ich he has received, and who has never lamented that his
benevolence outran his discretion. But there was one man in England at
the time who had the rare union of qualities necessary for Crabbe's
purpose. Burke is a name never to be mentioned without reverence; not
only because Burke was incomparably the greatest of all English
political writers, and a standing refutation of the theory which couples
rhetorical excellence with intellectual emptiness, but also because he
was a man whose glowing hatred of all injustice and sympathy for all
suffering never evaporated in empty words. His fine literary perception
enabled him to detect the genuine excellence which underlay the
superficial triviality of Crabbe's verses. He discovered the genius
where men like North and Shelburne might excusably see nothing but the
mendicant versifier; and a benevolence still rarer than his critical
ability forbade him to satisfy his conscience by the sacrifice of a
five-pound note. When, by the one happy thought of his life, Crabbe
appealed to Burke's sympathy, the poet was desperately endeavouring to
get a poem through the press. But he owed fourteen pounds, and every
application to friends as poor as himself, and to patrons upon whom he
had no claims, had been unsuccessful. Nothing but ruin was before him.
After writing to Burke he spent the night in pacing Westminster Bridge.
The letter on which his fate hung is the more pathetic because it is
free from those questionable poetical flourishes which had failed to
conciliate his former patrons. It tells his story frankly and forcibly.
Burke, however, was not a rich man, and was at one of the most exciting
periods of his political career. His party was at last fighting its way
to power by means of the general resentment against the gross
mismanagement of their antagonists. A perfunctory discharge of the duty
of charity would have been pardonable; but from the moment when Crabbe
addressed Burke the poor man's fortune was made. Burke's glory rests
upon services of much more importance to the world at large than even
the preservation to the country of a man of genuine power. Yet there
are few actions on which he could reflect with more unalloyed
satisfaction; and the case is not a solitary one in Burke's history. A
political triumph may often be only hastened a year or two by the
efforts of even a great leader; but the salvage of a genius which would
otherwise have been hopelessly wrecked in the deep