Wordsworth’s fame and influence have grown steadily since his death in 1850.  Crabbe’s reputation was apparently at its height in 1819, for it was then, on occasion of his publishing his Tales of the Hall, that Mr. John Murray paid him three thousand pounds for the copyright of this work, and 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 various admirers, and drawn Crabbe’s old public from him.  It is the purpose of this little volume to inquire into the reasons why he is still justly counted a classic, and whether he has not, as Tennyson said of him, “a world of his own,” still rich in interest and in profit for the explorer.

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Aldeburgh—­or as it came to be more commonly spelled in modern times, Aldborough—­is to-day a pleasant and quiet watering-place on the coast of Suffolk, only a few miles from Saxmundham, with which it is connected by a branch line of the Great Eastern Railway.  It began to be known for its fine air and sea-bathing about the middle of the last century, and to-day possesses other attractions for the yachtsman and the golfer.  But a hundred years earlier, when Crabbe was born, the town possessed none of these advantages and means of access, to amend the poverty and rough manners of its boating and fishing inhabitants.  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Aldeburgh had been a flourishing port with a 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 devastation had been.  This cause, and others arising from it, the gradual decay of the shipping and fishing industries, had left the town in the main a poor and squalid place, the scene of much smuggling and other lawlessness.  Time and the ocean wave had left only “two parallel and unpaved streets, running between mean and scrambling houses.”  Nor was there much relief, aesthetic or other, in the adjacent country, which was flat, marshy, and treeless, continually swept by northern and easterly gales.  A river, the Ald, from which the place took its name, approached the sea close to the town from the west, and then took a turn, flowing south, till it finally entered the sea at the neighbouring harbour of Orford.