mon's dry, his walls are wet.)
The fish-spear barbed, the sweeping net are there,
Dog-hides, and pheasant plumes, and skins of hare,
Cordage for toils, and wiring for the snare.
Bartered for game from chase or warren won,
Yon cask holds moonlight,[5] seen when moon was none;
And late-snatched spoils lie stowed in hutch apart,
To wait the associate higgler's evening cart."

Happily for Scott's fame, and for the world's delight, he did not long
pursue the unprofitable task of copying other men. _Rokeby_ appeared,
was coldly received, and then Scott turned his thoughts to fiction in
prose, came upon his long-lost fragment of _Waverley_ and the need of
conciliating the poetic taste of the day was at an end for ever. But his
affection for Crabbe never waned. In his earlier novels there was no
contemporary poet he more often quoted as headings for his chapters--and
it was Crabbe's _Borough_ to which he listened with unfailing delight
twenty years later, in the last sad hours of his decay.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 5: A cant term for smuggled spirits.]

CHAPTER VII

_THE BOROUGH_

(1809-1812)

The immediate success of _The Parish Register_ in 1807 encouraged Crabbe
to proceed at once with a far longer poem, which had been some years in
hand. _The Borough_ was begun at Rendham in Suffolk in 1801, continued
at Muston after the return thither in 1805, and finally completed during
a long visit to Aldeburgh in the autumn of 1809. That the Poem should
have been "in the making" during at least eight years is quite what
might be inferred from the finished work. It proved, on appearance, to
be of portentous length--at least ten thousand lines. Its versification
included every degree of finish of which Crabbe was capable, from his
very best to his very worst. Parts of it were evidently written when the
theme stirred and moved the writer: others, again, when he was merely
bent on reproducing scenes that lived in his singularly retentive
memory, with needless minuteness of detail, and in any kind of couplet
that might pass muster in respect of scansion and rhyme. In the preface
to the poem, on its appearance in 1810, Crabbe displays an uneasy
consciousness that his poem was open to objection in this respect. In
his previous ventures he had had Edmund Burke, Johnson, and Fox,
besides his friend Turner at Yarmouth, to restrain or to revise. On the
present occasion, the three first-named friends had passed away,