Christian Charity anxious to provide for future as well as pre- sent Miseries-Hence the Hospital for the Diseased- Description of a recovered Patient - The Building: how erected - The Patrons and Governors Eusebius The more active Manager of Business a moral and correct Con- tributor One of a different Description - Good the Re- Page 269 The Method of treating the Borough Paupers - Many main- tained at their own Dwellings - Characters mistress, when aged- The Idiot The poor Sailor- declined Tradesman and his Companion - This contrasted with the Maintenance of the Poor in a common Mansion erected by the Hundred - Objections to this Method stances of the Evil - A Return to the Borough Poor- Their Dwellings - The Lanes and By-ways- Amusements of Sea-port Children - The Town Flora Female In- The Parish-Clerk began his Duties with the late Vicar, a grave and austere Man; one fully orthodox; a Detector and Op- poser of the Wiles of Satan - His Opinion of his own For- titude Stratagems to overcome his Virtue - His Triumph - Is assaulted by Fear of Want, and Avarice THE BOROUGH. (') PAULO MAJORA CANAMUS. Virgil. (1) ["The Borough," which was begun while Mr. Crabbe resided at Rendham, was completed during a visit to his native town of Aldborough, in the autumn of 1809, and published in February, 1810. In the preface he is found ascribing this new appearance to the extraordinary success of the "Parish Register;" and Mr. Jeffrey commenced his review of the Borough in these terms (Edin. Rev. 1810): —“ We are very glad to meet with Mr. Crabbe so soon again; and particularly glad to find that his early return has been occasioned, in part, by the encouragement he received on his last appearance. This late spring of public favour, we hope, he will yet live to see ripen into mature fame. We scarcely know any poet who deserves it better; and are quite certain there is none who is more secure of keeping with posterity whatever he may win from his contemporaries."] TO HIS GRACE THE DUKE OF RUTLAND, MARQUIS OF GRANBY; RECORDER OF CAMBRIDGE AND SCARBOROUGH; LORD LIEUTENANT AND CUSTOS ROTULORUM OF THE COUNTY OF LEICESTER; K.G. AND LL.D. MY LORD, THE Poem, for which I have ventured to solicit your Grace's attention, was composed in a situation so near to Belvoir Castle, that the author had all the advantage to be derived from prospects extensive and beautiful, and from works of grandeur and sublimity and though nothing of the influence arising from such situation should be discernible in these verses, either from want of adequate powers in the writer, or because his subjects do not assimilate with such views, yet would it be natural for him to indulge a wish, that he might inscribe his labours to the lord of a scene which perpetually excited his admiration, and he would plead the propriety of placing the titles of the House of Rutland at the entrance of a volume written in the Vale of Belvoir.(') But, my Lord, a motive much more powerful than a sense of propriety, a grateful remembrance of benefits conferred by the noble family in which you preside, has been the great inducement for me to wish that I might be permitted to inscribe this work to your Grace: the honours of that time were to me unexpected, they were unmerited, and they were transitory: but since I am thus allowed to make public my gratitude, I am in some degree restored to the honour of that period; I have again the happiness to find myself favoured, and my exertions. stimulated, by the condescension of the Duke of Rutland. It was my fortune, in a poem which yet circulates, to write of the virtues, talents, and heroic death of Lord Robert Manners, and to bear witness to the affection of a brother whose grief was poignant, and to be soothed only by remembrance of his worth whom he so deeply deplored. (2) In a patron thus (1) [Mr. Crabbe, in 1790, wrote, at Muston, an Essay on, the Natural History of the Vale of Belvoir, which he contributed to Mr. Nichols's History of Leicestershire. The motto is from Drayton's Polyolbion : — "Do but compare the country where I lie, My hills and oulds will say, they are the island's eye; Then come unto my soil, and you shall see it well, With every grass and grain that Britain forth can bring; I challenge any vale to show me but that thing I cannot show to her, that truly is my own."] (2) [See Vol. I. p. 116. and Vol. II. pp. 95. 101.] |