tupendous Johnson, unrivalled in general literature,
had from an early period withdrawn himself from poetry. Cowper, destined
to fill so large a space in the public eye somewhat later, had not as
yet appeared as an author; and as for Burns, he was still unknown beyond
the obscure circle of his fellow-villagers."

All this is quite true, but it was not for such facile cleverness as
_The Candidate_ that the lovers of poetry were impatient. Up to this
point Crabbe shows himself wholly unsuspicious of this fact. It had not
occurred to him that it was possible for him safely to trust his own
instincts. And yet there is a stray entry in his diary which seems to
show how (in obedience to his visionary instructor) he was trying
experiments in more hopeful directions. On the twelfth, of May he
intimates to his Mira that he has dreams of success in something
different, something more human than had yet engaged his thoughts. "For
the first time in my life that I recollect," he writes, "I have written
three or four stanzas that so far touched me in the reading them as to
take off the consideration that they were things of my own fancy."
Thus far there was nothing in what he had printed--in _Inebriety_ or
_The Candidate_--that could possibly have touched his heart or that of
his readers. And it may well have been that he was now turning for fresh
themes to those real sorrows, those genuine, if homely, human interests
of which he had already so intimate an experience.

However that may have been, the combined coldness of his reviewers and
failure of his bookseller must have brought Crabbe within as near an
approach to despair as his healthy nature allowed. His distress was now
extreme; he was incurring debts with little hope of paying them, and
creditors wore pressing. Forty years later he told Walter Scott and
Lockhart how "during many months when he was toiling in early life in
London he hardly over tasted butcher-meat except on a Sunday, when he
dined usually with a tradesman's family, and thought their leg of
mutton, baked in the pan, the perfection of luxury." And it was only
after some more weary months, when at last "want stared him in the face,
and a gaol seemed the only immediate refuge for his head," that he
resolved, as a last resort, to lay his case once more before some public
man of eminence and character. "Impelled" (to use his own words) "by
some propitious influence, he fixed in some happy moment upon Edmund
Burke--