Quaffs the bright juice with all the gust of sense,
And clouds his brain in torpid elegance.”
Crabbe completed his apprenticeship in 1775 and once more returned to Aldeburgh. His family circumstances were extremely distressed, his father had changed for the worse, and his mother’s health had broken down. Again he was compelled to act as a warehouseman at Slaughden Quay. He managed to get to London for a short time, nominally to walk the hospitals; but having no funds he had, as he expresses it, to “pick up a little surgical knowledge as cheap as he could.” After ten months’ privation, Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh to become the assistant of a surgeon-apothecary, named Maskill,[4] who had opened a shop in the borough, and on his retirement Crabbe, though “imperfectly grounded in the commonest details of his profession,” set up for himself. His medical career was a complete failure. He had not the requisite knowledge and lacked means to acquire it, nor was he able to adapt himself to the rough surroundings amid which he lived. Aldeburgh was peopled, to quote his own words, by—
“A wild amphibious race
With sullen woe expressed on every face,
Who far from civil acts and social fly,
And scowl at strangers with suspicious eye.”
Sneered at as a poor and useless scholar by the relatives of Miss Elmy, to whom he was now engaged, regarded as a failure by his rough but not ungenerous father, Crabbe’s life was far from happy; the only relaxation he found was in the study of botany, and the only encouragement in the society of the officers of the Warwickshire militia, who were for a time quartered in the town. Their colonel, General Conway, showed the young surgeon attention, and gave him some valuable Latin books on botany. At last, wearied and disgusted with his life, Crabbe gave up attempting to be a doctor; and, aided by a loan of five pounds from Mr. Dudley North, brother to the candidate for the borough, he made his way to London in 1780 as a literary adventurer.[5]
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,