“Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,
  And even his failings leaned to virtue’s side;
  But in his duty prompt at every call
  He watched and wept; he prayed and felt for all. 
  And as a bird each fond endearment tries
  To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies,
  He tried each art, reproved each dull delay,
  Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way.”

Crabbe remembered a different type of parish priest in his boyhood, and this is how he introduces him.  He has been describing, with an unmitigated realism, the village poorhouse, in all its squalor and dilapidation:—­

  “There children dwell who know no parents’ care: 
  Parents, who know no children’s love, dwell there. 
  Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
  Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed”

The dying pauper needs some spiritual consolation ere he passes into the unseen world,

  “But ere his death some pious doubts arise,
  Some simple fears which bold, bad men despise;
  Fain would he ask the parish priest to prove
  His title certain to the joys above: 
  For this he sends the murmuring nurse, who calls
  The holy stranger to these dismal walls;
  And doth not he, the pious man, appear,
  He, ‘passing rich with forty pounds a year’? 
  Ah! no:  a shepherd of a different stock. 
  And far unlike him, feeds this little flock: 
  A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday’s task
  As much as God or man can fairly ask;
  The rest he gives to loves and labours light,
  To fields the morning, and to feasts the night;
  None better skilled the noisy pack to guide,
  To urge their chase, to cheer them, or to chide;
  A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day,
  And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play: 
  Then, while such honours bloom around his head,
  Shall he sit sadly by the sick man’s bed,
  To raise the hope he feels not, or with zeal
  To combat fears that e’en the pious feel?”

Crabbe’s son, after his father’s death, cited in a note on these lines what he hold to be a parallel passage from Cowper’s Progress of Error, beginning:—­

  “Oh, laugh or mourn with me the rueful jest,
  A cassocked huntsman, and a fiddling priest.”

Cowper’s first volume, containing Table-Talk and its companion satires, appeared some months before Crabbe’s Village.  The shortcomings of the clergy are a favourite topic with him, and a varied gallery of the existing types of clerical inefficiency may be formed from his pages.  Many of Cowper’s strictures were amply justified by the condition of the English Church.  But Cowper’s method is not Crabbe’s.  The note of the satirist is seldom absent, blended at times with just a suspicion of that of the Pharisee.  The humorist and the Puritan contend for predominance in the breast of this polished gentleman and scholar.  Cowper’s