Again, through an introduction at Bath to Samuel Hoare of Hampstead, Crabbe formed a friendship with him and his family of the most affectionate nature.

During the first and all later visits to London Crabbe was most often their guest at the mansion on the summit of the famous "Northern Height," with which, after Crabbe's death, Wordsworth so touchingly associated his name, in the lines written on the death of the Ettrick Shepherd and his brother-poets: "Our haughty life is crowned with darkness, Like London with its own black wreath, On which with thee, O Crabbe, forth looking, I gazed from Hampstead's breezy heath." Between Samuel Hoare's hospitable roof and the _Hummums_ in Covent Garden Crabbe seems to have alternated, according as his engagements in town required.
But although living, as the Diary shows, in daily intercourse with the literary and artistic world, tasting delights which were absolutely new to him, Crabbe never forgot either his humble friends in Wiltshire, or the claims of his own art.

He kept in touch with Trowbridge, where his son John was in charge, and sends instructions from time to time as to poor pensioners and others who were not to be neglected in the weekly ministrations.

At the same time, he seems rarely to have omitted the self-imposed task of adding daily to the pile of manuscript on which he was at work--the collection of stories to be subsequently issued as _Tales of the Hall_.

Crabbe had resolved, in the face of whatever distractions, to write if possible a fixed amount every day.