In October of this year Crabbe was again working hard at his botany—­for like the Friar in Romeo and Juliet his time was always much divided between the counselling of young couples and the “culling of simples”—­when his household received the tidings of the death of John Tovell of Parham, after a brief illness.  It was momentous news to Crabbe’s family, for it involved “good gifts,” and many “possibilities.”  Crabbe was left executor, and as Mr. Tovell had died without children, the estate fell to his two sisters, Mrs. Elmy and an elderly spinster sister residing in Parham.  As Mrs. Elmy’s share of the estate would come to her children, and as the unmarried sister died not long after, leaving her portion in the same direction, Crabbe’s anxiety for the pecuniary future of his family was at an end.  He visited Parham on executor’s business, and on his return found that he had made up his mind “to place a curate at Muston, and to go and reside at Parham, taking the charge of some church in that neighbourhood.”

Crabbe’s son, with the admirable frankness that marks his memoir throughout, does not conceal that this step in his father’s life was a mistake, and that he recognised and regretted it as such on cooler reflection.  The comfortable home of the Tovells at Parham fell somehow, whether by the will, or by arrangement with Mrs. Elmy, to the disposal of Crabbe, and he was obviously tempted by its ampler room and pleasant surroundings.  He would be once more among relatives and acquaintances, and a social circle congenial to himself and his wife.  Muston must have been very dull and lonely, except for those on visiting terms with the duke and other county magnates.  Moreover it is likely that the relations of Crabbe with his village flock were already—­as we know they were at a later date—­somewhat strained.  Let it be said once for all that judged by the standards of clerical obligation current in 1792, Crabbe was then, and remained all his life, in many important respects, a diligent parish-priest.  Mr. Hutton justly remarks that “the intimate knowledge of the life of the poor which his poems show proves how constantly he must have visited, no less than how closely he must have observed.”  But the fact remains that though he was kind and helpful to his flock while among them in sickness and in trouble—­their physician as well as their spiritual adviser—­his ideas as to clerical absenteeism were those of his age, and moreover his preaching to the end of his life was not of a kind to arouse much interest or zeal.  I have had access to a large packet of his manuscript sermons, preached during his residence in Suffolk and later, as proved by the endorsements on the cover, at his various incumbencies in Leicestershire and Wiltshire.  They consist of plain and formal explanations of his text, reinforced by other texts, entirely orthodox but unrelieved by any resource in the way of illustration, or by any of those poetic touches which his published