Chapter II: Part 2

“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:

“A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday task
As much as God or man can fairly ask;
The rest he gives to loves and labours light,
To fields the morning, and to feasts the night.

* * * * *

A sportsman keen, he shouts through half the day,
And, skilled at whist, devotes the night to play.”

But I must reluctantly forbear to quote more from “The Village,” and ask you to turn your attention to two passages in “The Borough,” which show what sort of men lived in Crabbe’s native town, and also indicate the power our author has in depicting two very different characters.

I will take Peter Grimes, the fisherman, first. Grimes was one of those human monsters who delight in cruelty; and the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, to its shame, furnished victims for its exercise in workhouse apprentices. The guardians of the overflowing workhouses of London were accustomed to get rid of their superfluous numbers by binding children as apprentices to masters, who practically became the owners of the little victims they were paid to teach.

“Peter had heard there were in London then--
Still have their being!--workhouse-clearing men,
Who, undisturbed by feelings just or kind,
Would parish-boys to needy tradesmen bind;
They in their want a trifling sum would take,
And toiling slaves of piteous orphans make.”[8]

Grimes did several of these wretched boys to death by his cruelty, which was notorious in the borough, but the shocking thing was that nobody troubled to interfere.

“None put the question: ‘Peter, dost thou give
The boy his food? What, man! the lad must live;
Consider, Peter, let the child have bread,
He’ll serve thee better if he’s stroked and fed.’
None reasoned thus; and some, on hearing cries,
Said calmly, ‘Grimes is at his exercise.’”

At last Grimes, who seems to have been never quite sane in his brutality, went mad, and died raving at visions of his aged father and the boys he had done to death.

More inviting is a picture of another fisherman, the mayor of the borough:

“He was a fisher from his earliest day,
And placed his nets within the borough bay,
Where, by his skates, his herrings, and his soles,
He lived, nor dreamed of corporation doles.”

At last he saved £240 ($1200), and asked a friend what to do with it. The friend suggests “put it out on interest.”

“‘Oh, but,’ said Daniel, ‘that’s a dangerous plan,
He may be robbed like any other man.’”

The friend tells Daniel that he will be paid five per cent. every year.

“‘What good is that?’ quoth Daniel, ‘for ’tis plain
If part I take, there can but part remain.’”

With great difficulty the principle of a mortgage is explained, and at last,

“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.’”

Burke selected two poems, “The Village” and “The Library,” for publication. He introduced Crabbe to Fox, and also to Reynolds: the latter brought him to Dr. Johnson; and when Burke heard that Crabbe desired to be ordained, he induced Dr. Yonge, Bishop of Norwich, to overlook his unacademic education, and to admit him to the ministry. Lord Thurlow, himself an East Anglian, had at first refused to receive Crabbe, but now treated him with much kindness, and gave him £100 ($500); so Crabbe returned to Aldeburgh a clergyman--a very different position from that which he had occupied on leaving--and was shortly summoned thence to be domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, on the recommendation of his firm friend, Mr. Burke. From the Duke’s seat at Belvoir “The Village” was published, after it had been submitted to Burke and Johnson. Naturally Crabbe’s sentiments about rustic happiness and virtue accorded with the views of the worthy doctor, but it is pleasing to remark the kindness which made him at the height of his fame labour to improve the work of the younger poet. Very characteristic are Johnson’s corrections of Crabbe’s manuscript. Here is how Crabbe writes at the commencement of “The Village”:

“In fairer scenes, where peaceful pleasures spring,
Tityrus the pride of Mantuan swains might sing:
But charmed by him, or smitten with his views,
Shall modern poets court the Mantuan muse?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where fancy leads, or Virgil led the way?”

From Johnson’s hands little remains unchanged:

“On Mincio’s banks in Cæsar’s bounteous reign,
If Tityrus found the golden age again,
Must sleepy bards the flattering dreams prolong
Mechanick echoes of the Mantuan song?
From Truth and Nature shall we widely stray,
Where Virgil, not where Fancy, leads the way?”

I cannot feel very certain myself that the poet or his corrector got the concluding line right.

I must now pass somewhat hurriedly over a long period. In 1785 Crabbe published “The Newspaper,” and for twenty-two years he settled down to his clerical duties and did not reappear as an author. He lived at Stathern and Muston in Leicestershire the happy, domestic life of a country clergyman, returning to Suffolk when his wife inherited a share in the estate of her uncle, Mr. Tovell, at Parham.

