SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND
1750-1850

BY

F. J. FOAKES-JACKSON

New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1916

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1916,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
Set up and electrotyped. Published September, 1916.
Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

ACADEMIAE HARVARDIANAE
ET PRAESERTIM
A. LAURENTIO LOWELL
PRAESIDI
PROFESSORSIBUSQUE EIS
QUI FRATERNO AMORE
HOSPITEM ACCEPERUNT
CANTABRIGIENSIS CANTABRIGIENSIBUS
HOC OPUSCULUM
D.D.

PREFACE

This volume contains a course of Lowell Lectures delivered in Boston in March, 1916; and I take this opportunity of tending my thanks to the Lowell Institute for affording me the privilege of delivering them. I must also thank a most indulgent audience for their sympathetic attention.

I desire particularly to thank several friends in England for assistance in the preparation of these lectures. In my investigations into the story of Margaret Catchpole, Mr. John Cobbold of Holywells, Ipswich, Mr. Edward Brooke of Ufford Hall, Suffolk, Mrs. Sylvester of Tonbridge, and the Curator of the Ipswich Museum, allowed me to see original documents of great interest; Mr. Barker of the East Anglian Daily Times and Mr. Goodwin of Ipswich helped by searching the files of old newspapers for information. The Downing Professor of the Laws of England at Cambridge assisted with his advice on the subject of Dickens’ legal knowledge; and Mr. Stoakley of the Cambridge chemical laboratory contributed to the success of the lectures by his admirable reproductions of illustrative maps and pictures.

Above all, I must express my gratitude to two ladies in America, who not only contributed to the pleasure of my visit by their unstinted hospitality, but did all in their power to save me from those pitfalls which beset every one who lectures in a strange country. Mrs. Barrett Wendell of Boston found time in the midst of her many useful avocations to hear several lectures before they were delivered, and to advise how they could be made more intelligible and acceptable to an American audience; and Mrs. Kirsopp Lake proved herself indefatigable not only in revising the lectures before they were delivered, but also in reading the proofs of this book.

Union Theological Seminary,

New York,

August, 1916.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SOCIAL LIFE IN ENGLAND

LECTURE I

Life in the Eighteenth Century Illustrated by the Career of John Wesley

In order to depict social life in England in the eighteenth century I am going to take the career of one of its most remarkable men, though you may be surprised at the choice I have made. For the eighteenth century was an eminently social age and the stage is crowded with figures of men and women of the world. Their letters, their talk, their scandals, their amusements have come down to us in profusion; and it is not difficult for us to imagine ourselves in their midst. You may well ask me why I did not select a really brilliant character to expound the life of this time. I might for example have taken Lord Chesterfield or Horace Walpole, or Boswell, that most observant of men, or the great character whom he immortalised. Or I might have selected others less known, but equally interesting, and rather than a revivalist preacher like John Wesley. I had written thus far when I came across the following words by the British man of letters, Mr. Birrell:

“How much easier to weave into your page the gossip of Horace Walpole, to enliven it with a heartless jest of George Selwyn, to make it blush with the sad stories of the extravagance of Fox, to embroider it with the rhetoric of Burke, to humanise it with the talk of Johnson, to discuss the rise and fall of administrations, the growth and decay of the constitution, than to follow John Wesley into the streets of Bristol, or to the bleak moors near Burslem, when he met face to face in all their violence, all their ignorance, and all their generosity the living men, women, and children, who made up the nation.”

But I think I could give another reason why John Wesley is a fit person to represent the social life of his century, namely, that though he may undoubtedly be classed among the saints, though he was one of the most unworldly of men, though he took what must seem to most of us an unnecessarily serious view of life, he fell short of hardly any of the great men enumerated in shrewd observation and even in what in the language of his time would have been termed “wit.” Nay, Wesley possessed a caustic humour which many a worldly wit might have envied. “Certainly,” he writes in Scotland, “this is a nation quick to hear and slow to speak, though certainly not ‘slow to wrath.’” “You cannot be too superficial in addressing a ‘polite’ audience” is an aphorism of his which I remember. “I know mankind too well, I know they that love you for political service, love you less than their dinner; and they that hate you, hate you worse than the devil.” Here is a criticism of a tapestry in Dublin. “In Jacob’s vision you see, on the one side a little paltry ladder, and an angel climbing up it in the attitude of a chimney sweeper; and on the other side—Jacob staring at him under a silver laced hat.” The criticisms of books,—for he was an omnivorous reader, especially on a journey,—“History, poetry and philosophy I commonly read on horseback, having other employment at other times,”—are not always fair but nearly always shrewd and often as bitter as anything Johnson himself could have uttered. “I read with much expectation a celebrated book, Rousseau on Education. But how was I disappointed! Sure a more consummate coxcomb never saw the sun.... I object to his temper even more than to his judgment: he is a mere misanthrope; a cynic all over. So indeed is his brother infidel Voltaire; and well nigh as great a coxcomb. But he hides his doggedness and vanity a little better; whereas here it stares us in the face continually.” Here is his opinion of a very famous book. “Tuesday, February 11, 1772, I casually took a volume of what is called, A sentimental Journey through France and Italy. Sentimental! What is that? It is not English: he might as well say Continental. It is not sense. It conveys no determinate idea: yet one fool makes many. And this nonsensical word (who would believe it?) is become a fashionable one! However the book agrees full well with the title; for one is as queer as the other. For oddity, uncouthness, and unlikeness to all the world beside, I suppose the writer is without a rival.” “A book wrote with as much learning and as little judgment, as any I remember to have read in my whole life,” he says of Cave’s “Primitive Christianity.” Despite the fact, therefore, that John Wesley was devoted to the work of missionary preaching, that he was an ecstatic visionary and in many respects the most credulous as well as the most zealous of evangelists, his knowledge of men and critical power was not a little remarkable.

I am not at all sure that sinners are not the right people to write about saints. Saints may be; because sanctity implies something attractive which is almost unthinkable without the sympathy which nearly always reveals itself in a certain playfulness. But good, deserving people are assuredly not qualified to be the biographers of saints; for, in their desire to exalt their hero, they generally strip him of all the qualities for which men loved him (and no one was ever loved for his perfections alone) and present him as their own ideal of what a saint should be. John Wesley is an example of this and he would appear in a far more amiable light in pages written by a kindly man of the world than in a book by a devoted admirer and would-be imitator of his virtues. It was, after all, Boswell’s many failings which contributed to give us so delightful a portrait as that of his great and good friend, Samuel Johnson.

Now John Wesley was an undoubted saint, and the good he did in England, and his society in America for that matter, is incalculable: but I ask his admirers and any who profess to follow him to forgive me for using him as a peg on which to hang a few remarks on social England. Before, however, I do so may I introduce him and some of his family to you?

It is rare indeed to find in any family so much genius transmitted from father to son for more than two centuries as there was in that of the Wesleys. Here are six generations:

1. Bartholomew studied physic at the University and, when ejected for Puritanism in 1662 from the living of Allington in Dorsetshire, he practised as a doctor.

