e elderly prude:--

"--wise, austere, and nice,
Who showed her virtue by her scorn of vice";

and another of the selfish and worldly life of the Lady at the Great
House who prefers to spend her fortune in London, and leaves her tenants
to the tender mercies of her steward. Her forsaken mansion is described
in lines curiously anticipating Hood's _Haunted House_:--

"--forsaken stood the Hall:
Worms ate the floors, the tap'stry fled the wall:
No fire the kitchen's cheerless grate display'd;
No cheerful light the long-closed sash convey'd;
The crawling worm that turns a summer fly,
Here spun his shroud, and laid him up to die
The winter-death:--upon the bed of state,
The bat shrill shrieking woo'd his flickering mate."

In the end her splendid funeral is solemnised:--

"Dark but not awful, dismal but yet mean,
With anxious bustle moves the cumbrous scene;
Presents no objects tender or profound
But spreads its cold unmeaning gloom around."

And the sarcastic village-father, after hearing "some scholar" read the
list of her titles and her virtues, "looked disdain and said":--

"Away, my friends! why take such pains to know
What some brave marble soon in Church shall show?
Where not alone her gracious name shall stand,
But how she lived--the blessing of the land;
How much we all deplored the noble dead,
What groans we uttered and what tears we shed;
Tears, true as those which in the sleepy eyes
Of weeping cherubs on the stone shall rise;
Tears, true as those which, ere she found her grave,
The noble Lady to our sorrows gave!"

These portraits of the ignoble rich are balanced by one of the "noble
peasant" Isaac Ashford, drawn, as Crabbe's son tells us, from a former
parish-clerk of his father's at North Glemham. Coming to be past work
through infirmities of age, the old man has to face the probability of
the parish poorhouse, and reconciling himself to his lot is happily
spared the sore trial:--

"Daily he placed the Workhouse in his view!
But came not there, for sudden was his fate,
He dropp'd, expiring, at his cottage-gate.
I feel his absence in the hours of prayer,
And view his seat, and sigh for Isaac there:
I see no more those white locks thinly spread
Round the bald polish of that honour'd head;
No more that awful glance on playful wight,
Compell'd to kneel and tremble at the sight,
To fold his fingers, all in dread