o a life so
unpromisingly begun: in which (though it ought not to be
boasted of) I can reap some consolation from looking to the end
of it. I am, sir, with, the greatest respect, your obedient
and most humble servant,
GEORGE CRABBE."

The letter is undated, but, as we shall see, must have been written in
February or March of 1781. Crabbe delivered it with his own hands at
Burke's house in Charles Street, St. James's, and (as he long after told
Walter Scott) paced up and down Westminster Bridge all night in an agony
of suspense.

This suspense was not of long duration Crabbe made his threatened call,
and anxiety was speedily at an end. He had sent with his letter
specimens of his verse still in manuscript. Whether Burke had had time
to do more than glance at them--for they had been in his hands but a few
hours--is uncertain. But it may well have been that the tone as well as
the substance of Crabbe's letter struck the great statesman as something
apart from the usual strain of the literary pretender. During Burke's
first years in London, when he himself lived by literature and saw much
of the lives and ways of poets and pamphleteers, he must have gained
some experience that served him later in good stead. There was a flavour
of truthfulness in Crabbe's story that could hardly be delusive, and a
strain of modesty blended with courage that would at once appeal to
Burke's generous nature. Again, Burke was not a poet (save in the
glowing periods of his prose), but he had read widely in the poets, and
had himself been possessed at one stage of his youth "with the _furor
poeticus_." At this special juncture he had indeed little leisure for
such matters. He had lost his seat for Bristol in the preceding year,
but had speedily found another at Malton--a pocket-borough of Lord
Rockingham's,--and, at the moment of Crabbe's appeal, was again actively
opposing the policy of the King and Lord North. But he yet found time
for an act of kindness that was to have no inconsiderable influence on
English literature. The result of the interview was that Crabbe's
immediate necessities were relieved by a gift of money, and by the
assurance that Burke would do all in his power to further Crabbe's
literary aims. What particular poems or fragments of poetry had been
first sent to Burke is uncertain; but among those submitted to his
judgment were specimens of the poems to be henceforth known as th