2. His son John was an ardent Puritan, imprisoned on no less than four occasions. He died at an early age and was distinguished when at New Inn Hall at Oxford for his proficiency in Oriental studies.

3. Samuel, Rector of Epworth, a scholar of some repute and father of the famous Wesleys.

4. Charles, the poet of Methodism.

5. Samuel, the musician, one of the pioneers of modern organ playing.

6. Samuel Sebastian, the celebrated composer, organist in Gloucester Cathedral, who died in 1875.

Talent, not without eccentricity, seemed the natural gift of this remarkable family, to which was added beauty in the females and distinction of appearance in the male members. Samuel, the third on our list, was, naturally, a puritan by upbringing; but he became a Churchman by conviction. He obtained the Rectory of Epworth in the Isle of Axholm in Lincolnshire, and the chaplaincy of a regiment. This, however, he lost; and his dissenting enemies stopped his getting any further preferment save the living of Wroote, near to Epworth. He married the daughter of an ejected minister, Susannah Annesley, who was herself connected with the noble family of that name. She had no less than nineteen children, but few of these survived, among them the three famous brothers Samuel, John, and Charles. The girls, had they had their brother’s advantages and education, might have been almost equally distinguished. As it was, however, Samuel had enough to do to give his sons an education worthy of their abilities. The eldest son Samuel was a scholar of Westminster and a student of Christ Church, a friend of Bishop Atterbury, and a sound scholar. Owing to his Toryism he was never more than an usher (under-master) at Westminster and Master of Tiverton School: and he continued to hold the principles of a High Churchman to the last. He was an excellent and affectionate brother, ready to help John and Charles in their education; but from the first he recognised the tendencies of Methodism to be schismatical; and in a letter to his mother just before his death he pointed out the danger of his brothers’ teaching. Because he was not in sympathy with the movement he has been condemned as “worldly,” as dull, as without genius; but a sentence in this letter reveals something of the incisiveness of John. “As I told Jack,” he writes, “I am not afraid that the church should excommunicate him, discipline is at too low an ebb; but that he should excommunicate the church.” John went to school at the Charterhouse, thence to Christ Church, Oxford, and to a fellowship at Lincoln College. Charles followed in the footsteps of Samuel and became a student of Christ Church. Academic distinction was the lot of all the sons of the Rector of Epworth.

The home of the family was amid the fens of Lincolnshire; and the fenland had still many of its peculiar characteristics during the childhood and youth of the Wesleys. The Isle of Axholm had been but recently literally an island, rising out of the swamps and often approached only by boat. These islands were inhabited by a wild uncouth race who lived partly as farmers, and partly by capturing the fish and birds which swarmed in the surrounding fens. Here lived John Wesley and his family. By birth they were emphatically gentlefolk, by education highly cultivated; they were miserably poor, severed from the society of their equals among a people with whom they could have but little sympathy. All of a deeply religious spirit; the father a pious and conscientious but disappointed scholar, the mother sternly determined to do her duty, the sons endowed with singular gifts of leadership, the daughters sensitive and refined, condemned to live as peasant girls. A family so able, so thrown on its own resources, so out of contact with the world, of so imperious a spirit, was almost bound to develop on exceptional lines. Their virtues and their strength were as abnormal as their weakness, their singularly active minds were equally capable of the greatest deeds and the most surprising mistakes. All the girls were unfortunate in the choice of their partners and had sad lives. John, the most gifted of all this gifted household, was able to transform England by his preaching; yet made the most astonishing blunders in the conduct of his private life, though shewing a talent for administration worthy of his celebrated namesake, Arthur Wesley, or Wellesley, Duke of Wellington. In studying the movement we must always keep Epworth in the background.[1] But there was another side of the life of the sons of the Rector. Samuel’s friend Atterbury, the Tory Bishop of Rochester, is one of the most remarkable figures of his age. John and Charles at Oxford were poor enough but found a welcome in society congenial to them. Their birth and manners gave them access to a coterie of religious yet cultured circles, especially at Stanton in Gloucestershire; and they always comported themselves with a consciousness of a perfectly secure position in society. Neither of them was in the slightest degree dazzled by rank, wealth, or worldly position. When Count Zinzendorf, the great German noble, and the patron of the Moravians, spoke with the authority of a pious prince to John, he was answered in a spirit as uncompromising as his own. Selina, the famous and pious Countess of Huntingdon, “the elect lady” of evangelical preachers, might patronise Whitefield; but could not take a high tone with the Wesleys. Indeed, the aristocracy who preferred the treasure of the Gospel to be contained in clergy, who might be described as “earthen vessels,” disliked the Wesleys, whose greatest successes were obtained among the middle class. None the less their influence was in a measure due to the social advantages which they had enjoyed when Oxford students. We, however, have to do with John Wesley as illustrating the England of his day, and we may well begin to use him for our purposes as a traveller. He had been one the greater part of his life; but a good starting point for us will be after his visit to Germany in 1738, immediately after the time from which he dates his conversion. From that day almost till his death in 1791, John Wesley was almost continually on the road, preaching from town to town wherever he could get a hearing.

