the information from Lord Holland, and his Lordship’s permission to inform my readers) the poem which I have named The Parish Register was heard by Mr. Fox, and it excited interest enough by some of its parts to gain for me the benefit of his judgment upon the whole.  Whatever he approved, the reader will readily believe, I have carefully retained:  the parts he disliked are totally expunged, and others are substituted, which I hope resemble those more conformable to the taste of so admirable a judge.  Nor can I deny myself the melancholy satisfaction of adding that this poem (and more especially the history of Phoebe Dawson, with some parts of the second book) were the last compositions of their kind that engaged and amused the capacious, the candid, the benevolent mind of this great man.”

It was, as we have seen, at Dudley North’s residence in Suffolk that Crabbe had renewed his acquaintance with Fox, and received from him fresh offers of criticism and advice.  And now the great statesman had passed beyond reach of Crabbe’s gratitude.  He had died in the autumn of 1806, at the Duke of Devonshire’s, at Chiswick.  His last months wore of great suffering, and the tedium of his latter days was relieved by being read aloud to—­the Latin poets taking their turn with Crabbe’s pathetic stories of humble life.  In the same preface, Crabbe further expresses similar obligations to his friend, Richard Turner of Yarmouth.  The result of this double criticism is the more discernible when we compare The Parish Register with, its successor, The Borough, in the composition of which Crabbe admits, in the preface to that poem, that he had trusted more entirely to his own judgment.

In The Parish Register, Crabbe returns to the theme which he had treated twenty years before in The Village, but on a larger and more elaborate scale.  The scheme is simple and not ineffective.  A village clergyman is the narrator, and with his registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials open before him, looks through the various entries for the year just completed.  As name after name recalls interesting particulars of character and incident in their history, he relates them as if to an imaginary friend at his side.  The precedent of The Deserted Village is still obviously near to the writer’s mind, and he is alternately attracted and repelled by Goldsmith’s ideals.  For instance, the poem opens with an introduction of some length in which the general aspects of village life are described.  Crabbe begins by repudiating any idea of such life as had been described by his predecessor:—­

  “Is there a place, save one the poet sees,
  A land of love, of liberty, and ease;
  Where labour wearies not, nor cares suppress
  Th’ eternal flow of rustic happiness: 
  Where no proud mansion frowns in awful state,
  Or keeps the sunshine from the cottage-gate;
  Where young and old, intent on pleasure,