In 1807 Crabbe appeared once more as a poet with “The Parish Register,” and from this time his fame was unquestioned. “The Borough” followed and then “The Tales.” But I need not weary you with dates and details. A new generation arose to encourage Crabbe. His first poems had been hailed by Burke, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Johnson, and Fox; his later by Scott, Byron, Lord Holland, and Rogers. His last days were spent in comfort and comparative affluence at Trowbridge, to which he had been appointed by a later Duke of Rutland. In 1817 he was lionised in London, and in 1822 he paid his famous visit to Edinburgh and found Sir Walter Scott in the midst of that preposterous pageant in which the King and Sir William Curtis, Alderman of the City of London, delighted the Scottish nation by appearing at Holyrood, tremendous in Stewart tartan, with claymore, philabeg, and other accessories of the garb of old Gaul. Scott, unwearied by his efforts to organise the King’s visit, had time to welcome a brother poet, and it will be remembered that so delighted was he to greet one whose writings had so often occupied his attention that he sat down on the sacred glass out of which George IV had deigned to drink, with the natural result.[9] Crabbe lived on till February, 1832, passing away, full of years and honours, in the seventy-eighth year of his age.

Crabbe’s works are sufficient to fill seven volumes, and it is not possible to do more than endeavour to form an estimate of him by limiting oneself to a few topics. I must content myself with three, and I fear that even then I cannot do justice to these. Those I propose are:

I. Crabbe as reflecting the manners of his age.

II. As a delineator of character.

III. His place as a poet.

I. I have spoken of Crabbe’s scientific education--such as it was--and of his power of observation, and I find, even in later life, more of the doctor than the parson. It is for this reason that his work is of more value than that of greater poets in reflecting his age. For Crabbe was not one of those who let “fancy lead the way,” but dealt with sober realities of experience, and even refrained from generalising or theorising. For the religious life of the period Crabbe’s poems are an invaluable document of which historians have, I suggest, made too little use. There is no reason to suppose that our author took Orders simply to secure literary leisure. His early diaries prove him a most devout man, and the fact that he occupied himself twenty-two years in parish work, without publishing, shows his devotion to his profession. Yet he apparently saw no harm in accepting two livings in Dorsetshire from the Lord Chancellor, which he scarcely ever went near, but took other work in the Vale of Belvoir. Nor did he feel any compunctions later in leaving his parishes in the Midlands to the care of a non-resident clergyman in order to live on his wife’s property in Suffolk; and he evidently considered the then Duke of Rutland unduly slow in providing for him. He was not always popular with his parishioners. This was not unnatural at Aldeburgh, where he had been known under less prosperous circumstances, but he met with a good deal of opposition when, after his long residence in Suffolk, he returned to Muston; and at Trowbridge he was at first considered too worldly for his flock, and only slowly won their sincere respect. A strict moralist, he had no dislike of social pleasure, and as a staunch Whig he shrank from enthusiasm of every kind. The serious and the profane alike distrusted him. The worldly remonstrated at his description of the workhouse chaplain, to which allusion has been made, and in deference to the complaints of the religious world the vigorous lines in “The Library”:

“Calvin grows gentle in this silent coast,
Nor finds a single heretic to roast,”

make way for a weaker couplet with a half line plagiarised from Dryden:

“Socinians here and Calvinists abide
And thin partitions angry chiefs divide.”

Let us consider the clergy and religious teachers generally as he describes them.

I can only allude to the five rectors, whom old Dibble, the village clerk in the “Parish Register,” remembered. First comes “Good Master Addle,” who

“Filled the seven-fold surplice fairly out,”

and “dozing died”; Next was Parson Peele, whose favourite text was “I will not spare you,” and with “piercing jokes, and he’d a plenteous store,” raised the tithes all round. Dr. “Grandspear” followed Peele, a man who never stinted his “nappy beer,” and whom even cool Dissenters wished and hoped that a man so kind, “A way to heaven, though not their own, might find.” After him came the “Author Rector”--

“Careless was he of surplice, hood and band,
And kindly took them as they came to hand.”

He was succeeded by the young man from Cambridge, assailed in his youth by a “clamorous sect,” who preached “conviction” so violently that “Our best sleepers started as they slept.”

But says old Dibble:

“Down he sank upon his wretched bed
And gloomy crotchets filled his wandering head.”

