s ever-prudent
Mira still would not marry him. At last Thurlow's patronage took the
practical form (it had already taken that, equally practical, of a
hundred pounds) of two small Chancellor's livings in Dorsetshire,
residence at which was dispensed with by the easy fashions of the day.
The Duke of Rutland, when he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland,
did not take Crabbe with him, a circumstance which has excited some
unnecessary discussion; but he gave him free quarters at Belvoir, where
he and his wife lived for a time before they migrated to a neighbouring
curacy--his wife, for even Mira's prudence had yielded at last to the
Dorsetshire livings, and they were married in December 1783. They lived
together for nearly thirty years, in, as it would seem, unbroken mutual
devotion, but Mrs. Crabbe's health seems very early to have broken down,
and a remarkable endorsement of Crabbe's on a letter of hers has been
preserved. I do not think Mr. Kebbel quotes it; it ends, "And yet
happiness was denied"--a sentence fully encouraging to Mr. Browning and
other good men who have denounced long engagements.[5] The story of
Crabbe's life after his marriage may be told very shortly. His first
patron died in Ireland, but the duchess with some difficulty prevailed
on Thurlow to exchange his former gifts for more convenient and rather
better livings in the neighbourhood of Belvoir, at the chief of which,
Muston, Crabbe long resided. The death of his wife's uncle made him
leave his living and take up his abode for many years at Glemham, in
Suffolk, only to find, when he returned, that (not unnaturally, though
to his own great indignation) dissent had taken bodily possession of the
parish. His wife died in 1813, and the continued kindness, after nearly
a generation, of the house of Rutland, gave him the living of
Trowbridge, in Wiltshire, with a small Leicestershire incumbency near
Belvoir added, instead of Muston. At Trowbridge he lived nearly twenty
years, revisiting London society, making the acquaintance personally (he
had already known him by letter) of Sir Walter, paying a memorable visit
to Edinburgh, flirting in an elderly and simple fashion with many
ladies, writing much and being even more of a lion in the society of
George the Fourth's reign than he had been in the days of George the
Third. He died on 3rd February 1832.

Crabbe's character is not at all enigmatical, and emerges as clearly in
those letters and diaries of hi