Meanwhile Crabbe was working steadily, while in London, at his new poems.  Though his minimum output was thirty lines a day, he often produced more, and on one occasion he records eighty lines as the fruit of a day’s labour.  During the year 1818 he was still at work, and in September of that year he writes to Mary Leadbeater that his verses “are not yet entirely ready, but do not want much that he can give them.”  He was evidently correcting and perfecting to the best of his ability, and (as I believe) profiting by the intellectual stimulus of his visit to London, as well as by the higher standards of versification that he had met with, even in writers inferior to himself.  The six weeks in London had given him advantages he had never enjoyed before.  In his early days under Burke’s roof he had learned much from Burke himself, and from Johnson and Fox, but he was then only a promising beginner.  Now, thirty-five years later, he met Rogers, Wordsworth, Campbell, Moore, as social equals, and having, like them, won a public for himself.  When his next volumes appeared, the workmanship proved, as of old, unequal, but here and there Crabbe showed a musical ear, and an individuality of touch of a different order from anything he had achieved before.  Mr. Courthope and other critics hold that there are passages in Crabbe’s earliest poems, such as The Village, which have a metrical charm he never afterwards attained.  But I strongly suspect that in such passages Crabbe had owed much to the revising hand of Burke, Johnson, and Fox.

In the spring of 1819 Crabbe was again in town, visiting at Holland House, and dining at the Thatched House with the “Literary Society,” of which he had been elected a member, and which to-day still dines and prospers.  He was then preparing for the publication of his new Tales, from the famous house in Albemarle Street.  Two years before, in 1817, on the strength doubtless of Rogers’s strong recommendation, Murray had made a very liberal offer for the new poems, and the copyright of all Crabbe’s previous works.  For these, together, Murray had offered three thousand pounds.  Strangely enough, Rogers was at first dissatisfied with the offer, holding that the sum should be paid for the new volumes alone.  He and a friend (possibly Campbell), who had conducted the negotiation, accordingly went off to the house of Longman to see if they could not get better terms.  To their great discomfiture the Longmans only offered L1000 for the privilege that Murray had valued at three times the amount; and Crabbe and his friends were placed in a difficult position.  A letter of Moore to John Murray many years afterwards, when Crabbe’s Memoir was in preparation, tells the sequel of the story, and it may well be given in his words: