He either did not, or he would not see,
That if he meant a favourite priest to be,
He must not show, but learn of them, the way
To truth--he must not dictate, but obey;
They wish'd him not to bring them further light,
But to convince them that they now were right
And to assert that justice will condemn
All who presumed to disagree with them:
In this he fail'd, and his the greater blame,
For he persisted, void of fear or shame."

There is a touch of bitterness in these lines that is unmistakably that
of a personal grievance, even if the poet's son had not confirmed the
inference in a foot-note.

Book IV. is devoted to the _Adventures of Richard_, which begin with his
residence with his mother near a small sea-port (evidently Aldeburgh);
and here we once more read of the boy, George Crabbe, watching and
remembering every aspect of the storms, and making friends with the
wives and children of the sailors and the smugglers:

"I loved to walk where none had walk'd before,
About the rocks that ran along the shore;
Or far beyond the sight of men to stray,
And take my pleasure when I lost my way;
For then 'twas mine to trace the hilly heath,
And all the mossy moor that lies beneath:
Here had I favourite stations, where I stood
And heard the murmurs of the ocean-flood,
With not a sound beside except when flew
Aloft the lapwing, or the grey curlew,
Who with wild notes my fancied power defied,
And mock'd the dreams of solitary pride."

And as Crabbe evidently resorts gladly to personal experiences to make
out the material for his work, the same also holds with regard to the
incidental Tales. Crabbe refers in his Preface to two of these as not of
his own invention, and his son, in the Notes, admits the same of others.
One, as we have seen, happened in the Elmy family; another was sent him
by a friend in Wiltshire, to which county the story belonged; while the
last in the series, and perhaps the most painful of all, _Smugglers, and
Poachers_ was told to Crabbe by Sir Samuel Romilly, whom he had met at
Hampstead, only a few weeks before Romilly's own tragic death. Probably
other tales, not referred to by Crabbe or his son, were also encountered
by the poet in his intercourse with his parishioners, or submitted to
him by his friends. We might infer this from the singular inequality, in
interest and poetical opportunity, of the various plots of these
stories. Some of them are assur