“’My alms-deeds all, and every deed I’ve done,
  My moral-rags defile me every one;
  It should not be:—­what say’st thou!  Tell me, Ralph.’ 
  ’Quoth I, your Reverence, I believe you’re safe;
  Your faith’s your prop, nor have you pass’d such time
  In life’s good works as swell them to a crime. 
  If I of pardon for my sins were sure,
  About my goodness I would rest secure.’”

The volume containing The Parish Register, The Village, and others, appeared in the autumn of 1807; and Crabbe’s general acceptance as a poet of mark dates from that year.  Four editions were issued by Mr. Hatchard during the following year and a half—­the fourth appearing in March 1809.  The reviews were unanimous in approval, headed by Jeffrey in the Edinburgh, and within two days of the appearance of this article, according to Crabbe’s son, the whole of the first edition was sold off.

At this date, there was room for Crabbe as a poet, and there was still more room for him as an innovator in the art of fiction.  Macaulay, in his essay on Addison, has pointed out how the Roger de Coverley papers gave the public of his day the first taste of a new and exquisite pleasure.  At the time “when Fielding was birds-nesting, and Smollett was unborn,” he was laying the foundations of the English novel of real life.  After nearly a hundred years, Crabbe was conferring a similar benefit.  The novel had in the interim risen to its full height, and then sunk.  When Crabbe published his Parish Register, the novels of the day were largely the vapid productions of the Minerva Press, without atmosphere, colour, or truth.  Miss Edgeworth alone had already struck the note of a new development in her Castle Rackrent, not to mention the delightful stories in The Parents’ Assistant, Simple Susan, Lazy Lawrence, or The Basket-Woman.  Galt’s masterpiece, The Annals of the Parish, was not yet even lying unfinished in his desk.  The Mucklebackits and the Headriggs were still further distant.  Miss Mitford’s sketches in Our Village—­the nearest in form to Crabbe’s pictures of country life—­were to come later still.  Crabbe, though he adhered, with a wise knowledge of his own powers, to the heroic couplet, is really a chief founder of the rural novel—­the Silas Marner and the Adam Bede of fifty years later.  Of course (for no man is original) he had developed his methods out of that of his predecessors.  Pope was his earliest master in his art.  And what Pope had done in his telling couplets for the man and woman of fashion—­the Chloes and Narcissas of his day—­Crabbe hoped that he might do for the poor and squalid inhabitants of the Suffolk seaport.  Then, too, Thomson’s “lovely young Lavinia,” and Goldsmith’s village-parson and poor widow gathering her cresses from the brook, had been before him and contributed their share of influence.  But Crabbe’s achievement was practically a new thing.  The success of The Parish Register was largely that of a new adventure in the world of fiction.  Whatever defects the critic of pure poetry might discover in its workmanship, the poem was read for its stories—­for a truth of realism that could not be doubted, and for a pity that could not be unshared.