And it is on this point that Crabbe is so illuminating as to the spirit of his age. His difficulties as a clergyman were due rather to the fanaticism than to the indifference of his flock. In “Sir Eustace Grey,” a very powerful description of a madman who finds religious peace at last, the poet concludes,--

“But, Ah! though time could yield relief
And soften woes it cannot cure;
Would we not suffer pain and grief
To have our reason sound and sure?
Then let us keep our bosoms pure
Our fancies’ favourite flights suppress;
Prepare the body to endure,
And bend the mind to meet distress,
And then His Guardian care implore,
Whom demons dread and men adore.”

As the doctor recommends a moderate and temperate life as the best preventive of disease, and distrusts strong remedies and universal panaceas, so Crabbe (true to the best medical tradition) regards the pastoral work of healing the soul. Tolerant in most respects, he is severe on what the eighteenth century styled “enthusiasm,” and on sentimentalism in religion generally.

Thus, in “The Borough” we have in the letter on religious sects a description of the contempt the Calvinistic Methodists had for Church teaching:

“Hark to the Churchman; day by day he cries:
Children of men, be virtuous, be wise,
Seek patience, justice, temp’rance, meekness, truth,
In age be courteous, be sedate in youth,--So
they advise, and when such things be read,
How can we wonder that their flocks are dead?”

This “cauld morality,” as Scott makes Mr. Trumbull call it in “Redgauntlet,” is contrasted with a really rousing sermon:

“Further and further spread the conquering word
As loud he cried--‘the Battle of the Lord.’
Ev’n those apart who were the sound denied,
Fell down instinctive, and in spirit died.
Nor stayed he yet--his eye, his frown, his speech,
His very gesture, had a power to teach;
With outstretch’d arms, strong voice, and piercing call
He won the field and made the Dagons fall;
And thus in triumph took his glorious way,
Through scenes of horror, terror, and dismay.”

Crabbe often found his work hindered by a sort of fatalistic quietism which gave no hope to the “unconverted,” even when they sought the aid of the minister of religion. In “Abel Keene” we have the story of a merchant’s clerk who abandoned his faith, and then in days of poverty came for help:

“Said the good man, ‘and then rejoice therefore:
’Tis good to tremble: prospects then are fair,
When the lost soul is plunged in just despair.
Once thou wert simply honest, just and pure,
Whole as thou thought’st, and never wish’d a cure:

* * * * *

‘What must I do,’ I said, ‘my soul to free?’
‘Do nothing, man--it will be done for thee.’--
‘But must I not, my reverend guide, believe?’
‘If thou art call’d thou wilt the faith receive:’--
‘But I repent not.’--Angry he replied,
‘If thou art call’d thou need’st naught beside:
Attend on us, and if ’tis Heaven’s decree
The call will come--if not, ah, woe! for thee.’”

Crabbe had very little toleration for spiritual valetudinarians. He liked a good practical Christianity and was a little inclined to class the overscrupulous with the _malades imaginaires_. In “The Gentleman Farmer” we have a cleverly told story of a man of property, a professed atheist and an avowed enemy of priests and doctors. At last he fell ill; and his artful housekeeper, the meek Rebecca, produces a Scotch cousin, Dr. Mollet. He is so successful that Rebecca decides to allow the Rev. Mr. Whisp, a converted ostler, to advise her master. Mollet and Whisp between them point out that it is his duty to marry Rebecca. Then the three batten happily on their victim:

“Mollet his body orders, Whisp his soul,
And o’er his purse the lady takes control.”

Though Crabbe lived in the days of the French Revolution and Tom Paine, infidelity seems to have given him far less trouble than the enthusiasm of his parishioners. In “The Learned Boy” we have the tale of a precocious lad such as our poet detested, a mean little creature, neat and docile at school, to whom much could be taught because he could imitate without reflecting:

“He thought not much indeed--but what depends
On pains and care, was at his fingers’ ends.”

As it was impossible to make such a lad into a farmer like his honest father, he was sent to an office in town and picked up some up-to-date views of the Bible from a brother-clerk. On his return he thus explained his views to his grandmother, much to the dear old lady’s distress:

“I myself began
To feel disturbed and to my Bible ran;
I now am wiser--yet agree in this,
The book has things that are not much amiss;
It is a fine old work, and I protest
I hate to hear it treated as a jest;
The book has wisdom in it, if you look
Wisely upon it as another book.”

The father, overhearing his hopeful son, treats him to a long discourse, driven home with a cartwhip, and concluding:

“Teachers men honour, learners they allure;
But learners teaching of contempt are sure;
Scorn is their certain meed, and smart their only cure.”

