gratis also.”  His literary labours subsequent to The Village seem to have been slight, with the exception of a brief memoir of Lord Robert Manners contributed to The Annual Register in 1784, for the poem of The Newspaper, published in 1785, was probably “old stock.”  It is unlikely that Crabbe, after the success of The Village, should have willingly turned again to the old and unprofitable vein of didactic satire.  But, the poem being in his desk, he perhaps thought that it might bring in a few pounds to a household which certainly needed them. “The Newspaper, a Poem, by the Rev. George Crabbe, Chaplain to his Grace the Duke of Rutland, printed for J. Dodsley, in Pall Mall,” appeared as a quarto pamphlet (price 2s.) in 1785, with a felicitous motto from Ovid’s Metamorphoses on the title-page, and a politic dedication to Lord Thurlow, evincing a gratitude for past favours, and (unexpressed) a lively sense of favours to come.

The Newspaper is, to say truth, of little value, either as throwing light on the journalism of Crabbe’s day, or as a step in his poetic career.  The topics are commonplace, such as the strange admixture of news, the interference of the newspaper with more useful reading, and the development of the advertiser’s art.  It is written in the fluent and copious vein of mild satire and milder moralising which Crabbe from earliest youth had so assiduously practised.  If a few lines are needed as a sample, the following will show that the methods of literary puffing are not so original to-day as might be supposed.  After indicating the tradesman’s ingenuity in this respect, the poet adds.—­

  “These are the arts by which a thousand live,
  Where Truth may smile, and Justice may forgive. 
  But when, amid this rabble-rout, we find
  A puffing poet, to his honour blind: 
  Who slily drops quotations all about
  Packet or Post, and points their merit out;
  Who advertises what reviewers say,
  With sham editions every second day;
  Who dares not trust his praises out of sight,
  But hurries into fame with all his might;
  Although the verse some transient praise obtains,
  Contempt is all the anxious poet gains”

The Newspaper seems to have been coldly received by the critics, who had perhaps been led by The Village to expect something very different, and Crabbe never returned to the satirical-didactic line.  Indeed, for twenty-two years he published nothing more, although he wrote continuously, and as regularly committed the bulk of his manuscript to the domestic fire-place.  Meantime he lived a happy country life at Stathern, studying botany, reading aloud to his wife, and by no means forgetting the wants of his poor parishioners.  He visited periodically his Dorsetshire livings, introducing his wife on one such occasion, as he passed through London, to the Burkes.  And one day, seized with an acute attack of the mal du pays, he rode sixty miles to the coast of Lincolnshire that he might once more “dip,” as his son expresses it, “in the waves that washed the beach of Aldeburgh.”