FOOTNOTES:
[2] My father’s first cousin, the Ven. Robert Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk, the intimate friend of Edward Fitzgerald, was the grandson of a native of Aldeburgh who owned the Unity smack in which Crabbe sailed to London in 1780. My maternal great-grandparents, as will appear, also knew the poet.
[3] One cannot fail to recall Horace’s generous acknowledgement of the liberality of his father, “macro pauper agello,” in sending him to Rome to be educated. Sat. I. vi. 71.
[4] In the “Life” by his son it is implied that Crabbe was Maskill’s assistant; but this is denied in Huchon’s “George Crabbe and his Times,” p. 63.
[5] So the “Life.” Huchon points out that his name at this time was Long, and that he subsequently assumed the name of North. Crabbe went to London on the Unity smack, the property of Robinson Groome, grandfather of Archdeacon Groome, the intimate friend of E. Fitzgerald. Huchon, op. cit., p. 81.
[6] “The Village.”
[7] In the “Life” Crabbe is said to have prescribed for his parishioners at Muston with great success.
[8] For this abominable system see Walpole, “History of England from 1815,” vol. i, p. 163, and his quotations from Romilly and Yonge. Dickens, of course, alludes to the apprenticing of parish-boys in “Oliver Twist.”
[9] Lockhart’s “Life of Scott.” Huchon points out several obvious discrepancies. “George Crabbe,” etc., p. 435.
[10] He is said to have been “Challoner Arcedekne, who built Glevering Hall,” near Parham. Huchon, “George Crabbe,” etc., p. 309. The bitterness of the satire lies in the little known fact that at the time the family of Arcedekne was not in the eighteenth century reckoned among the old county families: their fortune having been recently acquired in the East Indies.