s schooldays: his first period of unhappiness at
Slaughden Quay, his apprenticeship near Bury St. Edmunds, where we seem
to hear his master's daughters, when he reached the door, exclaim with
laughter, "La! Here's our new 'prentice." We follow him a little
higher, to the house of the Woodbridge surgeon, then through his
prolonged courtship of Sarah Elmy, then to those dreary, uncongenial
duties of piling up butter casks on Slaughden Quay. A brief period of
starvation in London, and we find him again in a chemist's shop in
Aldeburgh. Lastly comes his most important journey to London upon the
borrowed sum of 5 pounds, only three of which he carried in hard cash.
His hand to mouth existence in London for some months is among the most
interesting things in literature. Chatterton's tragic fate might have
been his, but, more fortunate than Chatterton, he had friends at Beccles
who helped him, and he was even able to publish a poem, _The Candidate_.
Although this poem contained only thirty-four pages, one is not quite
sure but that it helped to ruin its publisher. In any case that
publisher went bankrupt soon after.

Crabbe has been reproached for having continually attempted to secure a
"patron" at this time, and it has been hinted by Sir Leslie Stephen that
he ought to have recognized that the patron was out of date, killed by
Dr. Johnson's sturdy defiance. I do not agree with this view. Dr.
Johnson, in spite of his famous epigram, was always more or less assisted
by the patron, although his personality was strong enough to enable him
to turn the tables at the end. When one comes to think of it, Thrale the
brewer was a patron of Johnson, so was Strahan the printer. And does he
not say in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield that "Seven years, my
lord, have now passed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was
repulsed from your door," clearly implying that if Chesterfield was not
Johnson's patron it was not the great Doctor's fault? In any case the
patron must always exist for the poor man of letters in every age. Now,
he is frequently a collective personality rather than an individual. He
is represented for the author who has tried and failed by the Royal
Literary Fund, by such bounty as is awarded by the Society of Authors, or
by the Civil List Grant. For the author in embryo he is assisted above
all by the literary log-roller who flourishes so much in our day. If he
is not this "collective personality,"