When he visited London a few years later and was received with general welcome in the literary world, he was very surprised. "In my own village," he told James Smith, "they think nothing of me." The three years following the publication of "The Borough" were especially lonely for him. He did have his two sons, George and John, with him; they had both passed through Cambridge, one at Trinity and the other at Caius, and were now clergymen themselves, each holding a curacy in the neighbourhood, enabling them to live under the parental roof, but Mrs. Crabbe's health was now very poor, and Crabbe had no daughter or female relative at home to help him with her care.