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 this estimate of clerical responsibilities Crabbe seems to have remained stationary.  But meantime the laity had been aroused to expect better things.  The ferment of the Wesley and Whitefield Revival was spreading slowly but surely even among the remote villages of England.  What Crabbe and the bulk of the parochial clergy called “a sober and rational conversion” seemed to those who had fallen under the fervid influence of the great Methodist a savourless and ineffectual formality.  The extravagances of the Movement had indeed travelled everywhere in company with its worthier fruits.  Enthusiasm,—­“an excellent good word until it was ill-sorted,”—­found vent in various shapes that were justly feared and suspected by many of the clergy, even by those to whom “a reasonable religion” was far from being “so very reasonable as to have nothing to do with the heart and affections.”  It was not only the Moderates who saw its danger.  Wesley himself had found it necessary to caution his more impetuous followers against its eccentricities.  And Joseph Butler preaching at the Rolls Chapel on “the Love of God” thought it well to explain that in his use of the phrase there was nothing “enthusiastical.”  But as one mischievous extreme generates another, the influence of the prejudice against enthusiasm became disastrous, and the word came too often to be confounded with any and every form of religious fervency and earnestness.  To the end of his days Crabbe, like many another, regarded sobriety and moderation in the expression of religious feeling as not only its chief safeguard but its chief ornament.  It may seem strange that the poetic temperament which Crabbe certainly possessed never seemed to affect his views of life and human nature outside the fields of poetic composition.  He was notably indifferent, his son tells us, “to almost all the proper objects of taste.  He had no real love for painting, or music, or architecture, or for what a painter’s eye considers as the beauties of landscape.  But he had a passion for science—­the science of the human mind, first; then, that of nature in general; and lastly that of abstract qualities.”

If the defects here indicated help to explain some of those in his poetry, they may also throw light on a certain lack of imagination in Crabbe’s dealings with his fellow-men in general and with his parishioners in particular.  His temperament was somewhat tactless and masterful, and he could never easily place himself at the stand-point of those who differed from him.  The use of his imagination was mainly confined to the hours in his study; and while there, if he had his “beaux moments,” he had also his “mauvais quarts d’heure.”