The immediate success of The Parish Register in 1807 encouraged Crabbe to proceed at once with a far longer poem, which had been some years in hand. The Borough was begun at Rendham in Suffolk in 1801, continued at Muston after the return thither in 1805, and finally completed during a long visit to Aldeburgh in the autumn of 1809. That the Poem should have been "in the making" during at least eight years is quite what might be inferred from the finished work. It proved, on appearance, to be of portentous length—at least ten thousand lines. Its versification included every degree of finish of which Crabbe was capable, from his very best to his very worst. Parts of it were evidently written when the theme stirred and moved the writer: others, again, when he was merely bent on reproducing scenes that lived in his singularly retentive memory, with needless minuteness of detail, and in any kind of couplet that might pass muster in respect of scansion and rhyme. In the preface to the poem, on its appearance in 1810, Crabbe displays an uneasy consciousness that his poem was open to objection in this respect. In his previous ventures he had had Edmund Burke, Johnson, and Fox, besides his friend Turner at Yarmouth, to restrain or to revise. On the present occasion, the three first-named friends had passed away, and Crabbe took his MS. with him to Yarmouth, on the occasion of his visit to the Eastern Counties, for Mr. Richard Turner's opinion. The scholarly rector of Great Yarmouth may well have shrunk from advising on a poem of ten thousand lines in which, as the result was to show, the pruning-knife and other trenchant remedies would have seemed to him urgently needed. As it proved, Mr. Turner's opinion was on the whole "highly favourable; but he intimated that there were portions of the new work which might be liable to rough treatment from the critics."

The Borough is an extension—a very elaborate extension—of the topics already treated in The Village and The Parish Register. The place indicated is undisguisedly Aldeburgh; but as Crabbe had now chosen a far larger canvas for his picture, he ventured to enlarge the scope of his observation, and while retaining the scenery and general character of the little seaport of his youth, to introduce any incidents of town life and experiences of human character that he had met with subsequently. The Borough is Aldeburgh extended and magnified. Besides church officials it exhibits every shade of nonconformist creed and practice, notably those of which the writer was now having unpleasant experience at Muston. It has, of course, like its prototype, a mayor and corporation, and frequent parliamentary elections. It supports many professors of the law; physicians of high repute, and medical quacks of very low. Social life and pleasure is abundant, with clubs, card-parties, and theatres. It boasts an almshouse, hospital, prisons, and schools for all classes. The poem is divided into twenty-four cantos or sections, written as "Letters" to an imaginary correspondent who had bidden the writer "describe the borough," each dealing with its separate topic—professions, trades, sects in religion, inns, strolling players, almshouse inhabitants, and so forth. These descriptions are relieved at intervals by elaborate sketches of character, as in The Parish Register—the vicar, the curate, the parish clerk, or by some notably pathetic incident in the life of a tenant of the almshouse, or a prisoner in the gaol. Some of these reach the highest level of Crabbe's previous studies in the same kind, and it was to these that the new work was mainly to owe its success. Despite of frequent defects of workmanship, they cling to the memory through their truth and intensity, though to many a reader to-day such, episodes may be chiefly known to exist through a parenthesis in one of Macaulay's Essays, where he speaks of "that pathetic passage in Crabbe's Borough which has made many a rough and cynical reader cry like a child."

The passage referred to is the once-famous description of the condemned Felon in the "Letter" on Prisons. Macaulay had, as we know, his "heightened way of putting things," but the narrative which he cites, as foil to one of Robert Montgomery's borrowings, deserves the praise. It shows Crabbe's descriptive power at its best, and his rare power and insight into the workings of the heart and mind. He has to trace the sequence of thoughts and feelings in the condemned criminal during the days between his sentence and its execution; the dreams of happier days that haunt his pillow—days when he wandered with his sweetheart or his sister through their village meadows:—

