imself and much better connected, being the niece and eventual
co-heiress of a wealthy yeoman squire. She was, it is said, pretty; she
was evidently accomplished, and she seems to have had access to the
country society of those days. But Mira, as Crabbe called her, perhaps
merely in the fashion of the eighteenth century, perhaps in remembrance
of Fulke Greville's heroine (for he knew his Elizabethans rather well
for a man of those days), and no doubt also with a secret joy to think
that the last syllables of her Christian name and surname in a way spelt
the appellation, fell in love with the boy and made his fortune. But for
her Crabbe would probably have subsided, not contentedly but stolidly,
into the lot of a Doctor Slop of the time, consoling himself with snuff
(which he always loved) and schnaps (to which we have hints that in his
youth he was not averse). Mira was at once unalterably faithful to him
and unalterably determined not to marry unless he could give her
something like a position. Their long engagement (they were not married
till he was twenty-nine and she was thirty-three) may, as we shall see,
have carried with it some of the penalties of long engagements. But it
is as certain as any such thing can be that but for it English
literature would have lacked the name of Crabbe.

There is no space here to go through the sufferings of the novitiate. At
last, at the extreme end of 1779, Crabbe made up his mind once more to
seek his fortune, this time by aid of literature only, in London. His
son too has printed rare scraps of a very interesting Journal to Mira
which he kept during at least a part of the terrible year of struggle
which he passed there. He saw the riots of '80; he canvassed, always
more or less in vain, the booksellers and the peers; he spent
three-and-sixpence of his last ten shillings on a copy of Dryden; he was
much less disturbed about imminent starvation than by the delay of a
letter from Mira ("my dearest Sally" she becomes with a pathetic lapse
from convention, when the pinch is sorest) or by the doubt whether he
had enough left to pay the postage of one. He writes prayers (but not
for the public eye), abstracts of sermons for Mira, addresses (rather
adulatory) to Lord Shelburne, which received no answer. All this has the
most genuine note that ever man of letters put into his work, for
whatever Crabbe was or was not, now or at any time, he was utterly
sincere; and his sincerity makes his n