I have dealt hitherto with the subject of religion as showing how Crabbe can be used to illustrate his age. For politics I may refer to the witty tale of “The Dumb Orators”; for social life to “Amusements in the Borough,” and to “Clelia” and “Blaney” in the same collection.

II. In the biography the son writes with much discrimination of his father’s genius:

“Whatever truth there may be in these lines (from “The Learned Boy,” disparaging order), it is certain that this insensibility to the beauty of order was a defect in his own mind; arising from what I must call his want of taste.... This view of his mind is, I must add, confirmed by his remarkable indifference to almost all the proper objects of taste. He had no real love for painting, for music, for architecture, or for what a painter’s eye considers as the beauties of a landscape. But he had a passion for science--the science of the human mind first--,” etc.

I believe that in delineation of character Crabbe is an artist indeed, worthy to rank with Jane Austen and the Brontës, and perhaps even more subtle than these ladies. He was not without a certain cynicism, and his powers of critical observation were great. He draws the drunken old reprobate in “The Borough,” the magnificent “Sir Denys Brand,” the gentle, suffering “Ellen Orford,” the University don in “Schools,” with masterly skill. I can only indicate his power in this respect by a few inadequate quotations.

The sketches of the characters in the almshouses in “The Borough” I commend to you as masterpieces. Clelia and Blaney had come down in life, and were without much excuse. They had been jobbed into the institution by Sir Denys Brand, and his words at the meeting of trustees throw a world of light on the baronet’s character. Of Blaney he says:

“‘’Tis true,’ said he, ‘the fellow’s quite a brute--
A very beast; but yet, with all his sin,
He has a manner--let the devil in.’”

Of Clelia:

“‘With all her faults,’ he said, ‘the woman knew
How to distinguish--had a manner, too,
And, as they say, she is allied to some
In decent station--let the creature come.’”

But though these two are powerfully drawn, Crabbe expends more care and skill in depicting Benbow, who had been

“a jovial trader; men enjoyed
The night with him: the day was unemployed.”

Benbow, whenever he could find an audience, used to dilate on “The men of might to mingle strong drink,” whom he had known. There was Squire Asgill, whose manor house was a disgrace and scandal to the countryside. It is needless to particularise. I can explain best by saying that his life was that of Sir Pitt Crawley in his later days, only he was more hospitable and generous. Let us see the worthy squire at his best, in church:

“His worship ever was a churchman true,
He held in scorn the methodistic crew;
May God defend the Church and save the King,
He’d pray devoutly and divinely sing.
Admit that he the holy day would spend
As priests approved not, still he was a friend;
Much then I blame the preacher as too nice
To call such trifles by the name of vice;
Hinting, though gently and with cautious speech,
Of good example--’tis their trade to preach.

* * * * *

A weaker man, had he been so reviled,
Had left the place--he only swore and smiled.”

A still greater hero of Benbow’s was Captain Dowling, who was ready to drink against any rival:

“Man after man they from the trial shrank,
And Dowling ever was the last that drank.”

But we must leave the old reprobate, and go on to a far subtler delineation of character. Sir Denys Brand, to use Crabbe’s own words, was “maybe too highly placed for an author, who seldom ventures above middle life to delineate.” It is admitted that Sir Denys was a real person, and the biographer withholds his name out of consideration for his family.[10] It must be remembered that Crabbe’s nature was both proud and sensitive, and the scathing satire he expends on Sir Denys was probably provoked by some real or fancied slight.

He is one of the trustees of the almshouses. He took the office--

“True ’twas beneath him; but to do men good
Was motive never by his heart withstood.”

Sir Denys is an aristocratic prig of the first water, and Crabbe hated prigs. He is one of those men who can be, with a certain amount of truth, described as possessing all the virtues:

“In him all merits were decreed to meet,
Sincere though cautious, frank and yet discreet,
Just all his dealings, faithful every word,
His passions’ master and his temper’s lord.”

His benevolence was splendid, and known to all men:

“He left to meaner minds the simple deed,
By which the houseless rest, the hungry feed;
His was a public bounty, vast and grand,
’Twas not in him to work with viewless hand.

* * * * *

He the first lifeboat plann’d; to him the place
Is deep in debt--’twas he revived the race.”

Yet nobody liked him--

“’Twould give me joy [says Crabbe] some gracious deed to meet
That has not called for glory in the street;
Who felt for many, could not always shun,
In some soft moment to be kind to one;
And yet they tell us, when Sir Denys died,
That not a widow in the borough cried.”

