These verses were written extempore immediately after reading a notice of the Ettrick Shepherd’s death in the Newcastle Paper, to the Editor of which I sent a copy for publication.  The persons lamented in these Verses were all either of my friends or acquaintance.  In Lockhart’s Life of Sir Walter Scott an account is given of my first meeting with him in 1803.  How the Ettrick Shepherd and I became known to each other has already been mentioned in these Notes.  He was undoubtedly a man of original genius, but of coarse manners and low and offensive opinions.  Of Coleridge and Lamb I need not speak here.  Crabbe I have met in London at Mr. Rogers’, but more frequently and favourably at Mr. Hoare’s upon Hampstead Heath.  Every Spring he used to pay that family a visit of some length, and was upon terms of intimate friendship with Mrs. Hoare, and still more with her daughter-in-law, who has a large collection of his letters addressed to herself.  After the Poet’s decease application was made to her to give up these letters to his biographer, that they, or at least a part of them, might be given to the public.  She hesitated to comply, and asked my opinion on the subject.  ‘By no means,’ was my answer, grounded not upon any objection there might be to publishing a selection from those letters, but from an aversion I have always felt to meet idle curiosity by calling back the recently departed to become the object of trivial and familiar gossip.  Crabbe obviously for the most part preferred the company of women to that of men; for this among other reasons, that he did not like to be put upon the stretch in general conversation.  Accordingly, in miscellaneous society his talk was so much below what might have been expected from a man so deservedly celebrated, that to me it seemed trifling.  It must upon other occasions have been of a different character, as I found in our rambles together on Hampstead Heath; and not so much so from a readiness to communicate his knowledge of life and manners as of natural history in all its branches.  His mind was inquisitive, and he seems to have taken refuge from a remembrance of the distresses he had gone through in these studies and the employments to which they led.  Moreover such contemplations might tend profitably to counterbalance the painful truths which he had collected from his intercourse with mankind.  Had I been more intimate with him I should have ventured to touch upon his office as a Minister of the Gospel, and how far his heart and soul were in it, so as to make him a zealous and diligent labourer.  In poetry, tho’ he wrote much, as we all know, he assuredly was not so.  I happened once to speak of pains as necessary to produce merit of a certain kind which I highly valued.  His observation was, ‘It is not worth while.’  You are right, thought I, if the labour encroaches upon the time due to teach truth as a steward of the mysteries of God; but if poetry is to be produced at all, make what you do