Allowing for a certain melodramatic climax here led up to, we cannot deny the impressiveness of this picture—the first-hand quality of its observation, and an eye for beauty, which his critics are rarely disposed to allow to Crabbe. A narrative of equal pathos, and once equally celebrated, is that of the village-girl who receives back her sailor-lover from his last voyage, only to watch over his dying hours. It is in an earlier section (No. ii. The Church), beginning:

too long to quote in full, and, as with Crabbe's method generally, not admitting of being fairly represented by extracts. Then there are sketches of character in quite a different vein, such as the vicar, evidently drawn from life. He is the good easy man, popular with the ladies for a kind of fade complimentary style in which he excels; the man of "mild benevolence," strongly opposed to every thing new:

Feeble good-nature, and selfish unwillingness to disturb any existing habits or conventions, make up his character:

An excellent companion sketch to that of the dilettante vicar is provided in that of the poor curate—the scholar, gentleman, and devout Christian, struggling against abject poverty to support his large family. The picture drawn by Crabbe has a separate and interesting origin. A year before the appearance of The Borough, one of the managers of the Literary Fund, an institution then of some twenty years' standing, and as yet without its charter, applied to Crabbe for a copy of verses that might be appropriate for recitation at the annual dinner of the Society, held at the Freemasons' Tavern. It was the custom of the society to admit such literary diversions as part of the entertainment. The notorious William Thomas Fitzgerald had been for many years the regular contributor of the poem, and his efforts on the occasion are remembered, if only through the opening couplet of Byron's English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, where Fitzgerald is gibbeted as the Codrus of Juvenal's satire:

His poem for this year, 1809, is printed at length in the Gentleman's Magazine for April—and also Crabbe's, recited at the same dinner. Crabbe seems to have composed it for the occasion, but with the intention of ultimately weaving it into the poem on which he was then engaged. A paragraph prefixed to the lines also shows that Crabbe had a further object in view. "The Founder of this Society having intimated a hope that, on a plan which he has already communicated to his particular Friends, its Funds may be sufficiently ample to afford assistance and relief to learned officiating Clergymen in distress, though they may not have actually commenced Authors—the Author, in allusion to this hope, has introduced into a Poem which he is preparing for the Press the following character of a learned Divine in distress."

Crabbe's lines bearing on the proposed scheme (which seems for a time at least to have been adopted by the administrators of the Fund) were left standing when The Borough was published, with, an explanatory note. They are effective for their purpose, the pathos of them is genuine, and worthy of attention even in these latter days of the "Queen Victoria Clergy Fund." The speaker is the curate himself:

Crabbe is known to most readers to-day by the delightful parody of his style in the Rejected Addresses, which appeared in the autumn of 1812, and it was certainly on The Borough that James Smith based his imitation. We all remember the incident of Pat Jennings's adventure in the gallery of the theatre. The manner of the narrative is borrowed from Crabbe's lighter and more colloquial style. Every little foible of the poet, when in this vein, is copied with great skill. The superfluity of information, as in the case of—

whose only place in the narrative is that he preceded Pat Jennings's father in the situation as

or again in the detail that,

(a perfect Crabbian couplet), is imitated throughout, Crabbe's habit of frequent verbal antithesis, and even of something like punning, is exactly caught in such a couplet as:

Much of the parody, no doubt, exhibits the fanciful humour of the brothers Smith, rather than of Crabbe, as is the case with many parodies. Of course there are couplets here and there in Crabbe's narratives which justify the burlesque. We have:

or the lines which the parodists themselves quote in their justification,

But lines such as these in fact occur only at long intervals. Crabbe's couplets are more often pedestrian rather than grotesque.

