Moreover it is likely that the relations of Crabbe with his village flock were already--as we know they were at a later date--somewhat strained.

Let it be said once for all that judged by the standards of clerical obligation current in 1792, Crabbe was then, and remained all his life, in many important respects, a diligent parish-priest.

Mr.Hutton justly remarks that "the intimate knowledge of the life of the poor which his poems show proves how constantly he must have visited, no less than how closely he must have observed." But the fact remains that though he was kind and helpful to his flock while among them in sickness and in trouble--their physician as well as their spiritual adviser--his ideas as to clerical absenteeism were those of his age, and moreover his preaching to the end of his life was not of a kind to arouse much interest or zeal.

I have had access to a large packet of his manuscript sermons, preached during his residence in Suffolk and later, as proved by the endorsements on the cover, at his various incumbencies in Leicestershire and Wiltshire.

They consist of plain and formal explanations of his text, reinforced by other texts, entirely orthodox but unrelieved by any resource in the way of illustration, or by any of those poetic touches which his published verse shows he had at his command.