Life's Pleasures Quote by George Crabbe

Friendship, in Crabbe's telling, comes with an invoice. The lines skewer the social economy of the late 18th-century visit: the "treat" is never just food and shelter, its real price paid in performance. "If you're pleased to retire" sounds like a gentle invitation, then flips into a set of demands that read like house rules for the polite classes. You "must all things admit" and "must all things admire" not because you're naturally agreeable, but because dissent is bad manners and bad manners are a kind of heresy in a world held together by reputation.

Crabbe's genius is the monotony of "must". It's not an argument, it's a drumbeat, turning hospitality into soft coercion. "Observance" is the key word: the visit becomes ritual, surveillance dressed up as warmth. You don't just eat; you eat what is praised, then return the compliment on cue. Taste isn't personal here, it's political. Your palate is recruited into confirming your host's status, discernment, even virtue. The joke is how quickly pleasure becomes obligation, how the guest is conscripted into advertising.

Context matters: Crabbe built his career on puncturing pastoral prettiness, dragging polite verse toward the grit of actual social arrangements. These couplets belong to that project. They're not anti-friendship so much as anti-false intimacy: a warning that the most "civil" spaces can demand the most obedience, and that sincerity is often the first thing checked at the door.