A letter written from Mrs. Hoare’s house at Hampstead in June 1825 presents an agreeable picture of his holiday enjoyments:—­

“My time passes I cannot tell how pleasantly when the pain leaves me.  To-day I read one of my long stories to my friends and Mrs. Joanna Baillie and her sister.  It was a task; but they encouraged me, and were, or seemed, gratified.  I rhyme at Hampstead with a great deal of facility, for nothing interrupts me but kind calls to something pleasant; and though all this makes parting painful, it will, I hope, make me resolute to enter upon my duties diligently when I return.  I am too much indulged.  Except a return of pain, and that not severe, I have good health; and if my walks are not so long, they are more frequent.  I have seen many things and many people; have seen Mr. Southey and Mr. Wordsworth; have been some days with Mr. Rogers, and at last have been at the Athenaeum, and purpose to visit the Royal Institution.  I have been to Richmond in a steamboat; seen also the picture-galleries and some other exhibitions; but I passed one Sunday in London with discontent, doing no duty myself, nor listening to another; and I hope my uneasiness proceeded not merely from breaking a habit.  We had a dinner social and pleasant, if the hours before it had been rightly spent; but I would not willingly pass another Sunday in the same manner.  I have my home with my friends here (Mrs. Hoare’s), and exchange it with reluctance for the Hummums occasionally.  Such is the state of the garden here, in which I walk and read, that, in a morning like this, the smell of the flowers is fragrant beyond anything I ever perceived before.  It is what I can suppose may be in Persia or other oriental countries—­a Paradisiacal sweetness.  I am told that I or my verses, or perhaps both, have abuse in a boot of Mr. Colburn’s publishing, called The Spirit of the Times.  I believe I felt something indignant; but my engraved seal dropped out of the socket and was lost, and I perceived this moved me much more than the Spirit of Mr. Hazlitt.”

The reference is, of course, to Hazlitt’s Spirit of the Age, then lately published In reviewing the poetry of his day Hazlitt has a chapter devoted to Campbell and Crabbe.  The criticism on the latter is little more than a greatly over-drawn picture of Crabbe’s choice of vice and misery for his subjects, and ignores entirely any other side of his genius, ending with the remark that he would long be “a thorn in the side of English poetry.”  Crabbe was wise in not attaching too much importance to Hazlitt’s attack.