And tease to assent, whom she could not persuade.
Methinks I see her with her pigmy light,

Precede her mistress in a moonless night;

From the small lantern throwing through the street

The dimm'd effulgence at her lady's feet;

What time she went to prove her well-known skill

With rival friends at their beloved quadrille. (1) This is quite different from the plenty and joviality of the yoeman's life.

The lives of Blaney and of Clelia illustrate the pleasures of people in a still different class of society.(2) Blaney "a wealthy heir at twentyone, at twentyfive was ruined and undone;" he was sent to the Colonies by a friend, still went on in his evil way, returned to England, inherited another fortune, squandered that too, and View'd his only guinea, then suppress'd,

For a short time, the tumults in his breast,

And, moved by pride, by habit and dispair,

а

Gave it an oper-bird to hum an air.(3)

Blaney ends his life in an alms house where he finds a

(1) Crabbe VI. 264.

(2) The Borough Letters XIV and XV.

Crabbe III.

(3) Ibid. 240

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congenial companion, Clelia, witty and interesting. Shek

had lived an adventurous life and even at this last

stage of life

She would to plays on lowest terms resort,

Where once her box was to the beaux a court.

And strange delight, to that same house where she
Join'd in the dance all gaity and glee,

Now, with the menials crowding to the wall,

She'd see not share, the pleasures of the ball,

And with degraded vanity unfold,

How she too triumph'd in the years of old. (1)

Religion.

"Here

The English mind is naturally religious. Quakers, Independants, Baptists exist, serious, honoured, recognised by the state, adorned by able writers, by deep scholars, by virtuous men, by founders of nations. The ir piety causes their disputes; it is because they will believe that they differ in belief. The only men without

1

Anglicans so scrupulous in collecting their tithes; the Presbyterians, "who look as if they were angry, and

preach with a strong nasal accent; the Quakers, "who

go to church to wait for the inspiration of God with their hats on their heads."(1) He laughed just as heartily at the sceptics. The Frenchman gloried in his unbelief, the English infidal said of religion:

"Allstates demand this aid, the vulgar need

Their priests and prayers, their sermons and their
creeds:
And those of stronger minds should never speak
(In his opinion) what might hurt the weak:
A man may smile, but still he should attend
His hour at church, and be the church's friend,
What there he thinks conceal, and what he hears
commend:(2)

Leslie Stephens says: "The infidals whom Crabbe sometimes attacks read Bolingbroke and Chubb and Mandeville and have only heard by report even of the existence of Voltaire."(3)

(1) Taine's English Literature II. 56.(2) Crabbe V. 8. (3) Hours in a Library, Second Series p.287.

Note:

Crabbe says of one :He read the works of deists every
From crabbed Hobbes to courtly Bolingbroke. (book
Crabbe VII. 136.