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 describe 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.