and
Crabbe took his MS. with him to Yarmouth, on the occasion of his visit
to the Eastern Counties, for Mr. Richard Turner's opinion. The scholarly
rector of Great Yarmouth may well have shrunk from advising on a poem of
ten thousand lines in which, as the result was to show, the
pruning-knife and other trenchant remedies would have seemed to him
urgently needed. As it proved, Mr. Turner's opinion was on the whole
"highly favourable; but he intimated that there were portions of the new
work which might be liable to rough treatment from the critics."

_The Borough_ is an extension--a very elaborate extension--of the topics
already treated in _The Village_ and _The Parish Register_. The place
indicated is undisguisedly Aldeburgh; but as Crabbe had now chosen a far
larger canvas for his picture, he ventured to enlarge the scope of his
observation, and while retaining the scenery and general character of
the little seaport of his youth, to introduce any incidents of town life
and experiences of human character that he had met with subsequently.
_The Borough_ is Aldeburgh extended and magnified. Besides church
officials it exhibits every shade of nonconformist creed and practice,
notably those of which the writer was now having unpleasant experience
at Muston. It has, of course, like its prototype, a mayor and
corporation, and frequent parliamentary elections. It supports many
professors of the law; physicians of high repute, and medical quacks of
very low. Social life and pleasure is abundant, with clubs,
card-parties, and theatres. It boasts an almshouse, hospital, prisons,
and schools for all classes. The poem is divided into twenty-four cantos
or sections, written as "Letters" to an imaginary correspondent who had
bidden the writer "describe the borough," each dealing with its separate
topic--professions, trades, sects in religion, inns, strolling players,
almshouse inhabitants, and so forth. These descriptions are relieved at
intervals by elaborate sketches of character, as in _The Parish
Register_--the vicar, the curate, the parish clerk, or by some notably
pathetic incident in the life of a tenant of the almshouse, or a
prisoner in the gaol. Some of these reach the highest level of Crabbe's
previous studies in the same kind, and it was to these that the new work
was mainly to owe its success. Despite of frequent defects of
workmanship, they cling to the memory through their truth and intensity,
though to many a reader