nxious to claim for his mother, who
so long formed one of this queer household, a degree of refinement
superior to that of her surroundings. After describing the daily
dinner-party in the kitchen--master, mistress, servants, with an
occasional "travelling rat-catcher or tinker"--he skilfully points out
that his mother's feelings must have resembled those of the
boarding-school miss in his father's "Widow's Tale" when subjected to a
like experience:--

"But when the men beside their station took,
The maidens with them, and with these the cook;
When one huge wooden bowl before them stood,
Filled with huge balls of farinaceous food;
With bacon, mass saline! where never lean
Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen:
When from a single horn the party drew
Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new;
When the coarse cloth she saw, with many a stain,
Soiled by rude hands who cut and came again--
She could not breathe, but with a heavy sigh,
Reined the fair neck, and shut th' offended eye;
She minced the sanguine flesh in frustums fine,
And wondered much to see the creatures dine!"

The home of the Tovells has long disappeared, and it must not therefore
be confused with the more remarkable "moated grange" in Parham,
originally the mansion of the Willoughbys, though now a farmhouse,
boasting a fine Tudor gateway and other fragments of fifteenth and
sixteenth century work. An engraving of the Hall and moat, after
Stanfield, forms an illustration to the third volume of the 1834 edition
of Crabbe.

When Crabbe began _The Village_, it was clearly intended to be, like
_The Borough_ later, a picture of Aldeburgh and its inhabitants. Yet not
only Parham, but the country about Belvoir crept in before the poem was
completed. If the passage in Book I. beginning:--

"Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er,"

describes pure Aldeburgh, the opening lines of Book II., taking a more
roseate view of rural happiness:--

"I, too, must yield, that oft amid those woes
Are gleams of transient mirth and hours of sweet repose,
Such as you find on yonder sportive Green,
The squire's tall gate, and churchway-walk between,
Where loitering stray a little tribe of friends
On a fair Sunday when the sermon ends,"

are drawn from the pleasant villages in the Midlands (perhaps Allington,
where he was afterwards to minister), whither he rambled on his
botanising excursions from Belvoir Cast