“I am not aware,” says Lockhart, “that I ever saw Scott in such a state of dejection as he was when I accompanied him and his friend Mr. Thomas Thomson from Edinburgh to Queensferry in attendance upon Lord Kinedder’s funeral.  Yet that was one of the noisiest days of the royal festival, and he had to plunge into some scene of high gaiety the moment after we returned.  As we halted in Castle Street, Mr. Crabbe’s mild, thoughtful face appeared at the window, and Scott said, on leaving me, ’Now for what our old friend there puts down as the crowning curse of his poor player in The Borough:—­

  “To hide in rant the heart-ache of the night."’”

There is pathos in the recollection that just ten years later when Scott lay in his study at Abbotsford—­the strength of that noble mind slowly ebbing away—­the very passage in The Borough just quoted was one of those he asked to have read to him.  It is the graphic and touching account in Letter XII. of the “Strolling Players,” and as the description of their struggles and their squalor fell afresh upon his ear, his own excursions into matters theatrical recurred to him, and he murmured smiling, “Ah!  Terry won’t like that!  Terry won’t like that!!”

The same year Crabbe was invited to spend Christmas at his old home, Belvoir Castle, but felt unable to face the fatigue in wintry weather.  Meantime, among other occupations at home, he was finding time to write verse copiously.  Twenty-one manuscript volumes were left behind him at his death.  He seems to have said little about it at home, for his son tells us that in the last year of his father’s life he learned for the first time that another volume of Tales was all but ready for the press.  “There are in my recess at home,” he writes to George, “where they have been long undisturbed, another series of such stories, in number and quantity sufficient for another octavo volume; and as I suppose they are much like the former in execution, and sufficiently different in events and characters, they may hereafter, in peaceable times, be worth something to you.”  A selection from those formed the Posthumous Poems, first given to the world in the edition of 1834.  The Tales of the Hall, it may be supposed, had not quite justified the publisher’s expectations.  John Murray had sought to revive interest in the whole bulk of Crabbe’s poetry, of which he now possessed the copyright, by commissioning Richard Westall, R.A., to produce a series of illustrations of the poems, thirty-one in number, engravings of which were sold in sets at two guineas.  The original drawings, in delicate water-colour, in the present Mr. John Murray’s possession, are sufficiently grim.  The engravings, lacking the relief of colour, are even more so, and a rapid survey of the entire series amply shows how largely in Crabbe’s subjects bulks the element of human misery.  Crabbe was much flattered by this new tribute to his reputation, and dwells on it in one of his letters to Mrs. Leadbeater.