“In this crisis it was that Mr. Rogers and myself, anxious to relieve our poor friend from his suspense, called upon you, as you must well remember, in Albemarle Street; and seldom have I watched a countenance with more solicitude, or heard words that gave me much more pleasure than when, on the subject being mentioned, you said ’Oh! yes.  I have heard from Mr. Crabbe, and look upon the matter as all settled.’  I was rather pressed, I remember, for time that morning, having an appointment on some business of my own, but Mr. Rogers insisted that I should accompany him to Crabbe’s lodgings, and enjoy the pleasure of seeing him relieved from his suspense.  We found him sitting in his room, alone, and expecting the worst; but soon dissipated all his fears by the agreeable intelligence which we brought.

“When he received the bills for L3000, we earnestly advised that he should, without delay, deposit them in some safe hands; but no—­he must take them with him to Trowbridge, and show them to his son John.  They would hardly believe in his good luck, at home, if they did not see the bills.  On his way down to Trowbridge, a friend at Salisbury, at whose house he rested (Mr. Everett, the banker), seeing that he carried these bills loosely in his waistcoat pocket, requested to be allowed to take charge of them for him:  but with equal ill success.  ‘There was no fear,’ he said, ’of his losing them, and he must show them to his son John.’”

It was matter of common knowledge in the literary world of Crabbe’s day that John Murray did not on this occasion make a very prudent bargain, and that in fact he lost heavily by his venture.  No doubt his offer was based upon the remarkable success of Crabbe’s two preceding poems. The Borough had passed through six editions in the same number of years, and the Tales reached a fifth edition within two years of publication.  But for changes in progress in the poetic taste of the time, Murray might safely have anticipated a continuance of Crabbe’s popularity.  But seven years had elapsed since the appearance of the Tales, and in these seven years much had happened.  Byron had given to the world one by one the four cantos of Childe Harold, as well as other poems rich in splendid rhetoric and a lyric versatility far beyond Crabbe’s reach.  Wordsworth’s two volumes in 1815 contained by far the most important and representative of his poems, and these were slowly but surely winning him a public of his own, intellectual and thoughtful if not as yet numerous.  John Keats had made two appearances, in 1817 and 1818, and the year following the publication of Crabbe’s Tales of the Hall was to add to them the Odes and other poems constituting the priceless volume of 1820—­Lamia and other Poems.  Again, for the lovers of fiction—­whom, as I have said, Crabbe had attracted quite as strongly as the lovers of verse—­Walter Scott had produced five or six of his finest novels, and was