III. Perhaps it may be said that the subject of my lecture was after all rather a commonplace old gentleman, and if what I have said leaves this view, it is because I have failed to convey the effect which the study of his works has left upon me. He certainly made a great impression in his time, and was hailed as a true poet in an age of poets. Nor is an age always wrong when it acclaims a man in whom posterity sees little merit. To compare Crabbe with Byron as a poet would be as absurd as to place his little stories on a level with the romances of Scott, whether in prose or verse. But in his own time men rated him very highly, and this is the more remarkable because he was essentially a man of the eighteenth century, who achieved his reputation in the nineteenth. He saturated himself in Pope and Dryden, and the wits of a bygone age, and never conformed to the taste of his own. The romantic movement, much as he admired Scott’s writings, never influenced Crabbe nor does he seem to have been affected by the Lake Poets. He was simply himself: simple-minded if sensitive, full of courage, and with a quiet dignity of his own. Unworldly, yet remarkably shrewd, curiously blind to the beauties of Nature and of art, yet wonderfully alive to the marvels of the world and the pathos of life. Stern and uncompromising as a realist, he lacked neither sympathy nor imagination, and possessed a saving sense of descriptive humour. Lord Thurlow said of him, “He’s as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen, by G--d,” and he has much of the winning simplicity of Fielding’s charming clerical creation. And yet he had the elevation of character and the genius with fearless hand to tear the veil which hid the lives of the poor from their richer neighbours, to expose the cruelty, injustice, and rapacity of an age which for all its greatness was singularly callous and unsympathetic of weakness and suffering; and Crabbe may take his place not only with the poets of his time, but with the Clarksons, the Howards, the Frys, and the good men and women who succeeded in inaugurating an era of practical humanity. We need not grudge him the generous commendation of the greatest among his contemporary poets--

“Nature’s sternest painter and her best.”

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.

LECTURE III

MARGARET CATCHPOLE

May I invite you to-day to a remote corner of England and ask you to associate with rather humble folk? Our heroine is a servant maid; her romance is her love for a smuggler and the faithful affection of a young farmer. The greatest personages to whom I shall introduce you are a Suffolk brewer and his worthy lady and uncommonly numerous family, one of whom was my grandfather. Yet it is almost impossible to imagine that men alive within our memory should have shared even as young children in the scenes I have to describe--the lawlessness of the country, the wild acts recorded, the stilted language employed by the chief actors. The strange callousness of the criminal code, the very piety displayed by some of the principal characters, are completely out of date and almost incomprehensible. The author himself of this true romance, though he only died in 1877, evidently wrote and thought in ways quite alien to those now in vogue.

I shall continue what I have said about Crabbe by attempting briefly to describe the county of Suffolk (the South-folk), which must occupy our attention during this lecture. I do so with no apology, for I believe that many a New England family tree springs from roots deeply embedded in its soil.

One thing realised by every child born in East Anglia is that he is not one of those inferior people who are born in the “Shires.” His native land is not called after any town, Northampton, Bedford, Leicester, or Cambridge: he belongs to a race, not to a territorial division, invented less than a thousand years ago. He and his kinsmen, the North folk, are East Anglians; and the rest of the world are to him “furriners,” or people who came from the “Sheeres.” Not that he is an unmixed race--far from it. The peasantry were in the land long before the Angles arrived. They are a small dark people, who have survived countless invasions and will probably outlive modern civilisation. When you see them beating a field or covert for game and kill hares and rabbits by throwing their sticks with unerring aim, you feel that they do much as their ancestors did before the dawn of history. The Anglian is a big blond man slow of speech and apparently somewhat dull, but in a bargain he is seldom the loser. The little town of Hadleigh was once the capital of Alfred’s rival, Guthrum, the Dane; and the Norse origin of many families reveals itself in Grimwood, Grimwade, Grimsey, and Grimes. Flemings and Dutch, French Huguenots, have all contributed to the population of East Anglia; but despite the blending of nationalities there is a strong feeling of a common tie binding all these heterogeneous elements together. Yet there are curious local divisions existing to this day. The eastern and western parts of the county are at constant feud. When the county councils were established in the ‘eighties,’ Suffolk had to be divided into East and West, because the two would not work together. When last year the county was made a single diocese, Ipswich would not allow the ancient western monastic town of Bury St. Edmunds to give the bishop his title; and Bury St. Edmunds scorned to submit to the richer but less aristocratic Ipswich. So in desperation the diocese had to be called ‘St. Edmundsbury and Ipswich.’

