And as Crabbe evidently resorts gladly to personal experiences to make out the material for his work, the same also holds with regard to the incidental Tales.  Crabbe refers in his Preface to two of these as not of his own invention, and his son, in the Notes, admits the same of others.  One, as we have seen, happened in the Elmy family; another was sent him by a friend in Wiltshire, to which county the story belonged; while the last in the series, and perhaps the most painful of all, Smugglers, and Poachers was told to Crabbe by Sir Samuel Romilly, whom he had met at Hampstead, only a few weeks before Romilly’s own tragic death.  Probably other tales, not referred to by Crabbe or his son, were also encountered by the poet in his intercourse with his parishioners, or submitted to him by his friends.  We might infer this from the singular inequality, in interest and poetical opportunity, of the various plots of these stories.  Some of them are assuredly not such as any poet would have sat down and elaborated for himself, and it is strange how little sense Crabbe seems to have possessed as to which were worth treating, or could even admit of artistic treatment at all.  A striking instance is afforded by the strange and most unpleasing history, entitled Lady Barbara:  or, The Ghost.

The story is as follows:  A young and beautiful lady marries early a gentleman of good family who dies within a year of their marriage.  In spite of many proposals she resolves to remain a widow; and for the sake of congenial society and occupation, she finds a home in the family of a pious clergyman, where she devotes herself to his young children, and makes herself useful in the parish.  Her favourite among the children is a boy, George, still in the schoolroom.  The boy grows apace; goes to boarding-school and college; and is on the point of entering the army, when he discovers that he is madly in love with the lady, still an inmate of the house, who had “mothered him” when a child.  No ages are mentioned, but we may infer that the young man is then about two and twenty, and the lady something short of forty.  The position is not unimaginable, though it may be uncommon.  The idea of marrying one who had been to her as a favourite child, seems to the widow in the first instance repulsive and almost criminal.  But it turns out that there is another reason in the background for her not re-entering the marriage state, which she discloses to the ardent youth.  It appears that the widow had once had a beloved brother who had died early.  Those two had been brought up by an infidel father, who had impressed on his children the absurdity of all such ideas as immortality.  The children had often discussed and pondered over this subject together, and had made a compact that whichever of them died first should, if possible, appear to the survivor, and thus solve the awful problem of a future life.  The brother not long after died in foreign parts.  Immediately after his