Because he took Holy Orders and won his fame as a poet while a clergyman, Crabbe’s experiences, on which he founded his rhymed tales--for such his poems really are--are considered to have been mainly clerical. But, to understand him aright, we must remember that he was more or less engaged in the practice of medicine from the age of fourteen to that of twenty-five. It would be easy to quote many lines wherein the doctor and not the parson is revealed, and he never lost the professional dislike of quacks or contempt of valetudinarians. Let us now consider how Crabbe’s experiences of Aldeburgh appear in his poems. I will take most of my extracts from his early poem, “The Village,” but a few will be from “The Borough,” which did not appear till more than twenty years later. In “The Village” Crabbe boldly asks: “From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray, Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?” and declines to follow the fashion of speaking of rural life as the height of felicity. He says: “I grant indeed that fields and flocks have charms For him that grazes or for him that farms;” But when amid such pleasing scenes I trace The poor laborious natives of the place. * * * * * Then shall I dare these real ills to hide In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?” In this spirit he describes the barren coast of East Suffolk, not then the haunt of the holiday-maker and the golfer, but the battleground of the smuggler and the preventive men, the home of-- “A bold and artful, surly, savage race, Who only skilled to take the finny tribe, The yearly dinner, or septennial bribe; Wait on the shore, and, as the waves run high, On the tossed vessel bend their eager eye, Which to the coast directs its venturous way, Theirs, or the ocean’s miserable prey.” This description of the barren land about the coast well illustrates Crabbe’s power of observation: “Lo, where the heath with withering brake grown o’er, Lends the light turf that warms the neighbouring poor; From thence a length of burning sand appears, Where the thin harvest waves its wither’d ears; Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o’er the land, and rob the blighted rye; There thistles stretch their prickly arms afar, And to the ragged infant threaten war; There poppies nodding, mock the hope of toil; Here the blue bugloss paints the sterile soil; Hardy and high above the slender sheaf, The slimy mallow waves her silky leaf; O’er the young shoot the charlock throws a shade, And clasping tares cling round the sickly blade; With mingled tints the rocky coasts abound, And a sad splendour vainly shines around.” We have already heard of the workhouse hospital and the “potent quack” who attended to the sick. Let us now listen to Crabbe’s description of the young clergyman who ministered to the afflicted of his village: