In Aldeburgh, on Christmas Eve 1754, George Crabbe was born.  He came of a family bearing a name widely diffused throughout Norfolk and Suffolk for many generations.  His father, 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 before him.  Here as a very young man he married an estimable and pious widow, named Loddock, some years his senior, and had a family of six children, of whom George was the eldest.

Within the limits of a few miles round, including the towns and villages of Slaughden, Orford, Parham, Beccles, Stowmarket, and Woodbridge, the first five-and-twenty years of the poet’s life were spent.  He had but slight interest in the pursuits of the inhabitants.  His father, brought up among its fishing and boating interests, was something nautical in his ambitions, having a partnership in a fishing-boat, and keeping a yacht on the river.  His other sons shared their father’s tastes, while George showed no aptitude or liking for the sea, but from his earliest years evinced a fondness for books, and a marked aptitude for learning.  He was sent early to the usual dame-school, 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, where the boy also acquired some mastery of Latin and acquaintance with the Latin classics.  In his later years he was given (perhaps a little ostentatiously) to prefixing quotations from Horace, Juvenal, Martial, and oven more recondite authors, to the successive sections of The Borough But wherever he found books—­especially poetry—­he read them and remembered them.  He early showed considerable acquaintance with the best English poets, and although Pope controlled his metrical forms, and something more than the forms, to the end of his life, he had somehow acquired a wide knowledge of Shakespeare, and even of such then less known poets as Spenser, Raleigh, and Cowley.

After some three years at Stowmarket—­it now being settled that medicine was to be his calling—­George was taken from school, and the search began in earnest for some country practitioner to whom he might be apprenticed.  An interval of a few months was spent at home, during which he assisted his father at the office on Slaughden Quay, and in the year 1768, when he was still under fourteen years of age, a post was