Other relief was however at hand, and once more through the watchful care of Burke.  Crabbe received a letter from his faithful friend to the effect that he had mentioned his case to the Duke of Rutland, and that the Duke had offered him the post of domestic chaplain at Belvoir Castle, when he might be free from his engagements at Aldeburgh.  That Burke should have ventured on this step is significant, both as regards the Duke and Duchess, and Crabbe.  Crabbe’s son remarks with truth that an appointment of the kind was unusual, “such situations in the mansions of that rank being commonly filled either by relations of the family itself, or by college acquaintances, or dependents recommended by political service and local attachment.”  Now Burke would certainly not have recommended Crabbe for the post if he had found in his protege any such defects of breeding or social tact as would have made his society distasteful to the Duke and Duchess.  Burke, as we have seen, described him on their first acquaintance as having “the mind and feelings of a gentleman.”  Thurlow, it is true, after one of Crabbe’s earlier interviews, had declared with an oath (more suo) that he was “as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen.”  But Thurlow was not merely jesting.  He knew that Fielding’s immortal clergyman had also the “mind and feelings of a gentleman,” although his simplicity and ignorance of the world put him at many social disadvantages.  It was probably the same obvious difference in Crabbe from the common type of nobleman’s chaplain of that day which made Crabbe’s position at Belvoir, as his son admits, full of difficulties.  It is quite possible and even natural that the guests and visitors at the Castle did not always accept Crabbe’s talents as making up for a certain want of polish—­or even perhaps for a want of deference to their opinions in conversation.  The “pampered menials” moreover would probably resent having “to say Amen” to a newly-discovered literary adventurer from the great metropolis.

In any case Crabbe’s experience of a chaplain’s life at Belvoir was not, by his son’s admission, a happy one.  “The numberless allusions,” he writes, “to the nature of a literary dependent’s existence in a great lord’s house, which occur in my father’s writings, and especially in the tale of The Patron, are, however, quite enough, to lead any one who knew his character and feelings to the conclusion that notwithstanding the kindness and condescension of the Duke and Duchess themselves—­which were, I believe, uniform, and of which he always spoke with gratitude—­the situation he filled at Belvoir was attended with many painful circumstances, and productive in his mind of some of the acutest sensations of wounded pride that have ever been traced by any pen.”  It is not necessary to hold Crabbe himself entirely irresponsible for this result.  His son, with a frankness that marks the Biography throughout, does not conceal that his father’s