“Much amazed was that good man. ‘Indeed,’ Said he, with gladdening eye, will money breed? How have I lived? I grieve with all my heart For my late knowledge of this precious art; Five pounds for every hundred will he give? And then the hundred--I begin to live.” Such was the simplicity of the good folk of Aldeburgh, and so little news of the great world reached the place that, when Crabbe, at the age of twenty-five or six, went to London in 1780, he had never heard of the genius and tragic fate of Chatterton. I shall pass over the terrible year our aspirant for fame spent in the Metropolis. It is a matter of personal pride to me to quote the following passage from the “Life”: “The only acquaintance he had on entering London was a Mrs. Burcham, who had been in early youth a friend of Miss Elmy’s, and who was now the wife of a linen-draper in Cornhill. This worthy woman and her husband received him with cordial kindness; then invited him to make their house his home whenever he chose; and as often as he availed himself of this invitation he was treated with that frank familiarity which cancels the appearance of obligation.” (“Life,” by the Rev. G. Crabbe.) I am glad to think my great-grand-parents understood the duty of hospitality. At last, after a terrible struggle with poverty and the unsuccessful publication of a poem called “The Candidate,” Crabbe, who had hitherto sought for a patron in vain, found one in Edmund Burke. It is said that the following lines, expressive of the writer’s feelings on quitting Aldeburgh, satisfied Burke that his petitioner was a poet: “As on their neighbouring beach the swallows stand, And wait for favouring winds to leave the land, While still for flight the ready wing is spread, So waited I the favouring hour, and fled; Fled from those shores where guilt and famine reign, And cried, ‘Ah! hapless they who still remain, Who still remain to hear the ocean roar, Whose greedy waves devour the lessening shore; Till some fierce tide, with more imperious sway, Sweeps the low hut and all it holds away; When the sad tenant weeps from door to door, And begs a poor protection from the poor.’”