After indicating the tradesman's ingenuity in this respect, the poet adds .-- "These are the arts by which a thousand live, Where Truth may smile, and Justice may forgive.
But when, amid this rabble-rout, we find A puffing poet, to his honour blind: Who slily drops quotations all about Packet or Post, and points their merit out; Who advertises what reviewers say, With sham editions every second day; Who dares not trust his praises out of sight, But hurries into fame with all his might; Although the verse some transient praise obtains, Contempt is all the anxious poet gains" _The Newspaper_ seems to have been coldly received by the critics, who had perhaps been led by _The Village_ to expect something very different, and Crabbe never returned to the satirical-didactic line.
Indeed, for twenty-two years he published nothing more, although he wrote continuously, and as regularly committed the bulk of his manuscript to the domestic fire-place.

Meantime he lived a happy country life at Stathern, studying botany, reading aloud to his wife, and by no means forgetting the wants of his poor parishioners.

He visited periodically his Dorsetshire livings, introducing his wife on one such occasion, as he passed through London, to the Burkes.

And one day, seized with an acute attack of the _mal du pays_, he rode sixty miles to the coast of Lincolnshire that he might once more "dip," as his son expresses it, "in the waves that washed the beach of Aldeburgh." In October 1787, Crabbe's household were startled by the news of the death of his friend and patron the Duke of Rutland, who died at the Vice-regal Lodge at Dublin, after a short illness, at the early age of thirty-three.

The duke, an open-handed man and renowned for his extravagant hospitalities, had lived "not wisely but too well." Crabbe assisted at the funeral at Belvoir, and duly published his discourse then delivered in handsome quarto.