The family dined together--the heads sat at the old kitchen table--the maids at a side table, called a bouter, the farm men stood in the scullery. With the principals at the table any stranger who happened to come in dined, even if he was a travelling ratcatcher, tinker, or farrier. “My father,” Mr. Crabbe goes on to say, “well describes in the ‘Widow’s Tale,’ my mother’s situation when living in her younger days at Parham: “But when the men beside their stations took, The maidens with them, and with these the cook; When one huge wooden bowl before them stood, Filled with huge balls of farinaceous food; With bacon, mass saline! where never lean Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen: When from a single horn the party drew Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new; When the coarse cloth, she said, with many a stain, Soil’d by rude hands who cut and came again; She could not breathe, but, with a heavy sigh, Reined the fair neck, and shut the offended eye; She minced the sanguine flesh in pastimes fine And wondered much to see the _creatures_ dine.” Then Mr. Crabbe goes on to describe Mr. Tovell’s cronies, who came after dinner, and enjoyed their punch, prosperous farmers or wealthy yeomen like himself. Their talk was at times too much for Mrs. Tovell, who withdrew; but “the servants, being considered much in the same point of view as the animals dozing on the hearth, remained.” The life of Crabbe the poet as told by his son is an admirable piece of biography, and the Rev. George Crabbe, junr., was to my mind at least as good a realist in prose as his father in poetry. I wonder if I am right in conjecturing that you in New England had at the same time old farmers not very unlike Mr. Tovell who lived in prosperous simplicity like the old Suffolk Yeoman, rough in manner, coarse in expression, and blunt in sensibility, yet with an honest independence of character which redeemed much which to our eyes may seem repulsive.[17] But the object of my remarks in this lecture has been to endeavour to give you an idea of what England, or part of it, was like about 1800; because I have another side of the picture to shew in my next lecture. The primitive simplicity of the peasant and the farmer was doomed to disappear, and the process had already begun. Still, side by side with a luxurious civilisation there were many traces of a roughness belonging to an early period in human development. To bring these facts into light, I do not think that the choice of my native county of Suffolk is a bad one.