A.D. 1711
A watch which had belonged to Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is said to have been presented by Mr. Ralph Howland, of Maidenhead.
Grabe’s Adversaria. See 1724.
A.D. 1712
‘July 19, Died Mr. Joseph Crabb, Under-keeper of the Bodleian Library, having kept in ever since this day sennight. He died of a rheumatism, occasion’d by a careless sort of life. He was, however, an honest harmless man. He was buried on Monday night following (between 7 and 8 o’cl.) in Haly-well Churchyard, very privately. Upon his coffin was put, I. C. ag. 38. 1712; but I heard him say some time since he was 39 years old173.’ He is described in the following caustic terms by Zach. Conr. Uffenbach, in a letter written in 1713, and printed in his Commercium Epistolicum174:—
‘Alteri [præfecto Bibliothecæ], nomine Crab, caput vacuum cerebro est, lepidum alias, dignusque homo quem ridiculo illo encomio, quo tamen multi serio egregios viros onerarunt, ornetur, vociteturque Helluo, non librorum tamen sed præmiorum, quæ ab exteris Bibliothecam hanc invisentibus avide excipit, statimque cauponibus reddit pro liquore, ad guttur colluendum purgandumque a pulvisculo, qui librorum tractationem velut umbra aut nebula comitari solet. Quamvis non ejus, sed tertii infimique Bibliothecarii, hoc sit muneris, ut libros in loculos reponat, quævis in ordinem redigat atque emundet.’
The date of Crabb’s appointment has not been ascertained, but it must have been previous to 1699, as on Nov. 8 of that year an order appears in the Visitors’ Book for an extra payment to him of £10175; other additional payments of £5 and 50s. are made to him annually until 1710. Two vols. of an index to texts of printed sermons, ending about the year 1708, (now Bodl. MSS. 47 and 657,) which were, doubtless, intended to form a continuation of Verneuil’s little book, are said in an old entry in the Catalogue to be by ‘Mr. Crabb.’ The following brief account of him is given in Rawlinson’s MSS. collections for a continuation of Wood’s Athenæ:—
‘Joseph Crabb, son of Will. Crabb, clerk, born at Child-Ockford in Dorsetshire on —— 1674; educated in grammar learning at ——; matriculated as a member of Exeter College, 18 July 1691; took the degree of B.A. 17 Oct. 1695; became Sub-librarian at the public library; removed to Gloucester Hall, where he became M.A., 4 July 1705, and died ——.’
Rawlinson goes on to attribute to him (as his solitary claim to a place in the Athenæ) a Poem on the late Storm, Lond. 1704, fol., but this was written (as well as a Latin poem In Georgium reducem, Lond. 1719, fol.) by John Crabb, Fellow of Exeter College (B.A., Oct. 15, 1685; M.A., June 19, 1688), who was also a Sub-librarian at an earlier period, but the date of whose entrance into office as well as of quittance is not known. The latter became Rector of Breamore, Hants, in 1709, where he died in 1748 at the age of eighty-five. He is remarkable for having married four wives, all of whom lie buried with him in his church. The third of these, Grace Shuckbridge, became his wife when he was aged seventy-six and she was forty-nine; the last (who survived until March 13, 1777) was thirty-six when she took him, at the age of eighty-one, for better or worse. There is a handsome marble tablet to his memory on the north wall of the Chancel of Breamore Church, bearing the following inscription, and surmounted by his arms (scil., on a field gules a chevron between two fleur-de-lis above and a crab displayed below or; crest, a demi-lion rampant or) painted in their proper colours:—
‘H. S. E. Reverend. Johan. Crabb, A. M. è Coll. Exon quondam Socius Oxon., Bibliothecæ Bodleianæ Sub-Librarius, et a sacris olim Episc. Fowler, hujus Parochiæ Minister residens amplius XXXVIII ann. Vir doctus, pius, generosus, in Ecclesiâ Orthodoxus, in Republicâ fidelis, et omnibus liberalis. Author Georgianæ et aliorum Carminum celebrium latine et anglice, Obiit tandem XIII Id. Martii, Anno ætat. suæ LXXXV., Æræ Christianæ MDCCXLVIII176.’
On July 22, Thomas Hearne was appointed Second-keeper by Dr. Hudson, in the room of Crabb, while still retaining his post as Janitor, ‘with liberty allow’d him of being keeper of the Anatomy schoole, or Bodleian repository, on purpose to advance the perquisites of the place, which are very inconsiderable177,’ but with the proviso that the salary of the janitor’s place should go to an assistant officer. By this arrangement Hearne retained the keys, so that he could go in and out when he pleased178.
‘Sept. 16, Dr. Hudson told me to-day that some have complain’d that books in the Publick Library are not so easily come at as usual. I am glad there is such a complaint. I am afraid the complainers are such as us’d to steal books from the Library, and, upon that account, are concern’d that they are more strictly look’d after than formerly179.’
But the lady did not afford him the wished-for opportunity.
Notes
173 Hearne’s MS. Diary, xxxvii. 180.
174 1753, p. 182. For the reference to this passage the author is indebted to Dibdin’s Bibliogr. Decam. iii. 281. The same volume of Uffenbach’s contains some criticisms on Bernard’s Catalogue of the MSS., chiefly with relation to the Barocci collection, with extracts from the additional entries in the Reg. Benef.
175 This was granted at Hyde’s urgent request, ‘in regard of his great pains in entering books in the Catalogue, and of the smallness of his place.’ Letter from Hyde to Hudson, in Walker’s Letters, i. 174.
176 For the above particulars of John Crabb’s history subsequent to his leaving Oxford the author is indebted to his friend the Rev. J. H. Blunt, lately the Curate in charge of the parish of Breamore, who mentions, with reference to Crabb’s connubial experiences, the parallel case of Bishop John Thomas, Bishop of the adjoining diocese of Salisbury, 1757-61, and afterwards of Winchester. At his fourth wedding that prelate had the good taste and feeling to present his friends with memorial rings inscribed with the couplet:—
‘If I survive
I’ll make them five.’
177 Hearne’s MS. Diary, xxxvii. 191.
178 Life, 1772, p. 14.
179 MS. Diary, xxxix. 120.