English Men of Letters: Crabbe

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their bad. Both have suffered, and still suffer, in public estimation from this cause. The average reader of poetry does not care to have to search and select for himself, and is prone summarily to dismiss a writer (especially a poet) on the evidence of his inferior productions. Wordsworth, by far the greater of the two poets, has survived t

e other, it is conceivable that Crabbe, though he might have survived as one of the "mob of gentlemen" who imitated Pope "with ease," would never have learned where his true strength lay, and thus have lived as one of the first and profoundest students of The Annals of the Poor. For The Village, one of the earliest and not least valuable of his poems, was written (in part, at least) as early as 1781, while Wordsworth was yet a child, and before Cowper had published a volume. In yet another respect Crabbe was to work hand in hand with Wordsworth. He does not seem to have held definite opinions as to necessary reforms in what Wordsworth called "poetic diction." Indeed he was hampered, as Wordsworth was not, by a lifelong adhere

d its predecessors. But after that date Crabbe's popularity may be said to have continuously declined. Other poets, with other and more purely poetical gifts, arose to claim men's attention. Besides Wordsworth, as already pointed out, Scott, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley had found their

population able to provide notable aid in the hour of national danger. Successive Royal Charters had accorded to the town markets, with other important rights and privileges. It had returned two members to Parliament since early in the days of Elizabeth, and indeed continued to do so until the Reform Bill of 1831. But, in common with Dunwich, and other once flourishing ports on the same coast, Aldeburgh had for its most fatal enemy, the sea. The gradual encroachments of that irresistible power had in the course of two centuries buried a large portion of the ancient Borough beneath the waves. Two existing maps of the town, one of about 1590, the other about 1790, show how extensive this devastatio

after school-teaching in various parishes in the neighbourhood, finally settled down in his native place as collector of the salt duties, a post which his father had filled be

chool, and developed an insatiable appetite for such stories and ballads as were current among the neighbours. George Crabbe, the elder, possessed a few books, and used to read aloud to his family passages from Milton, Young, and other didactic poets of the eighteenth century. Furthermore he took in a country magazine, which had a "Poet's Corner," always handed over to George for his special benefit. The father, respecting these early signs of a literary bent in the son, sent him to a small boarding-school at Bungay in the same county, and a few years later to one of higher pretensions at Stowmarket, kept by a Mr. Richard Haddon, a mathematical teacher of some repute,

on Slaughden Quay, and in the year 1768, when he was still under fourteen years of age, a post was found for him in the house of a surgeon at Wickham-Brook, near Bury St. Edmunds. This practitioner combined the practise of agriculture on a small scale with that of physic, and young Crabbe had to take his share in t

e of its members, Mr. W.S. Levett, a surgeon (one wonders if a relative of Samuel Johnson's protégé), was at this time courting a Miss Brereton, of Framlingham, ten miles away. Mr. Levett died young in 1774, and did not live to marry, but during his brief friendship with Crabbe was the means of introducing him to the lady who, after many years of patient waiting, became his wife. In the village of Great Parham, not far from Framlingham, lived a Mr. Tovell, of Parham Hall, a substantial yeoman, farming his own estate. With Mr. and Mrs. Tovell and their only child,

and there can be no doubt that apart from the fascinations of his "Mira," by which name he proceeded to celebrate her in occasional verse, the experience of country life and scenery, so different from that of his native Aldeburgh, was of great service in enlarging his poetical outlook. Great Parham, distant about five miles from Saxmundham, and about thirteen from Aldeburgh, is at this day a village of great rural charm, although a single-lined branch of the Great Eastern wanders boldly among its streams and cottage gardens through the very heart of the place. The dwelling of the Tove

ey were signed "G.C., Woodbridge," and included divers lyrics addressed to Mira. Other extant verses of the period of his residence at Woodbridge show that he was making experiments in stanza-form on the model of earlier English poets, though without showing more than a certain imitative skill. But after he had been three years in the tow

! Heavenly m

could not adopt the same method, but he could not resist some other prece

rit, and its po

cheek and vivi

si

of the Aldeburgh poor. His subsequent medical pursuits must have brought him into occasional contact with it among the middle classes, and even in the manor-houses and parsonages for which he made up the medicine in his master's surgery. But his treatment of the subject was too palpably imitative of one poetic model, already stale from repetition. Not only did he choose Pope's

urtier drinks, th

urgundy, and

h the poet has inscribed his own maturer judgment of this youthful effort-"Pray let not this be seen ... there is very little of it that I'm not heartily ashamed of." The little quarto pamphlet-"Ipswich, printed and sold by C. Punchard, Bookseller, in the Butter Market, 1775. Price o

lure of his first venture having perhaps discouraged him. Some slight amount of practice in his profession fell to his share. An entry in the Minute Book of the Aldeburgh Board of Guardians of September 17, 1775, orders "that Mr. George Crabbe, Junr., shall be employed to cure the boy Howard of the itch, and that whenever any of the poor shall have occasion for a surgeon, the overseers shall apply to him for that purpose." But these very opportunities perhaps only served to show George Crabbe how poorly he was equipped for his calling as surgeon, and after a period not specified means were found for sending him to London, where he lodged with a family from Aldeburgh who were in business in Whitechapel. How and where he then obtained instruction or practice in his calling does not appear, though there is a gruesome story, recorded by his son, how a baby-subject for dissection was one day found in his cupboard b

urney. The tie between Crabbe and Miss Elmy was further strengthened by a dangerous fever from which Crabbe suffered in 1778-79, while Miss Elmy was a guest under his parents' roof. This was succeeded by an illness of Miss Elmy, when Crabbe was in constant attendance at Parham Hall. His intimacy with the Tovells was moreover to be strengthened by a sad event in that family, the death of their only child, an engaging girl of four

le-death had m

ough the course of this true love was to run more and more smooth, the questi

ason why his fees need not be calculated on any large scale. But this absorbing pursuit did far more than serve to furnish Crabbe's outfit as a healer. It was undoubtedly to the observing eye and retentive memory thus practised in the cottage gardens, and in the lanes, and meadows, and marshes of Suffolk that his descriptions, when once he found where his true strength lay, owed a charm for which readers of poetry had long been hungering. The floral outfit of pastoral poets, when Crabbe began to write, was a hortus siccus indeed. Distinctness in painting the common growth of field and hedgerow may be said to have had its origin with Crabbe. Gr

ons and escapades which his fellow-townsmen did not fail to remember against him in the later days of his success, Crabbe was of a genuinely religious temperament, and had been trained by a devout mother. Moreover, through a nearer and more sympathetic cont

g a store, was of a kind that men would care for. He must discover, and speedily, whether he was to take a modest place in the ranks of literature, or one even more hum

ng necessities of his condition, and plucking every now and then, I have no doubt, the hundredth specimen of some common weed. He stopped opposite a shallow, muddy piece of water, as desola

ce that it was by the Leech-pool on "the lonely moor"-though there was no "Leech-gatherer" at hand to lend him fortitude-that he resolved to encounter "Solitude, pain of heart, distress, and poverty." He was, indeed, little better equipped than Chatterton had been for the enterprise. His father was unable to assist him financially, and was disposed to reproach him for forsaking a profession, in the cause of which the family had already made sacrifices. The Crabbes and al