ot very abundant letters and
journals unusually interesting. At last, after a year, during which his
means of subsistence are for the most part absolutely unknown, he, as he
says himself, fixed "by some propitious influence, in some happy moment"
on Edmund Burke as the subject of a last appeal.

Nothing in all literary history is, in a modest way and without pearls
and gold, quite so like a fairy tale as the difference in Crabbe's
fortunes which this propitious influence brought about. On the day when
he wrote to Burke he was, as he said in the letter, "an outcast, without
friends, without employment, without bread." In some twenty-four hours
(the night-term of which he passed in ceaselessly pacing Westminster
Bridge to cheat the agony of expectation) he was a made man. It was not
merely that, directly or indirectly, Burke procured him a solid and an
increasing income. He did much more than that. Crabbe, like most
self-educated men, was quite uncritical of his own work: Burke took him
into his own house for months, encouraged him to submit his poems,
criticised them at once without mercy and with judgment, found him
publishers, found him a public, turned him from a raw country boy into a
man who at least had met society of the best kind. It is a platitude to
say that for a hundred persons who will give money or patronage there is
scarcely one who will take trouble of this kind; and if any devil's
advocate objects the delight of producing a "lion," it may be answered
that for Burke at least this delight would not have been delightful at
all.

The immediate form which the patronage of Burke and that, soon added, of
Thurlow took, is one which rather shocks the present day. They made
Crabbe turn to the Church, and got a complaisant bishop to ordain him.
They sent him (a rather dangerous experiment) to be curate in his own
native place, and finally Burke procured him the chaplaincy at Belvoir.
The young Duke of Rutland, who had been made a strong Tory by Pitt, was
fond of letters, and his Duchess Isabel, who was,--like her elder
kinswoman, Dryden's Duchess of Ormond--

A daughter of the rose, whose cheeks unite
The varying beauties of the red and white,

in other words, a Somerset, was one of the most beautiful and gracious
women in England. Crabbe, whose strictly literary fortunes I postpone
for the present, was apparently treated with the greatest possible
kindness by both; but he was not quite happy,[4] and hi