Eusebius is intended for Burke, and the portrait is a literary tribute for more substantial services.  When Crabbe came up from his native Aldborough, with three pounds and a case of surgical instruments in his trunk, he fondly believed that a great patron would be found to watch over his transformation from an unsuccessful apothecary into a popular poet.  He wrote to Lord North and Lord Shelburne, but they did not answer his letters; booksellers returned his copious manuscripts; the three pounds gradually disappeared; the surgical instruments went to the pawnbroker’s; and the poet found himself an outcast on the world, without a friend, without employment, and without bread.  He owed money for his lodging, and was on the very eve of being sent to prison, when it occurred to him to write to Burke.  It was the moment (1781) when the final struggle with Lord North was at its fiercest, and Burke might have been absolved if, in the stress of conflict, he had neglected a begging-letter.  As it was, the manliness and simplicity of Crabbe’s application touched him.  He immediately made an appointment with the young poet, and convinced himself of his worth.  He not only relieved Crabbe’s immediate distress with a sum of money that, as we know, came from no affluence of his own, but carried him off to Beaconsfield, installed him there as a member of the family, and took as much pains to find a printer for The Library and The Village, as if they had been poems of his own.  In time he persuaded the Bishop of Norwich to admit Crabbe, in spite of his want of a regular qualification, to holy orders.  He then commended him to the notice of Lord Chancellor Thurlow.  Crabbe found the Tiger less formidable than his terrifying reputation, for Thurlow at their first interview presented him with a hundred-pound note, and afterwards gave him a living.  The living was of no great value, it is true; and it was Burke who, with untiring friendship, succeeded in procuring something like a substantial position for him, by inducing the Duke of Rutland to make the young parson his chaplain.  Henceforth Crabbe’s career was assured, and he never forgot to revere and bless the man to whose generous hand he owed his deliverance.

Another of Burke’s clients, of whom we hardly know whether to say that he is more or less known to our age than Crabbe, is Barry, a painter of disputable eminence.  The son of a seafarer at Cork, he had been introduced to Burke in Dublin in 1762, was brought over to England by him, introduced to some kind of employment, and finally sent, with funds provided by the Burkes, to study art on the continent.  It was characteristic of Burke’s willingness not only to supply money, but what is a far rarer form of kindness, to take active trouble, that he should have followed the raw student with long and careful letters of advice upon the proper direction of his studies.  For five years Barry was maintained abroad by the Burkes.  Most unhappily for himself he was cursed with an irritable and perverse temper, and he lacked even the elementary arts of conduct.  Burke was generous to the end, with that difficult and uncommon kind of generosity which moves independently of gratitude or ingratitude in the receiver.