The poet himself, as the witty brothers relate with some pride, was by no means displeased or offended by the liberty taken. When they met in later years at William Spencer's, Crabbe hurried to meet James Smith with outstretched hand, "Ah! my old enemy, how do you do?" Again, writing to a friend who had expressed some indignation at the parody, Crabbe complained only of the preface. "There is a little ill-nature—and I take the liberty of adding, undeserved ill-nature—in their prefatory address; but in their versification they have done me admirably." Here Crabbe shows a slight lack of self-knowledge. For when to the Letter on Trades the following extenuating postscript is found necessary, there would seem to be hardly any room for the parodist:

After this, Crabbe himself might have admitted that the descent is not very far to the parodist's delightful apology for the change from "one hautboy" to "one fiddle" in the description of the band. The subsequent explanation, how the poet had purposely intertwined the various handkerchiefs which rescued Pat Jennings's hat from the pit, lest the real owner should be detected, and the reason for it, is a not less exquisite piece of fooling:—"For, in the statistical view of life and manners which I occasionally present, my clerical profession has taught me how extremely improper it would be by any allusion, however slight, to give any uneasiness, however trivial, to any individual, however foolish or wicked." It might perhaps be inferred from such effusions as are here parodied that Crabbe was lacking in a sense of humour. This would certainly be too sweeping an inference, for in many of his sketches of human character he gives unmistakable proof to the contrary. But the talent in question—often so recklessly awarded or denied to us by our fellow-creatures—is very variable in the spheres of its operation. The sense of humour is in its essence, as we have often been told, largely a sense of proportion, and in this sense Crabbe was certainly deficient. The want of it accounts for much more in his writings than for his prose notes and prefaces. It explains much of the diffuseness and formlessness of his poetry, and his inability to grasp the great truth how much the half may be greater than the whole.

In spite, however, of these defects, and of the inequalities of the workmanship, The Borough was from the first a success. The poem appeared in February 1810, and went through six editions in the next six years. It does not indeed present an alluring picture of life in the provinces. It even reminds us of a saying of Tennyson's, that if God made the country, and man made the city, then it was the devil who made the country-town. To travel through the borough from end to end is to pass through much ignoble scenery, human and other, and under a cloudy heaven, with only rare gleams of sunshine, and patches of blue sky. These, when they occur, are proportionally welcome. They include some exquisite descriptions of nature, though with Crabbe it will be noticed that it is always the nature close about his feet, the hedge-row, the meadow, the cottage-garden: as his son has noted, his outlook never extends to the landscape beyond.

In the respects just mentioned, the qualities exhibited in the new poem have been noticed before in The Village and The Parish Register. In The Borough, however, appear some maturer specimens of this power, showing how Crabbe's art was perfecting by practice. Very noticeable are the sections devoted to the almshouse of the borough and its inhabitants. Its founder, an eccentric and philanthropic merchant of the place, as well as the tenants of the almshouse whose descriptions follow, are all avowedly, like most other characters in Crabbe, drawn from life. The pious founder, being left without wife or children, lives in apparent penury, but while driving all beggars from his door, devotes his wealth to secret acts of helpfulness to all his poorer neighbours in distress:—

The good man lived on, until, when his seventieth year was past, a building was seen rising on the green north of the village—an almshouse for old men and women of the borough, who had struggled in life and failed. Having built and endowed this harbour of refuge, and placed its government in the hands of six trustees, the modest donor and the pious lady-relative who had shared in his good works passed quietly out of life.

This prelude is followed by an account of the trustees who succeeded to the management after the founder's death, among them a Sir Denys Brand, a lavish donor to the town, but as vulgar and ostentatious as the founder had been humble and modest. This man defeats the intentions of the founder by admitting to the almshouses persons of the shadiest antecedents, on the ground that they at least had been conspicuous in their day:

From this unfit class of pensioner Crabbe selects three for his minute analysis of character. They are, as usual, of a very sordid type. The first, a man named "Blaney," had his prototype in a half-pay major known to Crabbe in his Aldeburgh days, and even the tolerant Jeffrey held that the character was rather too shameless for poetical treatment. The next inmate in order, a woman also drawn from the living model, and disguised under the title of Clelia, is a study of character and career, drawn with consummate skill. Certain abortive attempts of Crabbe to write prose fiction have been already mentioned. But this narrative of the gradual degradation of a coquette of the lower middle class shows that Crabbe possessed at least some of the best qualities of a great novelist. Clelia is, in fact, a kind of country-town Becky Sharp, whose wiles and schemes are not destined to end in a white-washed reputation at a fashionable watering-place. On the contrary she falls from one ignominy to another until, by a gross abuse of a public charity, she ends her days in the almshouse!

