Maskill. This gentleman seems to have found Aldeburgh hopeless, for in a few months he left the town, and Crabbe set up for himself as his successor. But he was still poorly qualified for his profession, his skill in surgery being notably deficient.
There seemed at least a diminution other natural active outlook on life as a whole, and if she feared from Crabbe's rather dilatory methods that their union was in danger from too long delay, she did not say so, even to her confidante.
In Crabbe's day it had been effectually curbed, hindered, and hampered, and it cannot be said of Crabbe that he was a master who takes natural possession of a language that has suffered nothing. He was evidently a man of talent who had to take his part with the times, subject to history. To call him a poet was a mere convention.
Six killed, eleven wounded, and forty-one prisoners were the fruits of his little victory, which furnished him also with a fresh supply of rifles and ammunition. On May 21st Crabbe's column was in touch with Lotter and with Lategan, but no very positive result came from the skirmish.
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