For years he seems to have travelled constantly on horseback, but later in life he made use of a postchaise. The distances he covered are almost incredible. Here is an extract from his Journal, dated August 7, 1759, when he was in his fifty fourth year. “After preaching at four (because of the harvest) I took horse and rode easily to London. Indeed I wanted a little rest; having rode in seven months about four and twenty hundred miles.” As we have seen, Wesley often read as he rode, and this practice taught him the value of a slack rein. “I asked myself How is it no horse stumbles when I am reading? No account can possibly be given but this: because I throw the reins on his back. I then set myself to observe; and I aver that in riding about an hundred thousand miles I scarce remember any horse (except two that would fall head over heels anyway) to fall or to make a considerable stumble while I rode with a slack rein. To fancy, therefore, that a tight rein prevents stumbling is a capital blunder. I have repeated the trial more than most men in the kingdom can do. A slack rein will prevent stumbling if anything will. But in some horses nothing can.” But all his rides were not so leisurely, and I will read you an account of a ride in Wales. He started from Shrewsbury at 4 A.M., and at two in the afternoon was forty two or three miles off, preaching in the marketplace at Llanidloes. He and his companions then rode to Fountainhead where he hoped to lodge; but “Mr. B. being unwilling” they remounted at 7 P.M. and rode on to Ross-fair. They missed the track and found themselves at the edge of a bog and had to be put on the right road; again they missed their way, “it being half-past nine.” They did not find Ross-fair till between 11 and 12. When they were in bed the ostler and a miner had a ride on their beasts, and in the morning Wesley found his mare “bleeding like a pig” in the stable, with a wound behind. This was on July 24; on the 27th he was at Pembroke; “I rested that night, having not quite recovered my journey from Shrewsbury to Ross-fair.” He was in his 62d year! The dangers of travel were considerable, and one of the most remarkable facts in regard to Wesley was that he was never molested by highwaymen, who literally swarmed in England throughout the eighteenth century. They were often in league with the post boys, many of whom were highwaymen themselves. When Wesley was 76 years of age he writes: “Just at this time there was a combination among many of the postchaise drivers on the Bath road, especially those that drove by night, to deliver their passengers into each other’s hands. One driver stopped at the spot they had appointed, where another waited to attack the chaise. In consequence of this many were robbed; but I had a good Protector still. I have travelled all roads by day or by night for these forty years, and never was interrupted yet.” Four years later, in 1782, he writes: “About one on Wednesday morning we were informed that three highwaymen were on the road and had robbed all the coaches that had passed, some within an hour or two. I felt no uneasiness on this account, knowing that God would take care of us: and He did so; for before we came to the spot all the highwaymen were taken.” I cannot but think it remarkable that Wesley was never molested, because, especially in his early days of itinerancy, everything was done to hinder his work and his enemies were quite unscrupulous enough to set the highwaymen on him. Perhaps the highwaymen had their scruples! In the early days of Wesley’s mission the invasion of England by the forces of the young Pretender took place. This was the period at which he and his followers suffered most from mob violence and also from charges of Popery and disaffection. I will take the latter first, as there is hardly any feature in the 18th century so marked in England as the dread and horror with which the Roman Catholic religion was regarded. I remember a few years ago examining a number of cartoons and caricatures during the rebellion of 1745 and almost every one of them had to do with Popery. To the English the invasion of the country by Charles Edward was like the Spanish Armada, an attempt to impose the papal yoke on the land. In the trinity of the nation’s enemies the Pope stood first: “From the Pope, the Devil and the Pretender, Good Lord, deliver us.” It was hatred of Rome that completely blinded people’s eyes to the romance of the young prince’s enterprise, and to his undoubted claim to the throne. Neither the government nor the sovereign were popular; but it was no question of popularity where Popery was concerned. The House of Hanover stood for Protestantism and the nation rallied to its support. Even that rapacious and cynical infidel, Frederick the Great of Prussia, was the darling of England as the “Protestant Hero”; and the Duke of Cumberland’s cruelties were forgotten because he saved England from the Pope. Like Marlborough and Wellington he was known as “the Great Duke.”

No charge could be more effective against an opponent than that of Romanism and many good men had to endure it. The great Bishop Butler was exposed to it for complaining in his visitation charge to the clergy of Durham of the disgraceful neglect into which they had allowed their fabrics to fall. The most deadly shaft levelled against John Wesley was Bishop Lavington of Exeter’s book, “The enthusiasm of the Methodists and Papists compared.” The visions, the trances, the ecstasies of the Methodists, reminded good Protestants of such Catholic mystics as St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross. The reasonableness of Protestantism, whether Anglican or nonconformist, was contrasted with the excited and hysterical manifestation of religious fervour in Popish countries, and the fervour of the Wesleys and their followers was especially unpopular on this account. The furious hatred of anything approaching Romanism is the key to much of the thought and feeling of the age. But though undoubtedly an enthusiast, Wesley was far in advance of his age as regards toleration. He had, moreover, a curious and chivalrous regard for the memory of Mary Queen of Scots; and he considered Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen and Protestant champion, as little better than a royal criminal. He at least would never have said as Puff says in The Critic, “Hush! no scandal against Queen Elizabeth.” On the contrary, he says in his Journal, “But what then was Queen Elizabeth? As just and merciful as Nero, and as good a Christian as Mahomet.” Thus he wrote in 1768, and if he held such a view twenty three years earlier, no wonder he was suspected of Jacobitism and Popery.

Far more to his credit is the fact that he resolutely refused to indulge in violent abuse of the ancient Church. On the contrary, he found so little true religion anywhere that wherever it was manifested he welcomed it. Charles Wesley’s son went over to the Church of Rome, to the great grief of his parents and, possibly, to the scandal of Methodism. This is how John writes and his words are so remarkable that I quote them at some length.

“He has not changed his religion; he has changed his opinions and mode of worship, but that is not religion.... He has suffered unspeakable loss because his new opinions are unfavourable to religion.... What then is religion. It is happiness in God or in the knowledge and love of God. It is faith working by love producing righteousness and peace and Joy in the Holy Ghost. In other words, it is a heart and life devoted to God.... Now either he has this religion or he has not: if he has, he will not finally perish, notwithstanding the absurd unscriptural opinions he has embraced ... let him only have his right faith ... and he is quite safe. He may indeed roll a few years in purging fire but he will surely go to heaven at last.”

No wonder, therefore, considering the bigotry of his age, that Wesley was exposed to persecution by the mobs: but his leniency towards Romanism was not the only cause of this. To-day, however, I wish to utilize the story of the attacks made on the Methodists to shew the state of the country. Mob law was powerful wherever population was dense. Towns were gradually growing up and the English system of legal machinery was devised rather for a rural population. There was no police properly so called. Shakespeare’s Dogberry and Verges would not have been caricatures in the 18th century. Wesley himself speaks of the watchmen as “those poor fools.” The violence of the mob was a feature of the 18th century in England. Perhaps you may recollect Hogarth’s picture of the chairing of a member of Parliament after an election,—the man laying about him with a flail, the prize-fights, etc. Riots play an important part in the history of the time and the no-popery riot in 1780 when Lord George Gordon stirred up the fanaticism of the London mob is only one of many similar occurrences. Never did the brothers Wesley, John and Charles, shew the courage of good breeding more conspicuously than when they faced an infuriated rabble and saved themselves and their followers by the dignity of their demeanour and the fearless mildness of their conduct amid scenes of tumult. Witness the affair at Wednesbury and Walsall. The mob dragged John Wesley from one magistrate to another. Some tried to protect him but were overpowered. To quote the Journal: “To attempt speaking was vain; for the noise on every side was like the roaring of the sea. So they dragged me along till they came to the town where seeing the door of a large house open, I attempted to go in; but a man catching me by the hair pulled me back into the middle of the mob.... I continued speaking all the time to those within hearing, feeling neither pain nor weariness.... I stood at the door (of a shop) and asked ‘Are you willing to hear me speak?’ Many cried out ‘No, no, knock his brains out, kill him at once, etc.’.... In the mean time my strength and voice returned and I broke out aloud in prayer. And now the man who just before headed the mob, turned, and said, Sir I will spend my life for you: follow me and not one soul here shall touch a hair of your head.” Throughout the riot Wesley notices: “From first to last I heard none give me a reviling word, or call me by any opprobrious name; but the cry of one and all was “The Preacher! the Parson! the Minister!” A man rushed at him to strike him but paused and merely stroked his head, saying, “Why, what soft hair he has!” In Cornwall attempts were made to stop Methodism by calling in the aid of the Press-Gang. Thomas Maxfield was caught and offered to the captain of a ship in Mount’s Bay, who refused to take him. An attempt was actually made to press John Wesley. A clergyman, Dr. Borlase, acted in his magisterial capacity to further this infamous project. But a Mr. Eustick who was charged with executing the warrant had the sense to see the indecency of arresting such a man to serve in the navy as a common seaman. He conducted Mr. Wesley to Dr. Borlase’s door and told him he had done his duty and that his prisoner was free to depart. Wesley’s description of the event is characteristic. Mr. Eustick was visited by him in order to be taken to Dr. Borlase’s to be pressed into the army.

