dness to his flock.--

"Thus to relieve the wretched was his pride,
And even his failings leaned to virtue's side;
But in his duty prompt at every call
He watched and wept; he prayed and felt for all.
And as a bird each fond endearment tries
To tempt its new-fledged offspring to the skies,
He tried each art, reproved each dull delay,
Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way."

Crabbe remembered a different type of parish priest in his boyhood, and
this is how he introduces him. He has been describing, with an
unmitigated realism, the village poorhouse, in all its squalor and
dilapidation:--

"There children dwell who know no parents' care:
Parents, who know no children's love, dwell there.
Heart-broken matrons on their joyless bed,
Forsaken wives, and mothers never wed"

The dying pauper needs some spiritual consolation ere he passes into the
unseen world,

"But ere his death some pious doubts arise,
Some simple fears which bold, bad men despise;
Fain would he ask the parish priest to prove
His title certain to the joys above:
For this he sends the murmuring nurse, who calls
The holy stranger to these dismal walls;
And doth not he, the pious man, appear,
He, 'passing rich with forty pounds a year'?
Ah! no: a shepherd of a different stock.
And far unlike him, feeds this little flock:
A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's 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;
None better skilled the noisy pack to guide,
To urge their chase, to cheer them, or to chide;
A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day,
And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play:
Then, while such honours bloom around his head,
Shall he sit sadly by the sick man's bed,
To raise the hope he feels not, or with zeal
To combat fears that e'en the pious feel?"

Crabbe's son, after his father's death, cited in a note on
these lines what he hold to be a parallel passage from Cowper's
_Progress of Error_, beginning:--

"Oh, laugh or mourn with me the rueful jest,
A cassocked huntsman, and a fiddling priest."

Cowper's first volume, containing _Table-Talk_ and its companion
satires, appeared some months before Crabbe's _Village_. The
shortcomings of the clergy are a favourite topic with him, and a varied
gallery of the existing types of clerical inefficiency may be for