In 1754 George Crabbe was born in the old sea-faring town of Aldborough, in the county of Suffolk. His father, the collector of salt-duties, or salt-master of the town, was a churlish sullen fellow at the best of times; but, falling upon adversity in his old days, he became the _beau-ideal_ of a domestic tyrant. He was not, however, without his respectable points. Though a poor man, he did his best to educate his children above the ranks of the very poor. One of them became a thriving glazier in his native town; another went to sea, and became captain of a Liverpool slave-ship; and a third, also a sailor, met with strange vicissitudes--at one time enjoying a very considerable amount of prosperity, and then suffering penury and persecution. A studious and a delicate lad, George, the eldest of the party, was designed for some pursuit more adapted to his disposition and physical powers than the avocations of working mechanics, or the hard duties of the marine service. When quite a child, he had, amongst the inhabitants of Aldborough, a reputation for mental superiority that often did him good service. On one occasion he chanced to offend a playmate--his senior and "master," as boys and savages term it--and was on the point of receiving a good thrashing nigh the roaring waves of old ocean, when a third boy, a common acquaintance, exclaimed in a voice of affright:-- "Yar marn't middle a' him; lit him aloone--he ha' got l'arning." The plea was admitted as a good one, and the future bard, taking his benefit of clergy, escaped the profanation of a drubbing. George was sent to two respectable schools, the one at Bungay, in Suffolk, and the other (the better of the two) at Stowmarket, in the same county. The expense of such an education, even if it amounted to no more than £20 per annum, was no small undertaking for the salt-master of a fishing-village; for Aldborough--now a handsome and much frequented provincial watering-place--was in 1750 nothing better than a collection of huts, whose humble inhabitants possessed little stake in the commonweal beyond the right of sending to parliament two members to represent their interests and opinions. On leaving school, in his fourteenth year, George was apprenticed to a country doctor of a very rough sort, who plied his trade at Wickham Brook, a small village near Bury St. Edmunds. It is a fact worthy of note, as throwing some light on the state of the profession in the provinces, that the apprentice shared the bed of his master's stable-boy. At Wickham Brook, however, the lad did not remain long to endure such indignity. He was removed from that scene of trial, and placed under the tutelage of Mr. Page, a surgeon of Woodbridge, a gentleman of good connections and polite tastes, and through the marriage of his daughter with the late famous Alderman Wood, an ancestor of a learned judge, who is not more eminent as a lawyer than beloved as a man.