and schools for all classes. The poem is divided into twenty-four cantos
or sections, written as "Letters" to an imaginary correspondent who had
bidden the writer "describe the borough," each dealing with its separate
topic--professions, trades, sects in religion, inns, strolling players,
almshouse inhabitants, and so forth. These descriptions are relieved at
intervals by elaborate sketches of character, as in _The Parish
Register_--the vicar, the curate, the parish clerk, or by some notably
pathetic incident in the life of a tenant of the almshouse, or a
prisoner in the gaol. Some of these reach the highest level of Crabbe's
previous studies in the same kind, and it was to these that the new work
was mainly to owe its success. Despite of frequent defects of
workmanship, they cling to the memory through their truth and intensity,
though to many a reader to-day such, episodes may be chiefly known to
exist through a parenthesis in one of Macaulay's _Essays_, where he
speaks of "that pathetic passage in Crabbe's _Borough_ which has made
many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child."

The passage referred to is the once-famous description of the condemned
Felon in the "Letter" on _Prisons_. Macaulay had, as we know, his
"heightened way of putting things," but the narrative which he cites, as
foil to one of Robert Montgomery's borrowings, deserves the praise. It
shows Crabbe's descriptive power at its best, and his rare power and
insight into the workings of the heart and mind. He has to trace the
sequence of thoughts and feelings in the condemned criminal during the
days between his sentence and its execution; the dreams of happier days
that haunt his pillow--days when he wandered with his sweetheart or his
sister through their village meadows:--

"Yes! all are with him now, and all the while
Life's early prospects and his Fanny's smile.