741.

_CRABBE_

It is nearly a century since George Crabbe, then a young man of
five-and-twenty, put three pounds in his pocket and started from his
native town of Aldborough, with a box of clothes and a case of surgical
instruments, to make his fortune in London. Few men have attempted that
adventure with less promising prospects. Any sensible adviser would have
told him to prefer starvation in his native village to starvation in the
back lanes of London. The adviser would, perhaps, have been vexed, but
would not have been confuted, by Crabbe's good fortune. We should still
recommend a youth not to jump into a river, though, of a thousand who
try the experiment, one may happen to be rescued by a benevolent
millionaire, and be put in the road to fortune. The chances against
Crabbe were enormous. Literature, considered as a trade, is a good deal
better at the present day than it was towards the end of the last
century, and yet anyone who has an opportunity of comparing the failures
with the successes, would be more apt to quote Chatterton than Crabbe as
a precedent for youthful aspirants. Crabbe, indeed, might say for
himself that literature was the only path open to him. His father was
collector of salt duties at Aldborough, a position, as one may imagine,
of no very great emolument. He had, however, given his son the chance of
acquiring a smattering of 'scholarship,' in the sense in which that
word is used by the less educated lower classes. To the slender store of
learning acquired in a cheap country school, the lad managed to add such
medical training as could be picked up during an apprenticeship in an
apothecary's shop. With this provision of knowledge he tried to obtain
practice in his native town. He failed to get any patients of the paying
variety. Crabbe was clumsy and absent-minded to the end of his life. He
had, moreover, a taste for botany, and the shrewd inhabitants of
Aldborough, with that perverse tendency to draw inferences which is
characteristic of people who cannot reason, argued that as he picked up
his samples in the ditches, he ought to sell the medicines presumably
compounded from them for nothing. In one way or other, poor Crabbe had
sunk to the verge of distress. Of course, under these circumstances, he
had fallen in love and engaged himself at the age of eighteen to a young
lady, apparently as poor as himself. Of course, too, he called Miss Elmy
'Mira,' and addressed her in verses whic