Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

English Men of Letters: Crabbe by Alfred Ainger
page 62 of 214 (28%)
Packet or Post, and points their merit out;
Who advertises what reviewers say,
With sham editions every second day;
Who dares not trust his praises out of sight,
But hurries into fame with all his might;
Although the verse some transient praise obtains,
Contempt is all the anxious poet gains"

_The Newspaper_ seems to have been coldly received by the critics, who
had perhaps been led by _The Village_ to expect something very
different, and Crabbe never returned to the satirical-didactic line.
Indeed, for twenty-two years he published nothing more, although he
wrote continuously, and as regularly committed the bulk of his
manuscript to the domestic fire-place. Meantime he lived a happy country
life at Stathern, studying botany, reading aloud to his wife, and by no
means forgetting the wants of his poor parishioners. He visited
periodically his Dorsetshire livings, introducing his wife on one such
occasion, as he passed through London, to the Burkes. And one day,
seized with an acute attack of the _mal du pays_, he rode sixty miles
to the coast of Lincolnshire that he might once more "dip," as his son
expresses it, "in the waves that washed the beach of Aldeburgh."

In October 1787, Crabbe's household were startled by the news of the
death of his friend and patron the Duke of Rutland, who died at the
Vice-regal Lodge at Dublin, after a short illness, at the early age of
thirty-three. The duke, an open-handed man and renowned for his
extravagant hospitalities, had lived "not wisely but too well." Crabbe
assisted at the funeral at Belvoir, and duly published his discourse
then delivered in handsome quarto. Shortly after, the duchess, anxious
to retain their former chaplain in the neighbourhood, gave Crabbe a
DigitalOcean Referral Badge