To look at an Ordnance map one would say that Suffolk was very flat and eminently agricultural. The highest hill I could find was 402 feet above the sea; seldom does the land rise over 200 feet. Yet a motor drive in Suffolk gives one the sensation of having been on a switchback railway. One is never on the level, and some of the little ascents and descents are very sharp. The beautiful church towers are usually on hills and the churches are often placed outside the villages. The road or ‘street’ (Roman _stratum_) on each side of which the hamlet stands frequently runs up a hill. The lanes are narrow and muddy; and at the bottom of a hill often waterlogged. Communication must have been exceedingly difficult--a fact which explains many peculiarities of the people.

Nowhere is there a sharper line drawn by nature in the county than between the agricultural land in the centre and the coast. Rarely do the corn lands reach the sea. A belt of breezy commons, bright with gorse, extends almost from Lowestoft to Ipswich, and a glance at the map shews how thin the population is. Only by branch lines of recent construction does the railway reach the Suffolk coast. Cut off by a wild tract of commons and marshes, the inhabitants of the little ports formed strangely isolated communities, and regarded with no friendly eye the villagers of the interior, marrying only among themselves and keeping carefully apart. A brief survey of the coast throws a light on the character of the people. All along the shore the five fathom line, sometimes half a mile, sometimes as much as three miles from the shore, marks the continual encroachment of the North Sea. Towns like Aldeburgh and Dunwich, once standing a mile or more from the shore, are now, as in the case of the first, threatened by the waves; or, like Dunwich, once a famous seaport, almost entirely washed away and submerged. Occasionally, as from Aldeburgh to Orford, the sea makes its own breakwater by casting up long banks of shingle, and even now, for nearly ten miles, save for coastguard stations and lighthouses, the Suffolk foreshore is absolutely uninhabited.

One of the most striking features of the coast is the inland tidal rivers. In the south are the Stour and the Orwell, which converge at the important harbour of Harwich; and at the head of the tidal waters of the Orwell is Ipswich. The river itself when the tide is high is a most beautiful estuary with parks and woods sloping down to the water--Stoke Park, Wherstead Park, Woolverstone on the south, Alnesbourn Priory and Orwell Park on the north. A few miles north of the estuary of the Orwell and Stour is the river Deben, which culminates inland at Woodbridge and was the scene of many a solitary boating expedition by the famous translator of Omar Khayyam, Edward Fitzgerald. Then comes the shingle bank I have spoken of, parting the river Ore from the sea, as far as Slaughden, when it turns inland and becomes the Alde, giving its name to Aldeburgh. Great salt marshes in many places fringe these rivers and impart an air of desolation to the surrounding scenery.

Rightly to appreciate this curious country we must divest ourselves of modern ideas, forget that we can be in London in two hours, ignore the fact that the commons have been turned into golf courses, that the people are occupied by letting lodgings, that their harvest is the holiday season, and that we can motor on most of the roads in comfort. One must go back, and not so very far after all, to a time when it would have needed a guide to enable you to find Aldeburgh and the coast, and when you would have received the reverse of a hearty welcome from its inhabitants, “a surly race” who viewed strangers with “a suspicious eye,” and no wonder, since they had the best of reasons for concealing “the way they got their wealth.” You must transport yourself into this past, if you would wish to understand what the poet Crabbe has to tell you about his native place.

I think I caught something of his spirit when I went to Aldeburgh to prepare myself for writing this lecture. It was on a chill December day, damp and cold with a northeast wind. I had had a cold for a week and it lay very heavily on my chest, so my spirits were the reverse of buoyant. Rain was falling as I made my way along the deserted High street and walked to Slaughden Quay, where Crabbe was born, and as a young man worked at rolling casks from the hookers to the stores. A “dirty sea” at low tide was breaking against the shingle bank, and on the other side was the valley of the Alde and dreary marshes stretching to the low uplands on the horizon. On the rising ground above the town rose the church tower of Aldeburgh; and one could well imagine what a dreary home the desolate quay and the squalid little town must have been, when the only approach was by the harbourless sea, or by sandy tracks over a bleak moor, or by the sluggish river winding through the marsh.

