In the respects just mentioned, the qualities exhibited in the new poem have been noticed before in The Village and The Parish Register.  In The Borough, however, appear some maturer specimens of this power, showing how Crabbe’s art was perfecting by practice.  Very noticeable are the sections devoted to the almshouse of the borough and its inhabitants.  Its founder, an eccentric and philanthropic merchant of the place, as well as the tenants of the almshouse whose descriptions follow, are all avowedly, like most other characters in Crabbe, drawn from life.  The pious founder, being left without wife or children, lives in apparent penury, but while driving all beggars from his door, devotes his wealth to secret acts of helpfulness to all his poorer neighbours in distress:—­

  “A twofold taste he had; to give and spare,
  Both were his duties, and had equal care;
  It was his joy to sit alone and fast,
  Then send a widow and her boys repast: 
  Tears in his eyes would, spite of him, appear,
  But he from other eyes has kept the tear: 
  All in a wintry night from far he came
  To soothe the sorrows of a suffering dame,
  Whose husband robbed him, and to whom he meant
  A lingering, but reforming punishment: 
  Home then he walked, and found his anger rise
  When fire and rushlight met his troubled eyes;
  But these extinguished, and his prayer addressed
  To Heaven in hope, he calmly sank to rest.”

The good man lived on, until, when his seventieth year was past, a building was seen rising on the green north of the village—­an almshouse for old men and women of the borough, who had struggled in life and failed.  Having built and endowed this harbour of refuge, and placed its government in the hands of six trustees, the modest donor and the pious lady-relative who had shared in his good works passed quietly out of life.

This prelude is followed by an account of the trustees who succeeded to the management after the founder’s death, among them a Sir Denys Brand, a lavish donor to the town, but as vulgar and ostentatious as the founder had been humble and modest.  This man defeats the intentions of the founder by admitting to the almshouses persons of the shadiest antecedents, on the ground that they at least had been conspicuous in their day: 

  “Not men in trade by various loss brought down,
  But those whose glory once amazed the town;
  Who their last guinea in their pleasure spent,
  Yet never fell so low as to repent: 
  To these his pity he could largely deal,
  Wealth they had known, and therefore want could feel.”