lls from one
ignominy to another until, by a gross abuse of a public charity, she
ends her days in the almshouse!

One further instance may be cited of Crabbe's persistent effort to
awaken attention to the problem of poor-law relief. In his day the
question, both as to policy and humanity, between indoor and outdoor
relief, was still unsettled. In _The Borough_, as described, many of the
helpless poor were relieved at their own homes. But a new scheme, "The
maintenance of the poor in a common mansion erected by the Hundred,"
seems to have been in force in Suffolk, and up to that time confined to
that county. It differed from the workhouse of to-day apparently in this
respect, that there was not even an attempt to separate the young and
old, the sick and the healthy, the criminal and vicious from the
respectable and honest. Yet Crabbe's powerful picture of the misery thus
caused to the deserving class of inmate is not without its lesson even
after nearly a century during which thought and humanity have been
continually at work upon such problems. The loneliness and weariness of
workhouse existence passed by the aged poor, separated from kinsfolk and
friends, in "the day-room of a London workhouse," have been lately set
forth by Miss Edith Sellers, in the pages of the _Nineteenth Century_,
with a pathetic incisiveness not less striking than that of the
following passage from the Eighteenth Letter of Crabbe's _Borough_:--

"Who can, when here, the social neighbour meet?
Who learn the story current in the street?
Who to the long-known intimate impart
Facts they have learned, or feelings of the heart?
They talk indeed, but who can choose a friend,
Or seek companions at their journey's end?
Here are not those whom they when infants knew;
Who, with like fortune, up to manhood grew;
Who, with like troubles, at old age arrived;
Who, like themselves, the joy of life survived;
Whom time and custom so familiar made,
That looks the meaning in the mind conveyed:
But here to strangers, words nor looks impart
The various movements of the suffering heart;
Nor will that heart with those alliance own,
To whom its views and hopes are all unknown
What, if no grievous fears their lives annoy,
Is it not worse no prospects to enjoy?
'Tis cheerless living in such bounded view,
With nothing dreadful, but with nothing new;
Nothing to bring them joy, to make them weep;
The day itself is, like the