lived by literature and saw much of the lives and ways of poets and pamphleteers, he must have gained some experience that served him later in good stead.  There was a flavour of truthfulness in Crabbe’s story that could hardly be delusive, and a strain of modesty blended with courage that would at once appeal to Burke’s generous nature.  Again, Burke was not a poet (save in the glowing periods of his prose), but he had read widely in the poets, and had himself been possessed at one stage of his youth “with the furor poeticus.”  At this special juncture he had indeed little leisure for such matters.  He had lost his seat for Bristol in the preceding year, but had speedily found another at Malton—­a pocket-borough of Lord Rockingham’s,—­and, at the moment of Crabbe’s appeal, was again actively opposing the policy of the King and Lord North.  But he yet found time for an act of kindness that was to have no inconsiderable influence on English literature.  The result of the interview was that Crabbe’s immediate necessities were relieved by a gift of money, and by the assurance that Burke would do all in his power to further Crabbe’s literary aims.  What particular poems or fragments of poetry had been first sent to Burke is uncertain; but among those submitted to his judgment were specimens of the poems to be henceforth known as the The Library and The Village. Crabbe afterwards learned that the lines which first convinced Burke that a new and genuine poet had arisen were the following from The Village, in which the author told of his resolution to leave the home of his birth and try his fortune in the city of wits and scholars—­

  “As on their neighbouring beach yon swallows stand
  And wait for favouring winds to leave the land;
  While still for flight the ready wing is spread: 
  So waited I the favouring hour, and fled;
  Fled from those shores where guilt and famine reign,
  And cried, ’Ah! hapless they who still remain—­
  Who still remain to hear the ocean roar;
  Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore;
  Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway,
  Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away;
  When the sad tenant weeps from door to door,
  And begs a poor protection from the poor!”

Burke might well have been impressed by such a passage.  In some other specimens of Crabbe’s verse, submitted at the same time to his judgment, the note of a very different school was dominant.  But here for the moment appears a fresher key and a later model.  In the lines just quoted the feeling and the cadence of The Traveller and The Deserted Village are unmistakable.  But if they suggest comparison with the exquisite passage in the latter beginning—­

  “And as the hare, whom hounds and horns pursue,
  Pants to the place from which it first she flew,”

they also suggest a contrast.  Burke’s experienced eye would detect that if there was something in Crabbe’s more Pope-like couplets that was not found in Pope, so there was something here more poignant than even in Goldsmith.