His son tells us, and may be trusted, that his father's personal piety deepened in his declining years, an influence which could not be ineffectual.

Children, moreover, were growing up in the family, and proved a new source of interest and happiness.Pucklechurch.was not far away, and his son George's eldest girl, Caroline, as she approached her fourth birthday, began to receive from him the tenderest of letters.
The most important incident in Crabbe's life during this period was his visit to Walter Scott in Edinburgh in the early autumn of 1822.

In the spring of that year, Crabbe had for the first time met Scott in London, and Scott had obtained from him a promise that he would visit him in Scotland in the autumn.

It so fell out that George the Fourth, who had been crowned in the previous year, and was paying a series of Coronation progresses through his dominions, had arranged to visit Edinburgh in the August of this year.

Whether Crabbe deliberately chose the same period for his own visit, or stumbled on it accidentally, and Scott did not care to disappoint his proposed guest, is not made quite clear by Crabbe's biographer.