What! I suppose, I should have nursed his muse,
And with champagne have brighten'd up his views,
Then had he made me famed my whole life long,
And stunn'd my ears with gratitude and song.
Still should the father hear that I regret
Our joint misfortune--Yes! I'll not forget.'"

The story, though it has no precise prototype in Crabbe's own history,
is clearly the fruit of his experience of life at Belvoir Castle,
combined with the sad recollection of his sufferings when only a few
years before he, a young man with the consciousness of talent, was
rolling butter-tubs on Slaughden Quay.

Much of the Tale is admirably and forcibly written, but again it may be
said that it is powerful fiction rather than poetry--and indeed into
such matters poetry can hardly enter. It displays the fine observation
of Miss Austen, clothed in effective couplets of the school of Johnson
and Churchill. Yet every now and then the true poet comes to the
surface. The essence of a dank and misty day in late autumn has never
been seized with more perfect truth than in these lines:

"Cold grew the foggy morn, the day was brief,
Loose on the cherry hung the crimson leaf;
The dew dwelt ever on the herb; the woods
Roar'd with strong blasts, with mighty showers the floods:
All green was vanish'd, save of pine and yew,
That still displayed their melancholy hue;
Save the green holly with its berries red,
And the green moss that o'er the gravel spread."