In the last years of the eighteenth century there was a sudden awakening among the bishops to the growing abuse of non-residence and pluralities on the part of the clergy.  One prelate of distinction devoted his triennial charge to the subject, and a general “stiffening” of episcopal good nature set in all round.  The Bishop of Lincoln addressed Crabbe, with others of his delinquent clergy, and intimated to him very distinctly the duty of returning to those few sheep in the wilderness at Muston and Allington.  Crabbe, in much distress, applied to his friend Dudley North to use influence on his behalf to obtain extension of leave.  But the bishop, Dr. Pretyman (Pitt’s tutor and friend—­better known by the name he afterwards adopted of Tomlins) would not yield, and it was probably owing to pressure from some different quarter that Crabbe succeeded in obtaining leave of absence for four years longer.  Dudley North would fain have solved the problem by giving Crabbe one or more of the livings in his own gift in Suffolk, but none of adequate value was vacant at the time.  Meanwhile, the house rented by Crabbe, Great Glemham Hall, was sold over Crabbe’s head, by family arrangements in the North family, and he made his last move while in Suffolk, by taking a house in the neighbouring village of Rendham, where he remained during his last four years.  Crabbe was looking forward to his elder son’s going up to Cambridge in 1803, and this formed an additional reason for wishing to remain as long as might be in the eastern counties.

The writing of poetry seems to have gone on apace. The Parish Register was all but completed while at Rendham, and The Borough was also begun.  After so long an abstinence from the glory of print, Crabbe at last found the required stimulus to ambition in the need of some further income for his two sons’ education.  But during the last winter of his residence at Rendham (1804-1805), Crabbe produced a poem, in stanzas, of very different character and calibre from anything he had yet written, and as to the origin of which one must go back to some previous incidents in Crabbe’s history.  His son is always lax as to dates, and often just at those periods when they would be the most welcome.  It may be inferred, however, that at some date between 1790 and 1792 Crabbe suffered from serious derangements of his digestion, attended by sudden and acute attacks of vertigo.  The passage in the memoir as to the exact period is more than usually vague.  The writer is dealing with the year 1800, and he proceeds: 

“My father, now about his forty-sixth year, was much more stout and healthy than when I first remember him.  Soon after that early period he became subject to vertigoes, which he thought indicative of a tendency to apoplexy; and was occasionally bled rather profusely, which only increased the symptoms.  When he preached his first sermon at Muston in the year 1789 my mother foreboded, as she afterwards told us, that he would