“I went thither, and asked, ‘Is Mr. Eustick here?’ After some pause one said ‘Yes’; and he showed me into the parlour. When he came down he said ‘O Sir will you be so good as to go with me to the doctor’s?’ I answered ‘Sir I came for that purpose.’ ‘Are you ready Sir,’ I answered, ‘Yes.’ ‘Sir I am not quite ready, in a little time, in a quarter of an hour I will call upon you.’ In about three-quarters of an hour he came and finding that there was no remedy, he called for his horse and put forward to Dr. Borlase’s house; but he was in no haste so we were an hour and a quarter riding three or four measured miles. As soon as he came into the yard he asked a servant, ‘Is the Doctor at home’ upon whose answering ‘No Sir he is gone to Church;’ he presently said ‘Well Sir I have executed my commission. I have done Sir; I have no more to say.’”

Not that Wesley was not in serious danger at times, especially in Cornwall. Once at Falmouth the house was filled with privateersmen. Only a wainscot partition separated him from the mob. “Indeed to all appearances our lives were not worth an hour’s purchase.” When the door was broken down he came forth bareheaded (“For I purposely left off my hat that they all might see my face”). His calmness saved him; for though countless hands were lifted up to strike or throw at him yet they were “one and all stopped in the midway so that I had not even a speck of dirt on my clothes!” Ferocious as were the British mobs of this period they were capable of generous sentiments and chivalrous admiration for courage. The people were often set on Wesley by the gentry and, to their shame be it said, by some of the clergy. The excuse, both in Cornwall in 1745 and in Newcastle, was that the Methodist societies were with the Pretenders. “All the gentlemen in these parts say,” Wesley was told, “that you have been a long time in France and Spain, and are now set hither by the Pretender; and that these societies are to join him.”

It is scarcely necessary to do more than allude to the extreme brutality of the amusements of people in England in the eighteenth century. Dog fighting, bear baiting, bull baiting, cock fighting, were universal and, as we may see from Hogarth’s pictures, cruelty to animals was universal. On one occasion a baited bull was turned loose to interrupt a congregation assembled to hear Wesley preach. One of the ringleaders of the mob at Walsall who ended by taking the part of the Methodists was a noted prize-fighter in a bear garden.

John and Charles Wesley began their religious labours at Oxford in the city prison, Bocardo, ministering to the prisoners, and the Journal throws a lurid light on the condition of felons, criminals, and debtors in England. The system was atrocious, there was no real control; and the jailers farmed the place and made what they could out of it. The result was that if a man paid he could do what he liked in jail; and, if he could not, he was treated just as his keepers pleased. Side by side, therefore, with the utmost squalor and misery was almost indescribable profligacy. “I visited the Marshalsea prison,” writes Wesley, “on February 3, 1753, a nursery of all manner of wickedness. O shame to man that there should be such a place, such a picture of hell upon earth! And shame to those who bear the name of Christ that there should need any prison at all in Christendom.” Let me quote an extract from a letter to the London Chronicle, Friday, Jan. 2, 1761, “Sir, of all the seats of woe on this side hell, few, I suppose, exceed or equal Newgate. If any region of horror could exceed it, a few years ago Newgate in Bristol did; so great was the filth, the stench, the misery and wickedness which shocked all who had a spark of humanity left.”

The prison at Bristol had been reformed by a good keeper, who, says Wesley, “deserves to be remembered full as well as the man of Ross.” It was clean, there was no drunkenness nor brawling, no immorality, no idleness, and a decent service in the chapel. These reforms themselves shew what most prisons of the time must have been like.

Another evil was smuggling: wherever a boat could land there was a conspiracy to defraud the revenue. The business, for it was nothing else, was run on the most extensive scale and the whole countryside was engaged in it. The smugglers were armed and disciplined and prepared to offer furious resistance to the officers of the Revenue. Wesley set his face sternly against the practice.

“The stewards met at St. Ives, from the western part of Cornwall. The next day I began examining the society; but I was soon obliged to stop short. I found an accursed thing among them; well nigh one and all bought and sold ‘uncustomed’ goods. I therefore delayed speaking to any more till I had met them all together. This I did in the evening and told them plain, either they must put this abomination away or they would see my face no more.”

This was in November, 1753. In June, 1757, Wesley was in the north at Sunderland.

“I met the Society and told them plain, none could stay with us, unless he would part with all sin; particularly robbing the King, selling or buying run goods; which I would no more suffer than robbing on the highway.”

In 1762 he is able to record of Cornwall:

“The detestable practice of cheating the King (smuggling) is no more found in our societies, and since the accursed thing has been put away, the work of God has everywhere increased.”

The Cornish practice of “wrecking” still continued and in 1776 Wesley writes, “I was afterwards inquiring if that scandal in Cornwall of plundering wrecked vessels still continued.” He was told that it was as great as ever and only the Methodists would not share in it. Wesley remarks, with his usual good sense when dealing with a practical matter, “The Gentry of Cornwall may totally prevent it whenever they please. Only let the law take its course and the plundering will stop. Even if every labourer or tinner (i.e. tin miner) guilty of it were to be discharged and his name advertised to prevent his getting respectable employment, there would be no more of it.” In his peregrination Wesley did not disdain to visit and to note in his Journal objects of curiosity and interest. His active mind could not help occupying itself with anything exceptional, and many a traveller with nothing to do but investigate the locality has seen much less than he. Here is his description of how apprentices were made free of the corporation of Alnwick:

“Sixteen or seventeen, we were informed, were to receive their freedom this day, and in order thereto (such is the unparalleled wisdom of the present corporation, as well as of their forefathers), to walk through a great bog (purposely preserved for the occasion; otherwise it might have been drained long ago), which takes some of them to the neck, and many of them to the breast.”

A few months later he is in the south near Carisbrooke Castle, whither he walked in the afternoon.

“It stands upon a solid rock upon the top of a hill and commands a beautiful prospect. There is a well in it, cut quite through the rock, said to be seventy two yards deep, and another in the citadel, near a hundred. They drew up the water by an ass, which they assured us was sixty years old. But all the stately apartments lie in ruins. Only just enough of them is left to shew the chamber where poor King Charles was confined, and the windows through which he attempted to escape.”

From the steeple of Glasgow Cathedral Wesley surveys the country.

“A more fruitful and better cultivated plain is scarce to be seen in England. Indeed nothing is wanted but more trade (which would naturally bring more people) to make a great part of Scotland in no way inferior to the best counties in England.”