One further instance may be cited of Crabbe's persistent effort to awaken attention to the problem of poor-law relief. In his day the question, both as to policy and humanity, between indoor and outdoor relief, was still unsettled. In The Borough, as described, many of the helpless poor were relieved at their own homes. But a new scheme, "The maintenance of the poor in a common mansion erected by the Hundred," seems to have been in force in Suffolk, and up to that time confined to that county. It differed from the workhouse of to-day apparently in this respect, that there was not even an attempt to separate the young and old, the sick and the healthy, the criminal and vicious from the respectable and honest. Yet Crabbe's powerful picture of the misery thus caused to the deserving class of inmate is not without its lesson even after nearly a century during which thought and humanity have been continually at work upon such problems. The loneliness and weariness of workhouse existence passed by the aged poor, separated from kinsfolk and friends, in "the day-room of a London workhouse," have been lately set forth by Miss Edith Sellers, in the pages of the Nineteenth Century, with a pathetic incisiveness not less striking than that of the following passage from the Eighteenth Letter of Crabbe's Borough:—

The essence of workhouse monotony has surely never been better indicated than here.

The Borough did much to spread Crabbe's reputation while he remained, doing his duty to the best of his ability and knowledge, in the quiet loneliness of the Vale of Belvoir, but his growing fame lay far outside the boundaries of his parish. When, a few years later, he visited London and was received with general welcome by the distinguished world of literature and the arts, he was much surprised. "In my own village," he told James Smith, "they think nothing of me." The three years following the publication of The Borough were specially lonely. He had, indeed, his two sons, George and John, with him. They had both passed through Cambridge—one at Trinity and the other at Caius, and were now in holy orders. Each held a curacy in the near neighbourhood, enabling them to live under the parental roof. But Mrs. Crabbe's condition was now increasingly sad, her mind being almost gone. There was no daughter, and we hear of no other female relative at hand to assist Crabbe in the constant watching of the patient. This circumstance alone limited his opportunities of accepting the hospitalities of the neighbourhood, though with the Welbys and other county families, as well as with the surrounding clergy, he was a welcome guest.

The Borough appeared in February 1810, and the reviewers were prompt in their attention. The Edinburgh reviewed the poem in April of the same year, and the Quarterly followed in October. Jeffrey had already noticed The Parish Register in 1808. The critic's admiration of Crabbe had been, and remained to the end, cordial and sincere. But now, in reviewing the new volume, a note of warning appears. The critic finds himself obliged to admit that the current objections to Crabbe's treatment of country life are well founded. "His chief fault," he says, "is his frequent lapse into disgusting representations." All powerful and pathetic poetry, Jeffrey admits, abounds in "images of distress," but these images must never excite "disgust," for that is fatal to the ends which poetry was meant to produce. A few months later the Quarterly followed in the same strain, but went on to preach a more questionable doctrine. The critic in fact lays down the extraordinary canon that the function of Poetry is not to present any truth, if it happens to be unpleasant, but to substitute an agreeable illusion in its place. "We turn to poetry," he says, "not that we may see and feel what we see and feel in our daily experience, but that we may be refreshed by other emotions, and fairer prospects, that we may take shelter from the realities of life in the paradise of Fancy."

