Perhaps, with his
old-fashioned ideas, he would not quite have satisfied some clerical
critics of the present day. His views about non-residence and
pluralities seem to have been lax for the time; and his hearty dislike
for dissent was coupled with a general dislike for enthusiasm of all
kinds. He liked to ramble about after flowers and fossils, and to hammer
away at his poems in a study where chaos reigned supreme. For twenty-two
years after his first success as an author, he never managed to get a
poem into a state fit for publication, though periodical conflagrations
of masses of manuscript--too vast to be burnt in the chimney--testified
to his continuous industry. His reappearance seems to have been caused
chiefly by his desire to send a son to the University. His success was
repeated, though a new school had arisen which knew not Pope. The youth
who had been kindly received by Burke, Reynolds, and Johnson, came back
from his country retreat to be lionised at Holland House, and be petted
by Brougham and Moore, and Rogers and Campbell, and all the rising
luminaries. He paid a visit to Scott contemporaneously with George IV.,
and pottered about the queer old wynds and closes of Edinburgh, which he
preferred to the New Town, and apparently to Arthur's Seat, with a
judicious _caddie_ following to keep him out of mischief. A more
tangible kind of homage was the receipt of L3,000 from Murray for his
'Tales of the Hall,' which so delighted him that he insisted on carrying
the bills loose in his pocket till he could show them 'to his son John'
in the country.[2] There, no doubt, he was most at home; and his
parishioners gradually became attached to their 'Parson Adams,' in spite
of his quaintnesses and some manful defiance of their prejudices. All
women and children loved him, and he died at a good old age in 1832,
having lived into a new order in many things, and been as little
affected by the change as most men. The words with which he concludes
the sketch of the Vicar in his 'Borough' are not inappropriate to
himself:--

Nor one so old has left this world of sin
More like the being that he entered in.

The peculiar homeliness of Crabbe's character and poetry is excellently
hit off in the 'Rejected Addresses,' and the lines beginning

John Richard William Alexander Dwyer
Was footman to Justinian Stubbs, Esquire,

are probably more familiar to the present generation than any of the
originals. 'Pope in