We have heard it objected to Crabbe’s poetry that it wants fire, that it has no romance, that it moves among the homely scenes of rustic life, and seldom soars above parochial records and village history. But Crabbe’s life was a singularly unromantic one; everything with him had been real, hard, up-hill work, in which he had broken down had he not believed in work rather than in genius. At Bungay School he was flogged unmercifully, according to the wise methods of teaching the classics then in vogue, but now happily exploding, except in our antediluvian public schools; at Bury St. Edmunds he was apprenticed to a surgeon, who quickly turned him into an errand boy and servant of all work; at twenty years of age, conscious of innate power, and aspiring to literary honour, he found himself in London in two equal conditions of misery, without a _friend_ and without a _pound_; and then, in this very condition of impecuniosity, the tender place of his heart was touched by an unpropertied girl, Sarah Elwy, and he, the friendless young man, loves her with a pure, deep, passionate, and unchanging love. For eight long years of struggle, her image gave buoyancy to his spirit, and oneness to his purpose, amidst the ups and downs of no common hardships,—now turned from the rich man’s door by lacqueys in silver lace, and then politely bowed out by those who might have been his patrons in an hour of need, until, fortune favouring the bold, he became not only the recognised poet of the poor, but better still, the husband of a woman of surpassing worth. Never aspiring to be a great poet, but only a true and real man, he lived, and laboured, and published much. As a parish clergyman, his memory at Trowbridge is a familiar household word, and having honourably served his generation according to the will of God, he placidly and Christianly fell asleep. As we stood by Chantey’s monumental record of this good man, we felt that it did us good to look on such a memorial of a working man; a working man, in the truest sense of the word, for we must take some care, or else this good name will become an empty conventional sham. We must not confine the term to any one class, whether to men who work with sweat of _brow_, or to other men who work as hard, and harder too, with sweat of _brain_; we give the name of working men to all who toil with head or hand, and all such may be bettered by the contemplation of a character like Crabbe’s.