The appearance of these two prominent reviews to a certain extent influenced the direction of Crabbe's genius for the remainder of his life. He evidently had given them earnest consideration, and in the preface to the Tales, his next production, he attempted something like an answer to each. Without mentioning any names he replies to Jeffrey in the first part of his preface, and to the Quarterly reviewer in the second. Jeffrey had expressed a hope that Crabbe would in future concentrate his powers upon some interesting and connected story. "At present it is impossible not to regret that so much genius should be wasted in making us perfectly acquainted with individuals of whom we are to know nothing but their characters." Crabbe in reply makes what was really the best apology for not accepting this advice. He intimates that he had already made the experiment, but without success. His peculiar gifts did not fit him for it. As he wrote the words, he doubtless had in mind the many prose romances that he had written, and then consigned to the flames. The short story, or rather the exhibition of a single character developed through a few incidents, he felt to be the method that fitted his talent best.

Crabbe then proceeds to deal with the question, evidently implied by the Quarterly reviewer, how far many passages in The Borough, when concerned with low life, were really poetry at all. Crabbe pleads in reply the example of other English poets, whose claim to the title had never been disputed. He cites Chaucer, who had depicted very low life indeed, and in the same rhymed metre. "If all that kind of satire wherein character is skilfully delineated, must no longer be esteemed as genuine poetry," then what becomes of the author of The Canterbury Tales? Crabbe could not supply, or be expected to supply, the answer to this question. He could not discern that the treatment is everything, and that Chaucer was endowed with many qualities denied to himself—the spirit of joyousness and the love of sunshine, and together with these, gifts of humour and pathos to which Crabbe could make no pretension. From Chaucer, Crabbe passes to the great but very different master, on whom he had first built his style. Was Pope, then, not a poet? seeing that he too has "no small portion of this actuality of relation, this nudity of description, and poetry without an atmosphere"? Here again, of course, Crabbe overlooks one essential difference between himself and his model. Both were keen-sighted students of character, and both described sordid and worldly ambitions. But Pope was strongest exactly where Crabbe was weak. He had achieved absolute mastery of form, and could condense into a couplet some truth which Crabbe expanded, often excellently, in a hundred lines of very unequal workmanship. The Quarterly reviewer quotes, as admirable of its kind, the description in The Borough of the card-club, with the bickerings and ill-nature of the old ladies and gentlemen who frequented it. It is in truth very graphic, and no doubt absolutely faithful to life; but it is rather metrical fiction than poetry. There is more of the essence of poetry in a single couplet of Pope's:

For here the expression is faultless, and Pope has educed an eternally pathetic truth, of universal application.

Even had the gentle remonstrances of the two reviewers never been expressed, it would seem as if Crabbe had already arrived at somewhat similar conclusions on his own account. At the time the reviews appeared, the whole of the twenty-one Tales to be published in August 1812 were already written. Crabbe had perceived that if he was to retain the admiring public he had won, he must break fresh ground. Aldeburgh was played out. It had provided abundant material and been an excellent training-ground for Crabbe's powers. But he had discovered that there were other fields worth cultivating besides that of the hard lots of the very poor. He had associated in his later years with a class above these—not indeed with the "upper ten," save when he dined at Belvoir Castle, but with classes lying between these two extremes. He had come to feel more and more the fascination of analysing human character and motives among his equals. He had a singularly retentive memory, and the habit of noting and brooding over incidents—specially of "life's little ironies"—wherever he encountered them. He does not seem to have possessed much originating power. When, a few years later, his friend Mrs. Leadbeater inquired of him whether the characters in his various poems were drawn from life, he replied:—"Yes, I will tell you readily about my ventures, whom I endeavour to paint as nearly as I could, and dare—for in some cases I dared not.... Thus far you are correct: there is not one of whom I had not in my mind the original, but I was obliged in most cases to take them from their real situations, and in one or two instances even to change their sex, and in many, the circumstances.... Indeed I do not know that I could paint merely from my own fancy, and there is no cause why I should. Is there not diversity enough in society?"