o different from that of his native Aldeburgh, was of great
service in enlarging his poetical outlook. Great Parham, distant about
five miles from Saxmundham, and about thirteen from Aldeburgh, is at
this day a village of great rural charm, although a single-lined branch
of the Great Eastern wanders boldly among its streams and cottage
gardens through the very heart of the place. The dwelling of the Tovells
has many years ago disappeared--an entirely new hall having risen on the
old site; but there stands in the parish, a few fields away, an older
Parham Hall;--to-day a farm-house, dear to artists, of singular
picturesqueness, surrounded and even washed by a deep moat, and shaded
by tall trees--a haunt, indeed, "of ancient peace." The neighbourhood of
this old Hall, and the luxuriant beauty of the inland village, so
refreshing a contrast to the barrenness and ugliness of the country
round his native town, enriched Crabbe's mind with many memories that
served him well in his later poetry.

In the meantime he was practising verse, though as yet showing little
individuality. A Lady's Magazine of the day, bearing the name of its
publisher, Mr. Wheble, had offered a prize for the best poem on the
subject of _Hope_, which Crabbe was so fortunate as to win, and the same
magazine printed other short pieces in the same year, 1772. They were
signed "G.C., Woodbridge," and included divers lyrics addressed to Mira.
Other extant verses of the period of his residence at Woodbridge show
that he was making experiments in stanza-form on the model of earlier
English poets, though without showing more than a certain imitative
skill. But after he had been three years in the town, he made a more
notable experiment and had found a printer in Ipswich to take the risk
of publication. In 1775 was printed in that town a didactic satire of
some four hundred lines in the Popian couplet, entitled _Inebriety_.
Coleridge's friend, who had to write a prize poem on the subject of Dr.
Jenner, boldly opened with the invocation--

"Inoculation! Heavenly maid, descend."

As the title of Crabbe's poem stands for the bane and not the antidote,
he could not adopt the same method, but he could not resist some other
precedents of the epic sort, and begins thus, in close imitation of _The
Dunciad_--

"The mighty spirit, and its power which stains
The bloodless cheek and vivifies the brains,
I sing"

The apparent object of the satire was to descri