be the varied phases of
Intemperance, as observed by the writer in different classes of
society--the Villager, the Squire, the Farmer, the Parish Clergyman, and
even the Nobleman's Chaplain, an official whom Crabbe as yet knew only
by imagination. From childhood he had had ample experience of the vice
in the rough and reckless homes of the Aldeburgh poor. His subsequent
medical pursuits must have brought him into occasional contact with it
among the middle classes, and even in the manor-houses and parsonages
for which he made up the medicine in his master's surgery. But his
treatment of the subject was too palpably imitative of one poetic model,
already stale from repetition. Not only did he choose Pope's couplet,
with all its familiar antitheses and other mannerisms, but frankly
avowed it by parodying whole passages from the _Essay on Man_ and _The
Dunciad_, the original lines being duly printed at the foot of the page.
There is little of Crabbe's later accent of sympathy. Epigram is too
obviously pursued, and much of the suggested acquaintance with the
habits of the upper classes--

"Champagne the courtier drinks, the spleen to chase,
The colonel Burgundy, and Port his grace"

is borrowed from books and not from life. Nor did the satire gain in
lucidity from any editorial care. There are hardly two consecutive lines
that do not suffer from a truly perverse theory of punctuation. A copy
of the rare original is in the writer's possession, at the head of which
the poet has inscribed his own maturer judgment of this youthful
effort--"Pray let not this be seen ... there is very little of it that
I'm not heartily ashamed of." The little quarto pamphlet--"Ipswich,
printed and sold by C. Punchard, Bookseller, in the Butter Market, 1775.
Price one shilling and sixpence"--seems to have attracted no attention.
And yet a critic of experience would have recognised in it a force as
well as a fluency remarkable in a young man of twenty-one, and pointing
to quite other possibilities when the age of imitation should have
passed away.

In 1775 Crabbe's term of apprenticeship to Mr. Page expired, and he
returned to his home at Aldeburgh, hoping soon to repair to London and
there continue his medical studies. But he found the domestic situation
much changed for the worse. His mother (who, as we have seen, was
several years older than her husband) was an invalid, and his father's
habits and temper were not improving with time. He w