George Crabbe and his bride settled down in their apartments at Belvoir Castle, but difficulties soon arose.  Crabbe was without definite clerical occupation, unless he read prayers to the few servants left in charge; and was simply waiting for whatever might turn up in the way of preferment from the Manners family, or from the Lord Chancellor.  The young couple soon found the position intolerable, and after less than eighteen months Crabbe wisely accepted a vacant curacy in the neighbourhood, that of Stathern in Leicestershire, to the humble parsonage of which parish Crabbe and his wife removed in 1785.  A child had been born to them at Belvoir, who survived its birth only a few hours.  During the following four years at Stathern were born three other children—­the two sons, George and John, in 1785 and 1787, and a daughter in 1789, who died in infancy.

Stathern is a village about four miles from Belvoir Castle, and the drive or walk from one to the other lies through the far-spreading woods and gardens surrounding the ducal mansion.  Crabbe entered these woods almost at his very door, and found there ample opportunity for his botanical studies, which were still his hobby.  As usual his post was that of locum tenens, the rector, Dr. Thomas Parke, then residing at his other living at Stamford.  My friend, the Rev. J.W.  Taylor, the present rector of Stathern, who entered on his duties in 1866, tells me of one or two of the village traditions concerning Crabbe.  One of these is to the effect that he spoke “through his nose,” which I take to have been the local explanation of a marked Suffolk accent which accompanied the poet through life.  Another, that he was peppery of temper, and that an exceedingly youthful couple having presented themselves for holy matrimony, Crabbe drove them with scorn from the altar, with the remark that he had come there to marry “men and women, and not lads and wenches!”

Crabbe used to tell his children that the four years at Stathern were, on the whole, the happiest in his life.  He and his wife were in humble quarters, but they were their own masters, and they were quit of “the pampered menial” for ever.  “My mother and he,” the son writes, “could now ramble together at their ease amidst the rich woods of Belvoir without any of the painful feelings which had before chequered his enjoyment of the place:  at home a garden afforded him healthful exercise and unfailing amusement; and his situation as a curate prevented him from being drawn into any sort of unpleasant disputes with the villagers about him”—­an ambiguous statement which probably, however, means that the absent rector had to settle difficulties as to tithe, and other parochial grievances.  Crabbe now again brought his old medical attainments, such as they were, to the aid of his poor parishioners, “and had often great difficulty in confining his practice strictly within the limits of the poor, for the farmers would willingly have been attended