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.