with mirth, she would seize a cup and sing "Toby Fillpot," glorying as it were in her own jollity. When we took our morning rides, she generally drove my father in her phaeton, and interested him exceedingly by her strong understanding and conversational powers.

After morning prayers read by their clerical guest in the elegant boudoir, the carriages came to the door, and we went to some neighbouring town, or to the sea-side, or to a camp then formed at Hopton, a few miles distant; more frequently to Lowestoff; where, one evening, all adjourned to a dissenting chapel, to hear the venerable John Wesley on one of the last of his peregrinations. He was exceedingly old and infirm, and was attended, almost supported in the pulpit, by a young minister on each side. The chapel was crowded to suffocation. In the course of the sermon, he repeated, though with an application of his own, the lines from Anacreon

"Oft am I by women told,

Poor Anacreon! thou grow'st old;
See, thine hairs are falling all,
Poor Anacreon! how they fall!
Whether I grow old or no,
By these signs I do not know;
But this I need not to be told,
'Tis time to live if I grow old."

My father was much struck by his reverend appearance and his cheerful air, and the beautiful cadence he gave to these lines; and, after the service, introduced himself to the patriarch, who received him with benevolent politeness.

Shortly after our return from Suffolk, the parsonage at Muston was visited by the late Mr. John Nichols, his son, (the present "Mr. Urban,") and an artist engaged in making drawings for the History of Leicestershire. Mr. Crabbe on this occasion rendered what service he could to a work for which he had previously, as I have stated, undertaken to write a chapter of natural history; and was gratified, after his friend's return to London, by a present of some very fine Dutch engravings of plants, splendidly coloured.

In the spring of the next year (1792) my father preached a sermon at the visitation at Grantham, which so much struck the late Mr. Turner, rector of Denton and Wing, who had been commissioned to select a tutor for the sons of the Earl of Bute, that he came up after the service and solicited the preacher to receive these young noblemen into his family. But this he at once declined; and he never acted more wisely than in so doing. Like the late Archbishop Moore, when tutor to the sons of the Duke of Marlborough, he might easily have " read a-head" of his pupils, and thus concealed or remedied the defects of his own education; but the restraint of strange inmates would have been intolerable in my father's humble parsonage, and nothing could have repaid him for submitting to such an interruption of all his domestic habits and favourite pursuits.

About this time he became intimately acquainted with the late Dr. Gordon, precentor of Lincoln, father to the present dean, and my mother and he

passed some time with him at his residence near the cathedral. This was another of those manly, enlarged minds, for which he ever felt a strong partiality; and on the same grounds he felt the same regard, many years afterwards, for his son.

In October of this year Mr. Crabbe was enclosing a new garden for botanic specimens, and had just completed the walls, when he was suddenly summoned into Suffolk to act as executor to Mr. Tovell, who had been carried off before there was time to announce his illness; and on his return, after much deliberation (many motives contending against very intelligible scruples), my father determined to place a curate at Muston, and to go and reside at Parham, taking the charge of some church in that neighbourhood.

Though tastes and affections, as well as worldly interests, prompted this return to native scenes and early acquaintances, it was a step reluctantly taken, and, I believe, sincerely repented of. The beginning was ominous. As we were slowly quitting the place, preceded by our furniture, a stranger, though one who knew my father's circumstances, called out in an impressive tone, "You are wrong, you are wrong." The sound, he said, found an echo in his own conscience, and during the whole journey seemed to ring in his ears like a supernatural voice.

151

CHAPTER VII.

1792-1804.

MR. CRABBE'S RESIDENCE IN SUFFOLK, AT PARHAM,
-AT GLEMHAM,·
-AND AT RENDHAM.

IN November, 1792, we arrived once more at Parham; - but how changed was every thing since I had first visited that house, then the scene of constant mirth and hospitality! As I got out of the chaise, I remember jumping for very joy, and exclaiming, "Here we are - here we are, little Willy* and all!" but my spirits sunk into dismay when, on entering the well-known kitchen, all there seemed desolate, dreary, and silent. Mrs. Tovell and her sister-in-law, sitting by the fireside weeping, did not even rise up to welcome my parents, but uttered a few chilling words, and wept again. All this appeared to me as inexplicable as forbidding. How little do children dream of the alterations that elder people's feelings towards each other undergo, when death has caused a transfer of property! Our arrival in Suffolk was by no means palatable to all my mother's relations.

Mrs. Elmy and her sister, Miss Tovell, were their brother's co-heiresses: the latter was an ancient maiden, living in a cottage hard by, and persuaded

* My father's seventh and youngest child.

that every thing ought to have been left to her own management. I think I see her now, with her ivorytipped walking-cane, a foot, at least, above her head, scolding about some change that would, as she said, have made "Jacky" (her late brother), if he had seen it, shake in his grave, the said change being, perhaps, the removal of a print from one room to another, and my father having purchased every atom of the furniture when he came into the house.

My father being at least as accessible to the slightest mark of kindness as to any species of offence, the cool old dame used to boast, not without reason, that she could " screw Crabbe up and down like a fiddle." Every now and then she screwed her violin a little too tightly; but still there was never any real malice on either side. When, some time after, the hand of death was on Miss Tovell, she sent for Mr. Crabbe, and was attended by him with the greatest tenderness; nor did she at last execute her oft-repeated threat of making a cadicy -Anglicè, a codicil—to her will.

In many circumstances, besides, my father found the disadvantage of succeeding such a man as Mr. Tovell. He invited none of the old compotators, and if they came, received them but coolly; and it was soon said that " Parham had passed away, and the glory thereof." When the paper of parish rates came round, he perceived that he was placed on a much higher scale of payment than his wealthy predecessor had ever been for the very same occupation; and when he complained of this, he was told very plainly,—“ Why, sir, Mr. Tovell was a good neigh