reflection. The comfortable home of the Tovells at Parham fell somehow,
whether by the will, or by arrangement with Mrs. Elmy, to the disposal
of Crabbe, and he was obviously tempted by its ampler room and pleasant
surroundings. He would be once more among relatives and acquaintances,
and a social circle congenial to himself and his wife. Muston must have
been very dull and lonely, except for those on visiting terms with the
duke and other county magnates. Moreover it is likely that the
relations of Crabbe with his village flock were already--as we know they
were at a later date--somewhat strained. Let it be said once for all
that judged by the standards of clerical obligation current in 1792,
Crabbe was then, and remained all his life, in many important respects,
a diligent parish-priest. Mr. Hutton justly remarks that "the intimate
knowledge of the life of the poor which his poems show proves how
constantly he must have visited, no less than how closely he must have
observed." But the fact remains that though he was kind and helpful to
his flock while among them in sickness and in trouble--their physician
as well as their spiritual adviser--his ideas as to clerical absenteeism
were those of his age, and moreover his preaching to the end of his life
was not of a kind to arouse much interest or zeal. I have had access to
a large packet of his manuscript sermons, preached during his residence
in Suffolk and later, as proved by the endorsements on the cover, at his
various incumbencies in Leicestershire and Wiltshire. They consist of
plain and formal explanations of his text, reinforced by other texts,
entirely orthodox but unrelieved by any resource in the way of
illustration, or by any of those poetic touches which his published
verse shows he had at his command. A sermon lies before me, preached
first at Great Glemham in 1801, and afterwards at Little Glemham,
Sweffling, Muston, and Allington; at Trowbridge in 1820, and again at
Trowbridge in 1830. The preacher probably held his discourses quite as
profitable at one stage in the Church's development as at another. In