n places other than Olney, and perhaps his best verses were written
at Weston-Underwood. Now George Crabbe in the years of his success was
identified with many places other than Aldeburgh: with Belvoir Castle,
with Muston, and with Trowbridge, where he died, and some of his admirers
have even identified him with Bath. When all this is allowed, it is upon
Aldeburgh that the whole of his writings turned, the place where he was
born, where he spent his boyhood, and the earlier years of a perhaps too
sordid manhood, whither he returned twice, as a chemist's assistant and
as curate. It is the place that primarily inspired all his verses.
Aldeburgh stands out vividly before us in each succeeding poem--in _The
Village_, _The Borough_, _The Parish Register_, _The Tales_, and even in
those _Tales of the Hall_, composed in later life in faraway Trowbridge.
Crabbe's vivid observations indeed come home to every one who has studied
his works when they have visited not only Aldeburgh but its vicinity.
Every reach of the river Ald recalls some striking line by him: the
scenery in _The Lover's Journey_ we know is a description of the road
between Aldeburgh and Beccles, and all who have sailed along the river to
Orford have recognized that no stream has been so perfectly portrayed by
a poet's pen. Here in his writings you may have a suggestion of Muston,
here of Allington, and here again of Trowbridge; but in the main it is
the Suffolk scenery that most of us here know so well that was ever in
his mind.

When an attempt was once made to stir up the Great Eastern Railway to
identify this district with the name of Crabbe as the English Lakes were
identified with the name of Wordsworth, and the Scots Lakes with that of
Sir Walter Scott, a high official of the railway made the statement that
up to that moment he had never even heard the name of Crabbe. Well, all
that is going to be changed. I do not at all approve of the phrase
beloved of certain book-makers and of railway companies that implies that
any county or district is the monopoly of one man, be he ever so great a
writer. Yet I venture to say that within the next ten years the "Crabbe
Country" will sound as familiar to the officials of the Great Eastern as
the "Wordsworth Country" does to those of the Midland or the North
Western. It is true that once in the bitterness of his heart the poet
referred to Aldeburgh as "a little venal borough in Suffolk" and that he
more than onc