“Dear Sir,—­I do not know by what unlucky accident you missed the note I left for you at my house.  I wrote besides to you at Belvoir.  If you had received these two short letters you could not want an invitation to a place where every one considers himself as infinitely honoured and pleased by your presence.  Mrs. Burke desires her best compliments, and trusts that you will not let the holidays pass over without a visit from you I have got the poem; but I have not yet opened it.  I don’t like the unhappy language you use about these matters.  You do not easily please such a judgment as your own—­that is natural; but where you are difficult every one else will be charmed.  I am, my dear sir, ever most affectionately yours,

EDMUND BURKE.”

The “unhappy language” seems to point to Crabbe having expressed some diffidence or forebodings concerning his new venture.  Yet Crabbe had less to fear on this head than with most of his early poems. The Village had been schemed and composed in parts before Crabbe knew Burke.  One passage in it indeed, as we have seen, had first convinced Burke that the writer was a poet.  And in the interval that followed the poem had been completed and matured with a care that Crabbe seldom afterwards bestowed upon his productions.  Burke himself had suggested and criticised much during its progress, and the manuscript had further been submitted through Sir Joshua Reynolds to Johnson, who not only revised it in detail but re-wrote half a dozen of the opening lines.  Johnson’s opinion of the poem was conveyed to Reynolds in the following letter, and here at last we get a date:—­

March 4, 1783.

“Sir,—­I have sent you back Mr. Crabbe’s poem, which I read with great delight.  It is original, vigorous, and elegant.  The alterations which I have made I do not require him to adopt; for my lines are perhaps not often better than his own:  but he may take mine and his own together, and perhaps between them produce something better than either.  He is not to think his copy wantonly defaced:  a wet sponge will wash all the red lines away and leave the pages clean.  His dedication will be least liked:  it were better to contract it into a short, sprightly address.  I do not doubt of Mr. Crabbe’s success.  I am, Sir, your most humble servant,

SAMUEL JOHNSON.”

Boswell’s comment on this incident is as follows:—­“The sentiments of Mr. Crabbe’s admirable poem as to the false notions of rustic happiness and rustic virtue were quite congenial with Dr. Johnson’s own:  and he took the trouble not only to suggest slight corrections and variations, but to furnish some lines when he thought he could give the writer’s meaning better than in the words of the manuscript.”  Boswell went on to observe that “the aid given by Johnson to the poem, as to The Traveller and Deserted Village of Goldsmith, were so small as by no means to impair the distinguished merit of