Crabbe’s son and biographer remarks with justice that the time of his father’s arrival in London was “not unfavourable for a new Candidate in Poetry.  The giants, Swift and Pope, had passed away, leaving each in his department examples never to be excelled; but the style of each had been so long imitated by inferior persons that the world was not unlikely to welcome some one who should strike into a newer path.  The strong and powerful satirist Churchill, the classic Gray, and the inimitable Goldsmith had also departed; and more recently still, Chatterton had paid the bitter penalty of his imprudence under circumstances which must surely have rather disposed the patrons of talent to watch the next opportunity that might offer itself of encouraging genius ’by poverty depressed.’  The stupendous Johnson, unrivalled in general literature, had from an early period withdrawn himself from poetry.  Cowper, destined to fill so large a space in the public eye somewhat later, had not as yet appeared as an author; and as for Burns, he was still unknown beyond the obscure circle of his fellow-villagers.”

All this is quite true, but it was not for such facile cleverness as The Candidate that the lovers of poetry were impatient.  Up to this point Crabbe shows himself wholly unsuspicious of this fact.  It had not occurred to him that it was possible for him safely to trust his own instincts.  And yet there is a stray entry in his diary which seems to show how (in obedience to his visionary instructor) he was trying experiments in more hopeful directions.  On the twelfth, of May he intimates to his Mira that he has dreams of success in something different, something more human than had yet engaged his thoughts.  “For the first time in my life that I recollect,” he writes, “I have written three or four stanzas that so far touched me in the reading them as to take off the consideration that they were things of my own fancy.”  Thus far there was nothing in what he had printed—­in Inebriety or The Candidate—­that could possibly have touched his heart or that of his readers.  And it may well have been that he was now turning for fresh themes to those real sorrows, those genuine, if homely, human interests of which he had already so intimate an experience.

However that may have been, the combined coldness of his reviewers and failure of his bookseller must have brought Crabbe within as near an approach to despair as his healthy nature allowed.  His distress was now extreme; he was incurring debts with little hope of paying them, and creditors wore pressing.  Forty years later he told Walter Scott and Lockhart how “during many months when he was toiling in early life in London he hardly over tasted butcher-meat except on a Sunday, when he dined usually with a tradesman’s family, and thought their leg of mutton, baked in the pan, the perfection of luxury.”  And it was only after some more weary months, when at last “want stared him in the face, and a gaol seemed the only immediate refuge for his head,” that he resolved, as a last resort, to lay his case once more before some public man of eminence and character.  “Impelled” (to use his own words) “by some propitious influence, he fixed in some happy moment upon Edmund Burke—­one of the first of Englishmen, and in the capacity and energy of his mind, one of the greatest of human beings.”