eburgh, a favourite place with my father, as the home of
his forefathers. They were sea-folk; and Robinson Groome, my
great-grandfather, was owner of the Unity lugger, on which the poet
Crabbe went up to London. When his son, my grandfather, was about to
take orders, he expressed a timid hope that the bishop would deem him a
proper candidate. "And who the devil in hell," cried Robinson Groome,
"should he ordain if he doesn't ordain you, my dear?" {68} This I have
heard my father tell FitzGerald, as also of his "Aunt Peggy and Aunt D."
(_i.e._, Deborah), who, if ever Crabbe was mentioned in their hearing,
always smoothed their black mittens and remarked--"_We_ never thought
much of Mr Crabbe."

{Edward FitzGerald: p67.jpg}

Our house was Clare Cottage, where FitzGerald himself lodged long
afterwards. "Two little rooms, enough for me; a poor civil woman pleased
to have me in them." It fronts the sea, and is (or was) a small
two-storeyed house, with a patch of grass before it, a summer-house, and
a big white figurehead, belike of the shipwrecked Clare. So over the
garden-gate FitzGerald leant one June morning, and asked me, a boy of
eight, was my father at home. I remember him dimly then as a tall sea-
browned man, who took us boys out for several sails, on the first of
which I and a brother were both of us woefully sea-sick. Afterwards I
remember picnics down the Deben river, and visits to him at Woodbridge,
first in his lodgings on the Market Hill over Berry the gunsmith's, and
then at his own house, Little Grange. The last was in May 1883. My
father and I had been spending a few days with Captain Brooke of Ufford,
the possessor of one of the finest private libraries in England. {69}
From Ufford we drove on to Woodbridge, and passed some pleasant hours
with FitzGerald. We walked down to the riverside, and sat on a bench at
the foot of the lime-tree walk. There was a small boy, I remember,
wading among the ooze; and FitzGerald, calling him to him, said--"Little
boy, did you never hear tell of the fate of the Master of Ravenswood?"
And then he told him the story. At dinner there was much talk, as
always, of many things, old and new, but chiefly old; and at nine we
started on our homeward drive. Within a month I heard that FitzGerald
was dead.

From my own recollections, then, of FitzGerald himself, but still more of
my father's frequent talk of him, from some notes and fragments that have
escaped hebdomad