When he came to Edinburgh he was not so pleased with the High Street. “The situation of the city, on a hill shelving down on both sides, as well as to the east is inexpressibly fine. And the main street so broad and finely paved, with lofty houses on either side (many of them seven or eight stories high), is far beyond any in Great Britain. But how can it be suffered that all manner of filth should be thrown even into this street continually? Where are the magistracy, the gentry, the nobility of the land? Have they no concern for the honour of their nation? How long shall the capital city of Scotland, yea, and the chief street of it stink worse than a common sewer? Will no lover of this country, or of decency and common-sense find a remedy for it?”

On one occasion he went to the Tower of London, where lions used to be kept, with a man who played the German flute to see whether music had any influence on animals. The lions rose up and came to the front of the den and seemed all attention. A tiger started up and began continually leaping over and crawling under a lion. Wesley asks “Can we account for this by any principle of mechanism? can we account for it at all?” At Carn Brae in Cornwall he admires the Druidical remains. At Windsor he views the improvements of that “active and useful man the Duke of Cumberland,” especially the triangular tower built at the edge of Windsor Park. Here also he visited the house of a lover of the antique, “The oddest I ever saw with my eyes. Everything breathes antiquity; scarce a bedstead is to be seen that is not an hundred and fifty years old; and everything is out of the common way: for six hours I suppose these oddities would much delight a curious man; but after six months they would probably give him no more pleasure than a collection of feathers.” When he was eighty we find him in Holland delighted with the country and its people and his reception by Madam de Wassenaar. “She received us with that easy openness and affability which is almost peculiar to persons of quality.” The great hall in the Staat haus at Amsterdam reminds him of his old College hall at Christ Church, it is “near as large.”

It is a temptation to me to multiply examples of how the great preacher illustrates the country, every way of which was familiar to him. After his long journeyings no man of his time could have known England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland better. Few, with all our facilities of travel, know it half as well. Much of it was wild and almost uninhabited. Some of the roads were enough to daunt the hardiest of travellers. On one occasion the road to Ely for a mile and a half was under water. The chaise found the roads impassable near St. Ives, so Wesley borrowed a horse and rode forward till the ground was completely under water. Then he borrowed a boat “full twice as large as a kneading-trough.” He was seventy two years old at this time! So wild were parts of the island that John Haine, a disciple of Wesley, relates that he once saw what he supposed to be a supernatural appearance in the clear sky, “a creature like a swan, but much larger, part black and part brown, which flew at him, went just over his head, and lighting on the ground stood staring upon him.” This was undoubtedly a great bustard, and Southey in his “Life of Wesley” quotes the Gentleman’s Magazine to shew that one was seen as late as 1801. As we have seen, the very people of this time seem almost as unfamiliar to us as the scenery would have been. But is it not strange that with a guide whose thoughts were almost entirely in the world to come we should have seen so much and could see so much more, if only we could study him more closely? He lays bare to us England during the very long and active life of a man born just after the death of William III, who saw George III thirty years and more upon the throne. Wesley might have heard of the peace of Utrecht in 1713 as a boy, of the South Sea Bubble in 1720 as a youth, and he lived to hear of the French Revolution in 1789 and the fall of the Bastille. And throughout this long period of time the remarkable thing is his amazing vitality. He says he never felt low spirited: a sleepless night is so unusual that it is specially commented on. Till his 85th year he never acknowledged that he felt old: his youthfulness surprised him when recording his eighty eighth and following birthdays. No man had therefore a greater opportunity for seeing what England was like; and Wesley used it to the full. Yet it is a strange and perhaps an original guide whom we have used and it may be that the impression he leaves upon your minds is not quite what I had designed. Suppose my lecture should have been to some of you like the sermon of which George Herbert writes, “Where all lack sense, God takes the text and preaches patience;” and, my listeners, you have surrendered yourselves to your own thoughts and dreams. You may have pictured in the England of the eighteenth century a moorland on a windy winter evening, and on the near horizon the glare of an ill-lit manufacturing town, and a single figure small and slight, his long gray hair falling over his shoulders, sitting on a tired horse plodding forward with loosened rein. It is a subject the genius of a Millet might have made as memorable as his famous “Angelus,”—the two peasants praying as they hear the bell across the damp fields at even. And your dream, vision, picture, call it what you will, would be no less an adequate clue to the meaning of that famous age, than would some of the most stirring scenes in the history of Great Britain in those thrilling times. For in a sense John Wesley expressed the spirit of many thousands of its people.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] To shew how inaccessible Epworth must have been, I may mention that when I went there in an automobile, the sides of the roads were pointed out to me as paved so as to make a mule track about three feet in width.

LECTURE II

GEORGE CRABBE

I have chosen the subject of George Crabbe, the Suffolk poet, partly out of attachment to the county of my birth, but also because I have certain faint though undoubted family links in connection with him.[2] In addition to this, his character, as a man as well as a poet, has a certain attraction for me; and even though there has been a revival of interest in him, comparatively few have studied him, or are acquainted with the facts of his life. Crabbe, however, was singularly fortunate in having a son, possessed of many valuable qualities as a biographer, for not only was he affectionate, and extraordinarily proud of his father, but at the same time he was not blind to his defects as a man or as a writer. And it must be remembered that Crabbe at his death occupied a place in public estimation, together with Scott and Byron; that the latter had described him as “Nature’s sternest painter and the best,” and had written of him, “Crabbe, the first of living poets.” A son, therefore, who under such circumstances could refrain from indiscriminating eulogy of a beloved father just after his death must be a man to be trusted.

George Crabbe was born in 1754 at Aldeburgh, a somewhat squalid little fishing town on the coast of Suffolk, rejoicing, however, in the dignity of a corporation, and returning two members to Parliament. His father was saltmaster and general factotum of the borough; a man, to all appearances, of rough manners, not improved by unfortunate circumstances; but sufficiently intelligent to recognise that in George he had a son who would repay a good education.[3] Not that with his narrow means he could do much; but he certainly did his best, and more than could be expected. George was intended for the medical profession; and it may be of interest to hear how a boy was educated to be a doctor in the eighteenth century. Young Crabbe was sent to school at Bungay, where he remained till his eleventh or twelfth year. He was next sent to a Mr. Richard Haddon at Stowmarket, where he showed considerable aptitude for mathematics, in which his father was also proficient. His master, to quote the biography, “though neither a Porson nor a Parr, laid the foundations of a fair classical education also.” But he soon had to return home and had to work in the warehouse of Slaughden Quay, piling up butter and cheese, duties which the poor boy—he was but thirteen, and was of a dreamy, meditative temperament—bitterly resented. But his father had not forgotten that George was to be a doctor, and seeing an advertisement, “Apprentice Wanted,” he sent him to Wickhambook, near Bury St. Edmunds. There he was treated as a mere drudge, slept with the ploughboy, worked on the farm, and learned his profession apparently by delivering medicine bottles to the neighbouring villages. In 1771, he removed to Woodbridge as apprentice to a Mr. Page, where he pursued his studies under more favourable circumstances. Here it was he met his future bride, Miss Elmy, at the neighbouring village of Parham, won a prize poem in the Lady’s Magazine owned by a Mr. Wheble, on the subject of “Hope”; and later he published at Ipswich a poem entitled “Inebriety,” in the preface of which he apologises “for those parts wherein I have taken such great liberties with Mr. Pope.” And it was certainly to Pope that Crabbe owed his inspiration. Now to imitate Pope’s versification is easy, and to copy his mannerisms not impossible; but to gain a double portion of his spirit, to emulate his epigrammatic terseness, above all to acquire anything like his knowledge of life and human nature can only be done by a man who is even in a measure akin to him in genius. Whether Crabbe was, it must be our endeavour to decide.

