d offered him the post of domestic chaplain at Belvoir
Castle, when he might be free from his engagements at Aldeburgh. That
Burke should have ventured on this step is significant, both as regards
the Duke and Duchess, and Crabbe. Crabbe's son remarks with truth that
an appointment of the kind was unusual, "such situations in the mansions
of that rank being commonly filled either by relations of the family
itself, or by college acquaintances, or dependents recommended by
political service and local attachment." Now Burke would certainly not
have recommended Crabbe for the post if he had found in his _protege_
any such defects of breeding or social tact as would have made his
society distasteful to the Duke and Duchess. Burke, as we have seen,
described him on their first acquaintance as having "the mind and
feelings of a gentleman." Thurlow, it is true, after one of Crabbe's
earlier interviews, had declared with an oath (_more suo_) that he was
"as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen." But Thurlow was not merely
jesting. He knew that Fielding's immortal clergyman had also the "mind
and feelings of a gentleman," although his simplicity and ignorance of
the world put him at many social disadvantages. It was probably the same
obvious difference in Crabbe from the common type of nobleman's chaplain
of that day which made Crabbe's position at Belvoir, as his son admits,
full of difficulties. It is quite possible and even natural that the
guests and visitors at the Castle did not always accept Crabbe's talents
as making up for a certain want of polish--or even perhaps for a want of
deference to their opinions in conversation. The "pampered menials"
moreover would probably resent having "to say Amen" to a
newly-discovered literary adventurer from the great metropolis.

In any case Crabbe's experience of a chaplain's life at Belvoir was
not, by his son's admission, a happy one. "The numberless allusions," he
writes, "to the nature of a literary dependent's existence in a great
lord's house, which occur in my father's writings, and especially in the
tale of _The Patron_, are, however, quite enough, to lead any one who
knew his character and feelings to the conclusion that notwithstanding
the kindness and condescension of the Duke and Duchess themselves--which
were, I believe, uniform, and of which he always spoke with
gratitude--the situation he filled at Belvoir was attended with many
painful circumstances, and productive in