Goldsmith had also departed; and more recently still, Chatterton had
paid the bitter penalty of his imprudence under circumstances which must
surely have rather disposed the patrons of talent to watch the next
opportunity that might offer itself of encouraging genius 'by poverty
depressed.' The stupendous Johnson, unrivalled in general literature,
had from an early period withdrawn himself from poetry. Cowper, destined
to fill so large a space in the public eye somewhat later, had not as
yet appeared as an author; and as for Burns, he was still unknown beyond
the obscure circle of his fellow-villagers."

All this is quite true, but it was not for such facile cleverness as
_The Candidate_ that the lovers of poetry were impatient. Up to this
point Crabbe shows himself wholly unsuspicious of this fact. It had not
occurred to him that it was possible for him safely to trust his own
instincts. And yet there is a stray entry in his diary which seems to
show how (in obedience to his visionary instructor) he was trying
experiments in more hopeful directions. On the twelfth, of May he
intimates to his Mira that he has dreams of success in something
different, something more human than had yet engaged his thoughts. "For
the first time in my life that I recollect," he writes, "I have written
three or four stanzas that so far touched me in the reading them as to
take off the consideration that they were things of my own fancy."
Thus far there was nothing in what he had printed--in _Inebriety_ or
_The Candidate_--that could possibly have touched his heart or that of
his readers. And it may well have been that he was now turning for fresh
themes to those real sorrows, those genuine, if homely, human interests
of which he had already so intimate an experience.

However that may have been, the combined coldness of his reviewers and
failure of his bookseller must have brought Crabbe within as near an