19/31 Yet Crabbe had less to fear on this head than with most of his early poems. _The Village_ had been schemed and composed in parts before Crabbe knew Burke. One passage in it indeed, as we have seen, had first convinced Burke that the writer was a poet. And in the interval that followed the poem had been completed and matured with a care that Crabbe seldom afterwards bestowed upon his productions. Burke himself had suggested and criticised much during its progress, and the manuscript had further been submitted through Sir Joshua Reynolds to Johnson, who not only revised it in detail but re-wrote half a dozen of the opening lines. |