“Inebriety” did not catch on in Suffolk, a land which bears the epithet “silly” in two senses. I prefer the one which alludes to its numerous churches, “selig,” or pious. At any rate, no young author could expect an appreciative audience of clerics when he wrote thus:

“Lo proud Flaminius at the splendid board,

The easy chaplain of an atheist lord,

Quaffs the bright juice with all the gust of sense,

And clouds his brain in torpid elegance.”

Crabbe completed his apprenticeship in 1775 and once more returned to Aldeburgh. His family circumstances were extremely distressed, his father had changed for the worse, and his mother’s health had broken down. Again he was compelled to act as a warehouseman at Slaughden Quay. He managed to get to London for a short time, nominally to walk the hospitals; but having no funds he had, as he expresses it, to “pick up a little surgical knowledge as cheap as he could.” After ten months’ privation, Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh to become the assistant of a surgeon-apothecary, named Maskill,[4] who had opened a shop in the borough, and on his retirement Crabbe, though “imperfectly grounded in the commonest details of his profession,” set up for himself. His medical career was a complete failure. He had not the requisite knowledge and lacked means to acquire it, nor was he able to adapt himself to the rough surroundings amid which he lived. Aldeburgh was peopled, to quote his own words, by—

“A wild amphibious race

With sullen woe expressed on every face,

Who far from civil acts and social fly,

And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye.”

Sneered at as a poor and useless scholar by the relatives of Miss Elmy, to whom he was now engaged, regarded as a failure by his rough but not ungenerous father, Crabbe’s life was far from happy; the only relaxation he found was in the study of botany, and the only encouragement in the society of the officers of the Warwickshire militia, who were for a time quartered in the town. Their colonel, General Conway, showed the young surgeon attention, and gave him some valuable Latin books on botany. At last, wearied and disgusted with his life, Crabbe gave up attempting to be a doctor; and, aided by a loan of five pounds from Mr. Dudley North, brother to the candidate for the borough, he made his way to London in 1780 as a literary adventurer.[5]

The early struggles of a man who has won literary fame are only of importance in so far as they affect his subsequent work. Crabbe’s intellect was essentially scientific rather than imaginative. His poetry is, like Dutch art, remarkable for the finish of details and for exactness of observation. It is the same when he depicts what he saw as when he describes emotions and feelings. He had to understand before he could write. His hobby, as we have seen, was botany: he first showed talent as a mathematician; nor, because he failed in his medical work, need we suppose that his want of success was due in any way to intellectual deficiencies. Place Crabbe in a different situation. Suppose him to have walked the hospitals of London or Edinburgh, and to have made his way as a physician. He might well have taken an honoured place among the scientific men of his age. But look at the facts. His training was hardly better than that of an assistant in a chemist’s store in the most remote village nowadays. This, for example, was the hospital which Crabbe had “walked”:

“Such is that room which one rude beam divides,

And naked rafters form the sloping sides;

Here on a matted flock, with dust o’erspread,

The drooping wretch reclines his languid head.

But soon a loud and hasty summons calls,

Shakes the thin roof, and echoes round the walls,

Anon a figure enters, quaintly neat,

All pride and business, bustle and conceit.

A potent quack, long versed in human ills,

Who first insults the victim whom he kills;

Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect,

And whose most tender mercy is neglect.”[6]

We see the influence of Pope in the versification; but of personal experience in the subject.

True, Crabbe detested his profession, and thus apostrophises medical books as—

“Ye frigid tribe, on whom I wasted long

The tedious hours, and ne’er indulged in song;

Ye first seducers of my easy heart,

Who promised knowledge ye could not impart.”

But for all this, when in later life as a clergyman he used to prescribe for his poorer parishioners, he seems to have shown a power of diagnosis which made it evident that, though he failed as a surgeon apothecary, he might, had he had the requisite education, have succeeded as a consulting physician.[7]

Because he took Holy Orders and won his fame as a poet while a clergyman, Crabbe’s experiences, on which he founded his rhymed tales—for such his poems really are—are considered to have been mainly clerical. But, to understand him aright, we must remember that he was more or less engaged in the practice of medicine from the age of fourteen to that of twenty-five. It would be easy to quote many lines wherein the doctor and not the parson is revealed, and he never lost the professional dislike of quacks or contempt of valetudinarians.

Let us now consider how Crabbe’s experiences of Aldeburgh appear in his poems. I will take most of my extracts from his early poem, “The Village,” but a few will be from “The Borough,” which did not appear till more than twenty years later.

In “The Village” Crabbe boldly asks:

“From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,

Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?”

and declines to follow the fashion of speaking of rural life as the height of felicity. He says:

“I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms

For him that grazes or for him that farms;”

But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace

The poor laborious natives of the place.

Then shall I dare these real ills to hide

In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?”

In this spirit he describes the barren coast of East Suffolk, not then the haunt of the holiday-maker and the golfer, but the battleground of the smuggler and the preventive men, the home of—

“A bold and artful, surly, savage race,

Who only skilled to take the finny tribe,

The yearly dinner, or septennial bribe;

Wait on the shore, and, as the waves run high,

On the tossed vessel bend their eager eye,

Which to the coast directs its venturous way,

Theirs, or the ocean’s miserable prey.”

This description of the barren land about the coast well illustrates Crabbe’s power of observation:

“Lo, where the heath with withering brake grown o’er,

Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor;

From thence a length of burning sand appears,

Where the thin harvest waves its wither’d ears;

Rank weeds, that every art and care defy,

Reign o’er the land, and rob the blighted rye;

There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar,

And to the ragged infant threaten war;

There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil;

Here the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil;

Hardy and high above the slender sheaf,

The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf;

O’er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade,

And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade;

With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound,

And a sad splendour vainly shines around.”

We have already heard of the workhouse hospital and the “potent quack” who attended to the sick. Let us now listen to Crabbe’s description of the young clergyman who ministered to the afflicted of his village:

“A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday task

As much as God or man can fairly ask;

The rest he gives to loves and labours light,

To fields the morning, and to feasts the night.

A sportsman keen, he shouts through half the day,

And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play.”

But I must reluctantly forbear to quote more from “The Village,” and ask you to turn your attention to two passages in “The Borough,” which show what sort of men lived in Crabbe’s native town, and also indicate the power our author has in depicting two very different characters.

I will take Peter Grimes, the fisherman, first. Grimes was one of those human monsters who delight in cruelty; and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to its shame, furnished victims for its exercise in workhouse apprentices. The guardians of the overflowing workhouses of London were accustomed to get rid of their superfluous numbers by binding children as apprentices to masters, who practically became the owners of the little victims they were paid to teach.

