after their acquaintance had begun.  An explanation of this may be found in the autobiographical matter that Crabbe late in life supplied to the New Monthly Magazine in 1816.  He there intimates that after Burke had generously assisted him in other ways, besides enabling him to publish The Library, the question had been discussed of Crabbe’s future calling.  “Mr. Crabbe was encouraged to lay open his views, past and present; to display whatever reading and acquirements he possessed, to explain the causes of his disappointments, and the cloudiness of his prospects; in short he concealed nothing from a friend so able to guide inexperience, and so willing to pardon inadvertency.”  Obviously it was in answer to such invitations from Burke that the letter of the 26th of June 1781 was written.

It was probably soon after the publication of The Library that Crabbe paid his first visit to Beaconsfield, and was welcomed as a guest by Burke’s wife and her niece as cordially as by the statesman himself.  Here he first met Charles James Fox and Sir Joshua Reynolds, and through the latter soon became acquainted with Samuel Johnson, on whom he called in Bolt Court.  Later in the year, when in London, Crabbe had lodgings hard by the Burkes in St. James’s Place, and continued to be a frequent guest at their table, where he met other of Burke’s distinguished friends, political and literary.  Among these was Lord Chancellor Thurlow to whom Crabbe had appealed, without success, in his less fortunate days.  On that occasion Thurlow had simply replied, in regard to the poems which Crabbe had enclosed, “that his avocations did not leave him leisure to read verses.”  To this Crabbe had been so unwise as to reply that it was one of a Lord Chancellor’s functions to relieve merit in distress.  But the good-natured Chancellor had not resented the impertinence, and now hearing afresh from Burke of his old petitioner, invited Crabbe to breakfast, and made him a generous apology.  “The first poem you sent me, Sir,” he said, “I ought to have noticed,—­and I heartily forgive the second.”  At parting, Thurlow pressed a sealed packet containing a hundred pounds into Crabbe’s hand, and assured him of further help when Crabbe should have taken Holy Orders.

For already, as the result of Burke’s unceasing interest in his new friend, Crabbe’s future calling had been decided.  In the course of conversations at Beaconsfield Burke had discovered that his tastes and gifts pointed much more clearly towards divinity than to medicine.  His special training for the office of a clergyman was of course deficient.  He probably had no Greek, but he had mastered enough of Latin to read and quote the Latin poets.  Moreover, his chief passion from early youth had been for botany, and the treatises on that subject were, in Crabbe’s day, written in the language adopted in all scientific works.  “It is most fortunate,” said Burke, “that your father exerted himself to send