fortune of which was made by Mr. Wilkie Collins in
_No Name_) on Christmas Eve, 1754. That not uncommon infirmity of noble
minds which seeks to prove distinguished ancestry seems to have had no
hold on the plain common sense of the Crabbe family, who maintained
themselves to be at the best Norfolk yeomen, and though they possessed a
coat-of-arms, avowed with much frankness that they did not know how they
got it. A hundred and forty years ago they had apparently lost even the
dignity of yeomanhood, and occupied stations quite in the lower rank of
the middle class as tradesmen, non-commissioned officers in the navy or
the merchant service, and so forth. George Crabbe, the grandfather, was
collector of customs at Aldborough, but his son, also a George, was a
parish schoolmaster and a parish clerk before he returned to the
Suffolk port as deputy collector and then as salt-master, or collector
of the salt duties. He seems to have had no kind of polish, and late in
life was a mere rough drinking exciseman; but his education, especially
in mathematics, appears to have been considerable, and his ability in
business not small. The third George, his eldest son, was also fairly
though very irregularly educated for a time, and his father, perceiving
that he was "a fool about a boat," had the rather unusual common sense
to destine him to a learned profession. Unluckily his will was better
than his means, and while the profession which Crabbe chose or which was
chosen for him--that of medicine--was not the best suited to his tastes
or talents, the resources of the family were not equal to giving him a
full education, even in that. He was still at intervals employed in the
Customs warehouses at "piling up butter and cheese" even after he was
apprenticed at fourteen to a country surgeon. The twelve years which he
spent in this apprenticeship, in an abhorred return for a short time to
the cheese and butter, in a brief visit to London, where he had no means
to walk the hospitals, and in an attempt to practise with little or no
qualification at Aldborough itself, present a rather dismal history of
apprenticeship which taught nothing. But Love was, for once, most truly
and literally Crabbe's solace and his salvation, his master and his
patron. When he was barely eighteen, still an apprentice, and
possessed, as far as can be made out, of neither manners nor prospects,
he met a certain Miss Sarah Elmy. She was three or four years older than
h