elp of some one or other individual.

Finally there came--for I am hastily recapitulating Crabbe's story--the
years of prosperity, curacies, rectories, the praise of great
contemporaries, but nothing surely more edifying than the burning of
piles of manuscripts so extensive that no fireplace would hold them. The
son's account of his assisting at these conflagrations is not the least
interesting part of his biography, the merits of which I desire to
emphasize.

People who make jokes about that most succulent edible, the crab, when
the poet Crabbe is mentioned in their presence--and who can resist an
obvious pun--are not really far astray. There can be little doubt but
that a remote ancestor of George Crabbe took his name from the
"shellfish," as we all persist, in spite of the naturalist, in calling
it; and the poet did not hesitate to attribute it to the vanity of an
ancestor that his name had had two letters added. Nor when we hear of
Cromer crabs, or crabs from some other part of Norfolk as distinct from
what I am sure is equally palatable, the crustacean as it may be found in
Aldeburgh, are we remote from the story of our poet's life. For there
cannot be a doubt but that Norfolk shares with Suffolk the glory of his
origin. His family, it is clear, came first from Norfolk. The Crabbes
of Norfolk were farmers, the Crabbes of Suffolk always favoured the
seacoast, and all the glory that surrounds the name of the poet to whom
we do honour to-day is reflected in the town in which he was born and
bred. Aldeburgh is Crabbe's own town, and it is an interesting fact that
no other poet can be identified with one particular spot in the way in
which Crabbe can be identified with this beautiful watering-place in
which we are now assembled. Shakspere was more of a Londoner than a
Stratfordian; nearly all his best work was written in London, and many of
the most receptive years of his life were spent in that city. Milton's
honoured name is identified with many places, apart from London, the city
of his birth. Shelley, Byron and Keats were essentially cosmopolitans in
their writings as in their lives. Wordsworth was closely identified with
Grasmere, although born in a neighbouring county; but he went to many and
varied scenes, and to more than one country, for some of his most
inspired verses. Then Cowper, the poet of whom one most often thinks
when one is recalling the achievement of Crabbe, is a poet of some half-
doze