In the end her splendid funeral is solemnised:—­

  “Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean,
  With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene;
  Presents no objects tender or profound
  But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around.”

And the sarcastic village-father, after hearing “some scholar” read the list of her titles and her virtues, “looked disdain and said":—­

  “Away, my friends! why take such pains to know
  What some brave marble soon in Church shall show? 
  Where not alone her gracious name shall stand,
  But how she lived—­the blessing of the land;
  How much we all deplored the noble dead,
  What groans we uttered and what tears we shed;
  Tears, true as those which in the sleepy eyes
  Of weeping cherubs on the stone shall rise;
  Tears, true as those which, ere she found her grave,
  The noble Lady to our sorrows gave!”

These portraits of the ignoble rich are balanced by one of the “noble peasant” Isaac Ashford, drawn, as Crabbe’s son tells us, from a former parish-clerk of his father’s at North Glemham.  Coming to be past work through infirmities of age, the old man has to face the probability of the parish poorhouse, and reconciling himself to his lot is happily spared the sore trial:—­

  “Daily he placed the Workhouse in his view! 
  But came not there, for sudden was his fate,
  He dropp’d, expiring, at his cottage-gate. 
    I feel his absence in the hours of prayer,
  And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there: 
  I see no more those white locks thinly spread
  Round the bald polish of that honour’d head;
  No more that awful glance on playful wight,
  Compell’d to kneel and tremble at the sight,
  To fold his fingers, all in dread the while,
  Till Mister Ashford soften’d to a smile;
  No more that meek and suppliant look in prayer,
  Nor the pure faith (to give it force), are there:—­
  But he is blest, and I lament no more
  A wise, good man, contented to be poor.”

Where Crabbe is represented, not unfairly, as dwelling mainly on the seamy side of peasant and village life, such passages as the above are not to be overlooked.

This final section ("Burials”) is brought to a close by an ingenious incident which changes the current of the vicar’s thoughts.  He is in the midst of the recollections of his departed flock when the tones of the passing-bell fall upon his ear.  On sending to inquire he finds that they tell of a new death, that of his own aged parish-sexton, “old Dibble” (the name, it may be presumed, an imperfect reminiscence of Justice Shallow’s friend).  The speaker’s thoughts are now directed to his old parish servant, and to the old man’s favourite stories of previous vicars under whom he has served.  Thus the poem ends with sketches of Parson Addle, Parson Peele, Dr. Grandspear and others—­among them the “Author-Rector,” intended (the younger Crabbe thought) as a portrait of the poet himself.  Finally Crabbe could not resist the temptation to include a young parson, “a youth from Cambridge,” who has imbibed some extreme notions of the school of Simeon, and who is shown as fearful on his death-bed lest he should have been guilty of too many good works.  He appeals to his old clerk on the subject:—­