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 Tovells has many years ago disappeared—­an entirely new hall having risen on the old site; but there stands in the parish, a few fields away, an older Parham Hall;—­to-day a farm-house, dear to artists, of singular picturesqueness, surrounded and even washed by a deep moat, and shaded by tall trees—­a haunt, indeed, “of ancient peace.”  The neighbourhood of this old Hall, and the luxuriant beauty of the inland village, so refreshing a contrast to the barrenness and ugliness of the country round his native town, enriched Crabbe’s mind with many memories that served him well in his later poetry.

In the meantime he was practising verse, though as yet showing little individuality.  A Lady’s Magazine of the day, bearing the name of its publisher, Mr. Wheble, had offered a prize for the best poem on the subject of Hope, which Crabbe was so fortunate as to win, and the same magazine printed other short pieces in the same year, 1772.  They 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 town, he made a more notable experiment and had found a printer in Ipswich to take the risk of publication.  In 1775 was printed in that town a didactic satire of some four hundred lines in the Popian couplet, entitled Inebriety.  Coleridge’s friend, who had to write a prize poem on the subject of Dr. Jenner, boldly opened with the invocation—­

  “Inoculation!  Heavenly maid, descend.”

As the title of Crabbe’s poem stands for the bane and not the antidote, he could not adopt the same method, but he could not resist some other precedents of the epic sort, and begins thus, in close imitation of The Dunciad—­

  “The mighty spirit, and its power which stains
   The bloodless cheek and vivifies the brains,
   I sing”

The apparent object of the satire was to describe the varied phases of Intemperance, as observed by the writer in different classes of society—­the Villager, the Squire, the Farmer, the Parish Clergyman, and even the Nobleman’s Chaplain, an official whom Crabbe as yet knew only by imagination.  From childhood he had had ample experience of the vice in the rough and reckless homes of the Aldeburgh poor.  His subsequent medical pursuits must have brought