“A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday task As much as God or man can fairly ask; The rest he gives to loves and labours light, To fields the morning, and to feasts the night. * * * * * A sportsman keen, he shouts through half the day, And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play.” But I must reluctantly forbear to quote more from “The Village,” and ask you to turn your attention to two passages in “The Borough,” which show what sort of men lived in Crabbe’s native town, and also indicate the power our author has in depicting two very different characters. I will take Peter Grimes, the fisherman, first. Grimes was one of those human monsters who delight in cruelty; and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to its shame, furnished victims for its exercise in workhouse apprentices. The guardians of the overflowing workhouses of London were accustomed to get rid of their superfluous numbers by binding children as apprentices to masters, who practically became the owners of the little victims they were paid to teach. “Peter had heard there were in London then-- Still have their being!--workhouse-clearing men, Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind, Would parish-boys to needy tradesmen bind; They in their want a trifling sum would take, And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make.”[8] Grimes did several of these wretched boys to death by his cruelty, which was notorious in the borough, but the shocking thing was that nobody troubled to interfere. “None put the question: ‘Peter, dost thou give The boy his food? What, man! the lad must live; Consider, Peter, let the child have bread, He’ll serve thee better if he’s stroked and fed.’ None reasoned thus; and some, on hearing cries, Said calmly, ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’” At last Grimes, who seems to have been never quite sane in his brutality, went mad, and died raving at visions of his aged father and the boys he had done to death. More inviting is a picture of another fisherman, the mayor of the borough: “He was a fisher from his earliest day, And placed his nets within the borough bay, Where, by his skates, his herrings, and his soles, He lived, nor dreamed of corporation doles.” At last he saved £240 ($1200), and asked a friend what to do with it. The friend suggests “put it out on interest.” “‘Oh, but,’ said Daniel, ‘that’s a dangerous plan, He may be robbed like any other man.’” The friend tells Daniel that he will be paid five per cent. every year. “‘What good is that?’ quoth Daniel, ‘for ’tis plain If part I take, there can but part remain.’” With great difficulty the principle of a mortgage is explained, and at last,