e alluded to his unkind reception upon his reappearance as a
curate, when he had previously failed at other callings. "In my own
village they think nothing of me," he once said. But who does not know
how the heart turns with the years to the places associated with
childhood and youth, and Crabbe was a remarkable exemplification of this.
A well-known literary journal stated only last week that "Crabbe's
connexion with Aldeburgh was not very protracted." So far from this
being true it would be no exaggeration to say that it extended over the
whole of his seventy-eight years of life. It included the first five-and-
twenty years almost entirely. It included also the brief curacy, the
prolonged residence at Parham and Glenham, frequent visits for holidays
in after years, and who but a lover of his native place would have done
as his son pictures him doing when at Stathern--riding alone to the coast
of Lincolnshire, sixty miles from where he was living, only to dip in the
waves that also washed the beach of Aldeburgh and returned immediately to
his home. "There is no sea like the Aldeburgh sea," said Edward
FitzGerald, and we may be sure that was Crabbe's opinion also, for
revisiting it in later life he wrote:--

There once again, my native place I come
Thee to salute, my earliest, latest home.

One picture in Crabbe's life stands out vividly to us all--the long years
of devotion given by him to Sarah Elmy, and the reciprocal devotion of
the very capable woman who finally became his wife. Crabbe's courtship
and marriage affords a pleasant contrast to the usual unhappy relations
of poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Shelley,
and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure
how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the
fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The
public has so long been accustomed to expect a different state of things.

I have given thus much time to Crabbe's life story because it interests
me, and I do not believe that it is possible nowadays to kindle a very
profound interest in any writer without a definite presentation of his
personality. Apart from his biography--his three biographies by George
Crabbe the second, Mr. T. E. Kebbel, and Canon Ainger, there are the
seven volumes of his works. Now I do not imagine that any great
accession will be made to the ranks of Crabbe's admirers by asking peop