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 couplet, with all its familiar antitheses and other mannerisms, but frankly avowed it by parodying whole passages from the Essay on Man and The Dunciad, the original lines being duly printed at the foot of the page.  There is little of Crabbe’s later accent of sympathy.  Epigram is too obviously pursued, and much of the suggested acquaintance with the habits of the upper classes—­

  “Champagne the courtier drinks, the spleen to chase,
  The colonel Burgundy, and Port his grace”

is borrowed from books and not from life.  Nor did the satire gain in lucidity from any editorial care.  There are hardly two consecutive lines that do not suffer from a truly perverse theory of punctuation.  A copy of the rare original is in the writer’s possession, at the head of which 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 one shilling and sixpence”—­seems to have attracted no attention.  And yet a critic of experience would have recognised in it a force as well as a fluency remarkable in a young man of twenty-one, and pointing to quite other possibilities when the age of imitation should have passed away.

In 1775 Crabbe’s term of apprenticeship to Mr. Page expired, and he returned to his home at Aldeburgh, hoping soon to repair to London and there continue his medical studies.  But he found the domestic situation much changed for the worse.  His mother (who, as we have seen, was several years older than her husband) was an invalid, and his father’s habits and temper were not improving with time.  He was by nature imperious, and had always (it would seem) been liable to intemperance of another kind.  Moreover, a contested election for the Borough in 1774 had brought with it its familiar temptations to protracted debauch—­and it is significant that in 1775 he vacated the office of churchwarden that he had held for many years.  George, to whom his father was not as a rule unkind, did not shrink from once more assisting him among the butter-tubs on Slaughden Quay.  Poetry seems to have been for a while laid aside, the failure 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