I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath."

Between Samuel Hoare's hospitable roof and the _Hummums_ in Covent
Garden Crabbe seems to have alternated, according as his engagements in
town required.

But although living, as the Diary shows, in daily intercourse with the
literary and artistic world, tasting delights which were absolutely new
to him, Crabbe never forgot either his humble friends in Wiltshire, or
the claims of his own art. He kept in touch with Trowbridge, where his
son John was in charge, and sends instructions from time to time as to
poor pensioners and others who were not to be neglected in the weekly
ministrations. At the same time, he seems rarely to have omitted the
self-imposed task of adding daily to the pile of manuscript on which he
was at work--the collection of stories to be subsequently issued as
_Tales of the Hall_. Crabbe had resolved, in the face of whatever
distractions, to write if possible a fixed amount every day. More than
once in the Diary occur such entries as: "My thirty lines done; but not
well, I fear." "Thirty lines to-day, but not yesterday--must work up."
This anticipation of a method made famous later in the century by
Anthony Trollope may account (as also in Trollope's case) for certain
marked inequalities in the merit of the work thus turned out. At odd
times and in odd places were these verses sometimes composed. On a
certain Sunday morning in July 1817, after going to church at St.
James's, Piccadilly (or was it the Chapel Royal?), Crabbe wandered
eastward and found inspiration in the most unexpected quarter: "Write
some lines in the solitude of Somerset House, not fifty yards from the
Thames on one side, and the Strand on the other; but as quiet as the
sands of Arabia. I am not quite in good humour with this day; but,
happily, I cannot say why."