“Peter had heard there were in London then—

Still have their being!—workhouse-clearing men,

Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind,

Would parish-boys to needy tradesmen bind;

They in their want a trifling sum would take,

And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make.”[8]

Grimes did several of these wretched boys to death by his cruelty, which was notorious in the borough, but the shocking thing was that nobody troubled to interfere.

“None put the question: ‘Peter, dost thou give

The boy his food? What, man! the lad must live;

Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,

He’ll serve thee better if he’s stroked and fed.’

None reasoned thus; and some, on hearing cries,

Said calmly, ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’”

At last Grimes, who seems to have been never quite sane in his brutality, went mad, and died raving at visions of his aged father and the boys he had done to death.

More inviting is a picture of another fisherman, the mayor of the borough:

“He was a fisher from his earliest day,

And placed his nets within the borough bay,

Where, by his skates, his herrings, and his soles,

He lived, nor dreamed of corporation doles.”

At last he saved £240 ($1200), and asked a friend what to do with it. The friend suggests “put it out on interest.”

“‘Oh, but,’ said Daniel, ‘that’s a dangerous plan,

He may be robbed like any other man.’”

The friend tells Daniel that he will be paid five per cent. every year.

“‘What good is that?’ quoth Daniel, ‘for ’tis plain

If part I take, there can but part remain.’”

With great difficulty the principle of a mortgage is explained, and at last,

“Much amazed was that good man. ‘Indeed,’

Said he, with gladdening eye, will money breed?

How have I lived? I grieve with all my heart

For my late knowledge of this precious art;

Five pounds for every hundred will he give?

And then the hundred—I begin to live.”

Such was the simplicity of the good folk of Aldeburgh, and so little news of the great world reached the place that, when Crabbe, at the age of twenty-five or six, went to London in 1780, he had never heard of the genius and tragic fate of Chatterton.

I shall pass over the terrible year our aspirant for fame spent in the Metropolis. It is a matter of personal pride to me to quote the following passage from the “Life”:

“The only acquaintance he had on entering London was a Mrs. Burcham, who had been in early youth a friend of Miss Elmy’s, and who was now the wife of a linen-draper in Cornhill. This worthy woman and her husband received him with cordial kindness; then invited him to make their house his home whenever he chose; and as often as he availed himself of this invitation he was treated with that frank familiarity which cancels the appearance of obligation.” (“Life,” by the Rev. G. Crabbe.)

I am glad to think my great-grand-parents understood the duty of hospitality.

At last, after a terrible struggle with poverty and the unsuccessful publication of a poem called “The Candidate,” Crabbe, who had hitherto sought for a patron in vain, found one in Edmund Burke. It is said that the following lines, expressive of the writer’s feelings on quitting Aldeburgh, satisfied Burke that his petitioner was a poet:

“As on their neighbouring beach the swallows stand,

And wait for favouring winds to leave the land,

While still for flight the ready wing is spread,

So waited I the favouring hour, and fled;

Fled from those shores where guilt and famine reign,

And cried, ‘Ah! hapless they who still remain,

Who still remain to hear the ocean roar,

Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore;

Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway,

Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away;

When the sad tenant weeps from door to door,

And begs a poor protection from the poor.’”

Burke selected two poems, “The Village” and “The Library,” for publication. He introduced Crabbe to Fox, and also to Reynolds: the latter brought him to Dr. Johnson; and when Burke heard that Crabbe desired to be ordained, he induced Dr. Yonge, Bishop of Norwich, to overlook his unacademic education, and to admit him to the ministry. Lord Thurlow, himself an East Anglian, had at first refused to receive Crabbe, but now treated him with much kindness, and gave him £100 ($500); so Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh a clergyman—a very different position from that which he had occupied on leaving—and was shortly summoned thence to be domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, on the recommendation of his firm friend, Mr. Burke. From the Duke’s seat at Belvoir “The Village” was published, after it had been submitted to Burke and Johnson. Naturally Crabbe’s sentiments about rustic happiness and virtue accorded with the views of the worthy doctor, but it is pleasing to remark the kindness which made him at the height of his fame labour to improve the work of the younger poet. Very characteristic are Johnson’s corrections of Crabbe’s manuscript. Here is how Crabbe writes at the commencement of “The Village”:

“In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring,

Tityrus the pride of Mantuan swains might sing:

But charmed by him, or smitten with his views,

Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse?

From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,

Where fancy leads, or Virgil led the way?”

From Johnson’s hands little remains unchanged:

“On Mincio’s banks in Cæsar’s bounteous reign,

If Tityrus found the golden age again,

Must sleepy bards the flattering dreams prolong

Mechanick echoes of the Mantuan song?

From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,

Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?”

I cannot feel very certain myself that the poet or his corrector got the concluding line right.

I must now pass somewhat hurriedly over a long period. In 1785 Crabbe published “The Newspaper,” and for twenty-two years he settled down to his clerical duties and did not reappear as an author. He lived at Stathern and Muston in Leicestershire the happy, domestic life of a country clergyman, returning to Suffolk when his wife inherited a share in the estate of her uncle, Mr. Tovell, at Parham.

In 1807 Crabbe appeared once more as a poet with “The Parish Register,” and from this time his fame was unquestioned. “The Borough” followed and then “The Tales.” But I need not weary you with dates and details. A new generation arose to encourage Crabbe. His first poems had been hailed by Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johnson, and Fox; his later by Scott, Byron, Lord Holland, and Rogers. His last days were spent in comfort and comparative affluence at Trowbridge, to which he had been appointed by a later Duke of Rutland. In 1817 he was lionised in London, and in 1822 he paid his famous visit to Edinburgh and found Sir Walter Scott in the midst of that preposterous pageant in which the King and Sir William Curtis, Alderman of the City of London, delighted the Scottish nation by appearing at Holyrood, tremendous in Stewart tartan, with claymore, philabeg, and other accessories of the garb of old Gaul. Scott, unwearied by his efforts to organise the King’s visit, had time to welcome a brother poet, and it will be remembered that so delighted was he to greet one whose writings had so often occupied his attention that he sat down on the sacred glass out of which George IV had deigned to drink, with the natural result.[9] Crabbe lived on till February, 1832, passing away, full of years and honours, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.

