It supports many professors of the law; physicians of high repute, and medical quacks of very low.  Social life and pleasure is abundant, with clubs, card-parties, and theatres.  It boasts an almshouse, hospital, prisons, and schools for all classes.  The poem is divided into twenty-four cantos or sections, written as “Letters” to an imaginary correspondent who had bidden the writer “describe the borough,” each dealing with its separate topic—­professions, trades, sects in religion, inns, strolling players, almshouse inhabitants, and so forth.  These descriptions are relieved at intervals by elaborate sketches of character, as in The Parish Register—­the vicar, the curate, the parish clerk, or by some notably pathetic incident in the life of a tenant of the almshouse, or a prisoner in the gaol.  Some of these reach the highest level of Crabbe’s previous studies in the same kind, and it was to these that the new work was mainly to owe its success.  Despite of frequent defects of workmanship, they cling to the memory through their truth and intensity, though to many a reader to-day such, episodes may be chiefly known to exist through a parenthesis in one of Macaulay’s Essays, where he speaks of “that pathetic passage in Crabbe’s Borough which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child.”

The passage referred to is the once-famous description of the condemned Felon in the “Letter” on Prisons.  Macaulay had, as we know, his “heightened way of putting things,” but the narrative which he cites, as foil to one of Robert Montgomery’s borrowings, deserves the praise.  It shows Crabbe’s descriptive power at its best, and his rare power and insight into the workings of the heart and mind.  He has to trace the sequence of thoughts and feelings in the condemned criminal during the days between his sentence and its execution; the dreams of happier days that haunt his pillow—­days when he wandered with his sweetheart or his sister through their village meadows:—­

  “Yes! all are with him now, and all the while
  Life’s early prospects and his Fanny’s smile. 
  Then come his sister and his village friend,
  And he will now the sweetest moments spend
  Life has to yield,—­No! never will he find
  Again on earth such pleasure in his mind
  He goes through shrubby walks these friends among,
  Love in their looks and honour on the tongue. 
  Nay, there’s a charm beyond what nature shows,
  The bloom is softer and more sweetly glows;
  Pierced by no crime and urged by no desire
  For more than true and honest hearts require,
  They feel the calm delight, and thus proceed
  Through the green lane,—­then linger in the mead,—­
  Stray o’er the heath in all its purple bloom,—­
  And pluck the blossom where the wild bees hum;
  Then through the broomy bound with ease they pass,
  And press the sandy sheep-walk’s slender grass,
  Whore dwarfish flowers among the grass