The early struggles of a man who has won literary fame are only of importance in so far as they affect his subsequent work. Crabbe’s intellect was essentially scientific rather than imaginative. His poetry is, like Dutch art, remarkable for the finish of details and for exactness of observation. It is the same when he depicts what he saw as when he describes emotions and feelings. He had to understand before he could write. His hobby, as we have seen, was botany: he first showed talent as a mathematician; nor, because he failed in his medical work, need we suppose that his want of success was due in any way to intellectual deficiencies. Place Crabbe in a different situation. Suppose him to have walked the hospitals of London or Edinburgh, and to have made his way as a physician. He might well have taken an honoured place among the scientific men of his age. But look at the facts. His training was hardly better than that of an assistant in a chemist’s store in the most remote village nowadays. This, for example, was the hospital which Crabbe had “walked”: “Such is that room which one rude beam divides, And naked rafters form the sloping sides; * * * * * Here on a matted flock, with dust o’erspread, The drooping wretch reclines his languid head. * * * * * But soon a loud and hasty summons calls, Shakes the thin roof, and echoes round the walls, * * * * * Anon a figure enters, quaintly neat, All pride and business, bustle and conceit. * * * * * A potent quack, long versed in human ills, Who first insults the victim whom he kills; Whose murderous hand a drowsy Bench protect, And whose most tender mercy is neglect.”[6] We see the influence of Pope in the versification; but of personal experience in the subject. True, Crabbe detested his profession, and thus apostrophises medical books as-- “Ye frigid tribe, on whom I wasted long The tedious hours, and ne’er indulged in song; Ye first seducers of my easy heart, Who promised knowledge ye could not impart.” But for all this, when in later life as a clergyman he used to prescribe for his poorer parishioners, he seems to have shown a power of diagnosis which made it evident that, though he failed as a surgeon apothecary, he might, had he had the requisite education, have succeeded as a consulting physician.[7]