“Approach and through the unlatticed
window peep.
Nay, shrink not back, the inmate is asleep;
Sunk ’mid yon sordid blankets, till
the sun
Stoop to the west, the plunderer’s
toils are done.
Loaded and primed, and prompt for desperate
hand,
Rifle and fowling-piece beside him stand,
While round the hut are in disorder laid
The tools and booty of his lawless trade;
For force or fraud, resistance or escape
The crow, the saw, the bludgeon, and the
crape;
His pilfered powder in yon nook he hoards,
And the filched lead the church’s
roof affords—
(Hence shall the rector’s congregation
fret,
That while his sermon’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.