r to give up these letters to his biographer, that they, or at
least a part of them, might be given to the public. She hesitated to
comply, and asked my opinion on the subject. 'By no means,' was my
answer, grounded not upon any objection there might be to publishing a
selection from those letters, but from an aversion I have always felt to
meet idle curiosity by calling back the recently departed to become the
object of trivial and familiar gossip. Crabbe obviously for the most
part preferred the company of women to that of men; for this among other
reasons, that he did not like to be put upon the stretch in general
conversation. Accordingly, in miscellaneous society his talk was so
much below what might have been expected from a man so deservedly
celebrated, that to me it seemed trifling. It must upon other occasions
have been of a different character, as I found in our rambles together
on Hampstead Heath; and not so much so from a readiness to communicate
his knowledge of life and manners as of natural history in all its
branches. His mind was inquisitive, and he seems to have taken refuge
from a remembrance of the distresses he had gone through in these
studies and the employments to which they led. Moreover such
contemplations might tend profitably to counterbalance the painful
truths which he had collected from his intercourse with mankind. Had I
been more intimate with him I should have ventured to touch upon his
office as a Minister of the Gospel, and how far his heart and soul were
in it, so as to make him a zealous and diligent labourer. In poetry,
tho' he wrote much, as we all know, he assuredly was not so. I happened
once to speak of pains as necessary to produce merit of a certain kind
which I highly valued. His observation was, 'It is not worth while.' You
are right, thought I, if the labour encroaches upon the time due to
teach truth as a steward of the mysteries of God; but if poetry is to be
produced at all, make what you do produce as good as you can. Mr. Rogers
once told me that he expressed his regret to Crabbe that he wrote in his
late works so much less correctly than in his earlier. 'Yes,' replied
he, 'but then I had a reputation to make; now I can afford to relax.'
Whether it was from a modest estimate of his own qualifications or from
causes less creditable, his motives for writing verse and his hopes and
aims were not so high as is to be desired. After being silent for more
than twenty years he a