rom his earliest
years evinced a fondness for books, and a marked aptitude for learning.
He was sent early to the usual dame-school, and developed an insatiable
appetite for such stories and ballads as were current among the
neighbours. George Crabbe, the elder, possessed a few books, and used to
read aloud to his family passages from Milton, Young, and other didactic
poets of the eighteenth century. Furthermore he took in a country
magazine, which had a "Poet's Corner," always handed over to George for
his special benefit. The father, respecting these early signs of a
literary bent in the son, sent him to a small boarding-school at Bungay
in the same county, and a few years later to one of higher pretensions
at Stowmarket, kept by a Mr. Richard Haddon, a mathematical teacher of
some repute, where the boy also acquired some mastery of Latin and
acquaintance with the Latin classics. In his later years he was given
(perhaps a little ostentatiously) to prefixing quotations from Horace,
Juvenal, Martial, and oven more recondite authors, to the successive
sections of _The Borough_ But wherever he found books--especially
poetry--he read them and remembered them. He early showed considerable
acquaintance with the best English poets, and although Pope controlled
his metrical forms, and something more than the forms, to the end of his
life, he had somehow acquired a wide knowledge of Shakespeare, and even
of such then less known poets as Spenser, Raleigh, and Cowley.

After some three years at Stowmarket--it now being settled that medicine
was to be his calling--George was taken from school, and the search
began in earnest for some country practitioner to whom he might be
apprenticed. An interval of a few months was spent at home, during which
he assisted his father at the office on Slaughden Quay, and in the year
1768, when he was still under fourteen years of age, a post was found
for him in the house of a surgeon at Wickham-Brook, near Bury St.
Edmunds. This practitioner combined the practise of agriculture on a
small scale with that of physic, and young Crabbe had to take his share
in the labours of the farm. The result was not satisfactory, and after
three years of this rough and uncongenial life, a more profitable
situation was found with a Mr. Page of Woodbridge--the memorable home of
Bernard Barton and Edward FitzGerald. Crabbe became Mr. Page's pupil in
1771, and remained with him until 1775.

We have the authority of