From this unfit class of pensioner Crabbe selects three for his minute analysis of character.  They are, as usual, of a very sordid type.  The first, a man named “Blaney,” had his prototype in a half-pay major known to Crabbe in his Aldeburgh days, and even the tolerant Jeffrey held that the character was rather too shameless for poetical treatment.  The next inmate in order, a woman also drawn from the living model, and disguised under the title of Clelia, is a study of character and career, drawn with consummate skill.  Certain abortive attempts of Crabbe to write prose fiction have been already mentioned.  But this narrative of the gradual degradation of a coquette of the lower middle class shows that Crabbe possessed at least some of the best qualities of a great novelist.  Clelia is, in fact, a kind of country-town Becky Sharp, whose wiles and schemes are not destined to end in a white-washed reputation at a fashionable watering-place.  On the contrary she falls from one ignominy to another until, by a gross abuse of a public charity, she ends her days in the almshouse!

One further instance may be cited of Crabbe’s persistent effort to awaken attention to the problem of poor-law relief.  In his day the question, both as to policy and humanity, between indoor and outdoor relief, was still unsettled.  In The Borough, as described, many of the helpless poor were relieved at their own homes.  But a new scheme, “The maintenance of the poor in a common mansion erected by the Hundred,” seems to have been in force in Suffolk, and up to that time confined to that county.  It differed from the workhouse of to-day apparently in this respect, that there was not even an attempt to separate the young and old, the sick and the healthy, the criminal and vicious from the respectable and honest.  Yet Crabbe’s powerful picture of the misery thus caused to the deserving class of inmate is not without its lesson even after nearly a century during which thought and humanity have been continually at work upon such problems.  The loneliness and weariness of workhouse existence passed by the aged poor, separated from kinsfolk and friends, in “the day-room of a London workhouse,” have been lately set forth by Miss Edith Sellers, in the pages of the Nineteenth Century, with a pathetic incisiveness not less striking than that of the following passage from the Eighteenth Letter of Crabbe’s Borough:—­

  “Who can, when here, the social neighbour meet? 
  Who learn the story current in the street? 
  Who to the long-known intimate impart
  Facts they have learned, or feelings of the heart? 
  They talk indeed, but who can choose a friend,
  Or seek companions at their journey’s end? 
  Here are not those whom they when infants knew;
  Who, with like fortune, up to manhood grew;
  Who, with like troubles, at old age arrived;
  Who, like themselves, the joy of life survived;
  Whom time and custom so familiar made,