Crabbe’s works are sufficient to fill seven volumes, and it is not possible to do more than endeavour to form an estimate of him by limiting oneself to a few topics. I must content myself with three, and I fear that even then I cannot do justice to these. Those I propose are:

I. Crabbe as reflecting the manners of his age.

II. As a delineator of character.

III. His place as a poet.

I. I have spoken of Crabbe’s scientific education—such as it was—and of his power of observation, and I find, even in later life, more of the doctor than the parson. It is for this reason that his work is of more value than that of greater poets in reflecting his age. For Crabbe was not one of those who let “fancy lead the way,” but dealt with sober realities of experience, and even refrained from generalising or theorising. For the religious life of the period Crabbe’s poems are an invaluable document of which historians have, I suggest, made too little use. There is no reason to suppose that our author took Orders simply to secure literary leisure. His early diaries prove him a most devout man, and the fact that he occupied himself twenty-two years in parish work, without publishing, shows his devotion to his profession. Yet he apparently saw no harm in accepting two livings in Dorsetshire from the Lord Chancellor, which he scarcely ever went near, but took other work in the Vale of Belvoir. Nor did he feel any compunctions later in leaving his parishes in the Midlands to the care of a non-resident clergyman in order to live on his wife’s property in Suffolk; and he evidently considered the then Duke of Rutland unduly slow in providing for him. He was not always popular with his parishioners. This was not unnatural at Aldeburgh, where he had been known under less prosperous circumstances, but he met with a good deal of opposition when, after his long residence in Suffolk, he returned to Muston; and at Trowbridge he was at first considered too worldly for his flock, and only slowly won their sincere respect. A strict moralist, he had no dislike of social pleasure, and as a staunch Whig he shrank from enthusiasm of every kind. The serious and the profane alike distrusted him. The worldly remonstrated at his description of the workhouse chaplain, to which allusion has been made, and in deference to the complaints of the religious world the vigorous lines in “The Library”:

“Calvin grows gentle in this silent coast,

Nor finds a single heretic to roast,”

make way for a weaker couplet with a half line plagiarised from Dryden:

“Socinians here and Calvinists abide

And thin partitions angry chiefs divide.”

Let us consider the clergy and religious teachers generally as he describes them.

I can only allude to the five rectors, whom old Dibble, the village clerk in the “Parish Register,” remembered. First comes “Good Master Addle,” who

“Filled the seven-fold surplice fairly out,”

and “dozing died”; Next was Parson Peele, whose favourite text was “I will not spare you,” and with “piercing jokes, and he’d a plenteous store,” raised the tithes all round. Dr. “Grandspear” followed Peele, a man who never stinted his “nappy beer,” and whom even cool Dissenters wished and hoped that a man so kind, “A way to heaven, though not their own, might find.” After him came the “Author Rector”—

“Careless was he of surplice, hood and band,

And kindly took them as they came to hand.”

He was succeeded by the young man from Cambridge, assailed in his youth by a “clamorous sect,” who preached “conviction” so violently that “Our best sleepers started as they slept.”

But says old Dibble:

“Down he sank upon his wretched bed

And gloomy crotchets filled his wandering head.”

And it is on this point that Crabbe is so illuminating as to the spirit of his age. His difficulties as a clergyman were due rather to the fanaticism than to the indifference of his flock. In “Sir Eustace Grey,” a very powerful description of a madman who finds religious peace at last, the poet concludes,—

“But, Ah! though time could yield relief

And soften woes it cannot cure;

Would we not suffer pain and grief

To have our reason sound and sure?

Then let us keep our bosoms pure

Our fancies’ favourite flights suppress;

Prepare the body to endure,

And bend the mind to meet distress,

And then His Guardian care implore,

Whom demons dread and men adore.”

As the doctor recommends a moderate and temperate life as the best preventive of disease, and distrusts strong remedies and universal panaceas, so Crabbe (true to the best medical tradition) regards the pastoral work of healing the soul. Tolerant in most respects, he is severe on what the eighteenth century styled “enthusiasm,” and on sentimentalism in religion generally.

Thus, in “The Borough” we have in the letter on religious sects a description of the contempt the Calvinistic Methodists had for Church teaching:

“Hark to the Churchman; day by day he cries:

Children of men, be virtuous, be wise,

Seek patience, justice, temp’rance, meekness, truth,

In age be courteous, be sedate in youth,—So

they advise, and when such things be read,

How can we wonder that their flocks are dead?”

This “cauld morality,” as Scott makes Mr. Trumbull call it in “Redgauntlet,” is contrasted with a really rousing sermon:

“Further and further spread the conquering word

As loud he cried—‘the Battle of the Lord.’

Ev’n those apart who were the sound denied,

Fell down instinctive, and in spirit died.

Nor stayed he yet—his eye, his frown, his speech,

His very gesture, had a power to teach;

With outstretch’d arms, strong voice, and piercing call

He won the field and made the Dagons fall;

And thus in triumph took his glorious way,

Through scenes of horror, terror, and dismay.”

Crabbe often found his work hindered by a sort of fatalistic quietism which gave no hope to the “unconverted,” even when they sought the aid of the minister of religion. In “Abel Keene” we have the story of a merchant’s clerk who abandoned his faith, and then in days of poverty came for help:

“Said the good man, ‘and then rejoice therefore:

’Tis good to tremble: prospects then are fair,

When the lost soul is plunged in just despair.

Once thou wert simply honest, just and pure,

Whole as thou thought’st, and never wish’d a cure:

‘What must I do,’ I said, ‘my soul to free?’

‘Do nothing, man—it will be done for thee.’—

‘But must I not, my reverend guide, believe?’

‘If thou art call’d thou wilt the faith receive:’—

‘But I repent not.’—Angry he replied,

‘If thou art call’d thou need’st naught beside:

Attend on us, and if ’tis Heaven’s decree

The call will come—if not, ah, woe! for thee.’”

Crabbe had very little toleration for spiritual valetudinarians. He liked a good practical Christianity and was a little inclined to class the overscrupulous with the malades imaginaires. In “The Gentleman Farmer” we have a cleverly told story of a man of property, a professed atheist and an avowed enemy of priests and doctors. At last he fell ill; and his artful housekeeper, the meek Rebecca, produces a Scotch cousin, Dr. Mollet. He is so successful that Rebecca decides to allow the Rev. Mr. Whisp, a converted ostler, to advise her master. Mollet and Whisp between them point out that it is his duty to marry Rebecca. Then the three batten happily on their victim:

“Mollet his body orders, Whisp his soul,

And o’er his purse the lady takes control.”

Though Crabbe lived in the days of the French Revolution and Tom Paine, infidelity seems to have given him far less trouble than the enthusiasm of his parishioners. In “The Learned Boy” we have the tale of a precocious lad such as our poet detested, a mean little creature, neat and docile at school, to whom much could be taught because he could imitate without reflecting:

“He thought not much indeed—but what depends

On pains and care, was at his fingers’ ends.”

As it was impossible to make such a lad into a farmer like his honest father, he was sent to an office in town and picked up some up-to-date views of the Bible from a brother-clerk. On his return he thus explained his views to his grandmother, much to the dear old lady’s distress:

“I myself began

To feel disturbed and to my Bible ran;

I now am wiser—yet agree in this,

The book has things that are not much amiss;

It is a fine old work, and I protest

I hate to hear it treated as a jest;

The book has wisdom in it, if you look

Wisely upon it as another book.”

The father, overhearing his hopeful son, treats him to a long discourse, driven home with a cartwhip, and concluding:

“Teachers men honour, learners they allure;

But learners teaching of contempt are sure;

Scorn is their certain meed, and smart their only cure.”