The peculiarities of East Anglia, both inland and on the coast, are reflected in its inhabitants. It is a country which by its isolation has fostered strong originality in all classes, manifesting itself frequently in a species of coarseness of fibre and sensibility. The people have not a character for high intelligence, at any rate in Suffolk, where “silly” is the epithet applied to the county. Despite this fact perhaps no part of Great Britain has produced so many “worthies” of the highest order. In almost every one of these the “animal” is very strong and the intelligence is dominated by practical considerations. Suffolk and Norfolk respectively have bred perhaps the two greatest of English statesmen--Cardinal Wolsey and Sir Robert Walpole. Wolsey impressed his contemporaries by his native force and arrogance; and Bishop Creighton explains in his biography of him how sane a view he took of his country’s position in regard to the politics of Europe. Walpole, with the tastes of a boorish squire, little delicacy of mind, and a cynical contempt for mankind, was an unrivalled financier and minister in days of material prosperity. In the forefront among the pioneers of English science stands the famous Suffolk name of Bacon. In his great achievements and his equally serious faults Francis Bacon, Viscount Verulam, is an East Anglian. His luminous mind is seen in the singularly lucid English in which his thoughts are expressed, his rough common-sense reveals itself in the way in which he brushes aside the speculative theories of the philosophers, and goes directly for results based on practical experiment. And on the darker side, the unscrupulous way in which he crushed friend and foe alike in order to attain the position, which his genius entitled him to take in the country, discloses the same lack of sensibility which we frequently see in the East Anglian character.

Among the great judges few take a higher place than Lord Thurlow. Scarcely anyone could inspire such fear by the mere force of his personality than he. Whether in the House of Lords, when he crushed the Duke of Grafton, who twitted him with being a _novus homo_; or in the law courts; or at his own table in private life, where, in his old age, he could make the greatest wits of the day retire in discomfiture, he shewed himself an antagonist to be dreaded. Yet, as Crabbe attests, under that rough exterior beat a kind heart.

Not only the genius of Nelson, the son of a Norfolk Rector, as well as the moral failure which cast a stain on the unparalleled lustre of his name, may be traceable to his native soil. Even to-day there is one to whom England looks with confidence, though his stern practical ability inspires but little affection, among whose proud and well-deserved titles is the name of his mother’s home, an out-of-the-way Suffolk village; for on entering the peerage Earl Kitchener assumed the style of Baron Kitchener of Khartoum and Aspal.[11]

The force of character which produces great men is certain almost to manifest itself for evil also, and we recognise the truth of much of Crabbe’s stern realism in the characters to which he introduces us. As Dr. Jessop, a singularly acute observer of the Norfolk villager, points out, the criminal annals of East Anglia disclose outbursts of remarkable ferocity on the part of its inhabitants. Side by side with this vindictive spirit is a proneness to superstition, generally of a gloomy character. Aldeburgh has records of many portents and apparitions in its annals; nowhere was the witch finder more active than in Suffolk; and, even in the later half of the nineteenth century, a woman suspected of being a witch was done to death in the neighbouring county of Essex. We have seen in Crabbe how what was then called “enthusiasm” in religion drove more than one of his characters into a despair of gloom. Not that there was not a great deal of genuine piety: the churches of East Anglia are the glory of the countryside, and many of the most magnificent are due to the liberality of its traders and manufacturers in the days when it was one of the industrial centres of English life. Indeed, it may not be merely local vanity which explains the contemptuous epithet “silly” as carrying with it not a slight but a compliment--the word being used in its older sense as the equivalent of the German _selig_, “pious.” Nowhere did the Reformation obtain a stronger hold than in the diocese of Norwich; and its roll of Protestant martyrs in the reign of Mary was exceptionally large. Forcefulness for good or evil, superstition, and genuine piety all play their part in the story I am now about to ask you to consider. The popularity in Suffolk of the life of Margaret Catchpole--though the literary merit of the book is not great--is a testimony that her tale strikes a sympathetic chord to this day.

I must preface what I have to say by a few remarks about the author of the book. The Rev. Richard Cobbold was the son of John Cobbold, a wealthy brewer of the Cliff House, Ipswich, by his second wife, who plays so important a part in the story I am about to put before you. Mrs. Cobbold was a very remarkable woman, a friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds, an author of some repute; and, what was most unusual at the time, an eloquent public speaker. She married Mr. Cobbold when he was a widower with fourteen children and had by him a large family herself--six sons and a daughter. Richard was the youngest son, being born in 1797 and dying in his eightieth year in 1877. He was Rector of Wortham, a parish in the north of Suffolk, an author of repute in his day, highly respected as a devoted clergyman, a strong churchman, and a keen and active sportsman. In 1845 he brought out “Margaret Catchpole.” In his preface he says: “The public may depend upon the truth of the main features of this narrative; indeed, most of the facts recorded were matters of public notoriety at the time of their occurrence. The author who details them is a son with whom this extraordinary female lived and from whose hands he received the letters and facts here given.” The story of Margaret Catchpole told in the novel is briefly as follows:

She was born at Nacton, a village not far from Ipswich, on what was then a somewhat desolate heath on the north bank of the Orwell. Her father was head ploughman to a farmer named Denton, a well-known breeder of Suffolk cart horses. From childhood she was known as a good rider, and she obtained her first place as a servant by catching a very spirited pony of Mr. Denton’s, whose wife was taken suddenly ill, and riding at a gallop to the town and through the streets crowded on a market day to fetch the doctor. As she had not had time to saddle or bridle her steed, she rode him bareback with a halter to guide him--a really remarkable feat for a child of fourteen. As she grew up, she found a suitor in a clever sailor named William Laud, originally a boat builder, who had been a pupil in navigation, says the author, under a Mr. Crabbe, a brother of the poet’s.[12] Laud’s education and abilities seem to have been above his station in life, and had he been able to keep straight he would have risen to the command of a merchant ship, and possibly even to officer’s rank in the Royal Navy. As it was, he attached himself to a man named Bargood, an unscrupulous employer of smugglers, and became one of the leaders of that highly organized body which in the war with France was bent on defrauding the revenue. Laud’s influence was singularly bad for the Catchpole family. Two brothers came to a bad end, another enlisted and disappeared for years, and the whole household fell under suspicion of being in league with the smugglers.

Now comes the undoubted fiction in the story. Margaret Catchpole particularly requested that her husband’s name should be concealed, if her adventures were ever published, in order that her children might not know she had been a convict. Consequently we must assume that the honest lover called John Barry of Levington, the parish next to Nacton, is fictitious, and probably that he and his brother Edward are introduced to heighten the romance.[13] Anyhow, in the story Laud was severely wounded by John’s brother Edward, who commanded the preventive men on Felixstow Beach, and was supposed to have been killed. Margaret nursed Laud in his concealment into convalescence; and later on when she was in service at a Mrs. Wake’s he attempted to carry her off by violence. She was, however, protected by the faithful John Barry and a strange old fisherman nicknamed Robinson Crusoe. John Barry was seriously wounded. On his recovery he proposed to Margaret, who refused him; and, in desperation, the rejected lover emigrated to the Colony of New South Wales, Australia.

In May, 1793, Margaret entered into service with Mrs. Cobbold of the Cliff, Ipswich. The house still stands adjoining the well-known brewery on the shore of the river Orwell. Even to this day it lies at the fringe of the business part of Ipswich, at the end of the docks and quays; beyond it is country and the well-wooded banks of the beautiful river. The girl was under-nursemaid, and also helped the cook in the evening. She soon manifested exceptional abilities; for not only did she learn all the lessons which the children had to prepare, but on three occasions she saved the life of members of Mrs. Cobbold’s large family. She rescued two little boys, George and Frederick (the latter my grandfather), from the fall of a wall, which would inevitably have crushed them; she saved another, Henry, in Ipswich, when he had fallen into deep water; and when an older boy, named William, had gone alone down the Orwell to shoot ducks and his boat had been overturned, it was by her courage and resource that the lad was recovered in a state of insensibility. On the latter occasion Laud reappears suddenly. He had been pressed into the Navy and was now necessarily leading a more reputable life, and Margaret could avow her partiality for her lover without shame. In 1794 Laud fought in Lord Howe’s victory of the 1st of June and apparently distinguished himself highly in the action, being one of the crew entrusted with bringing home a valuable prize. In the story Laud is represented as a man naturally with good impulses, but weak and unstable; and the villain of the piece is the sailor who was Laud’s mate in his smuggling days--one Luff.

Luff was determined to get Laud back to the smuggling business; Laud, on the contrary, desired to lead a virtuous life with Margaret. Accordingly, when he was free of the navy, he brought his prize money and left it at Mr. Cobbold’s house, but Margaret, who had now become cook and had got into trouble by entertaining too many sailors, refused to see her lover--of course not knowing it was he. Luff then turned up, and, as she refused to give him information about Laud, threw her into a well from which she was rescued with difficulty. Luff was killed soon after in a desperate encounter with the preventive men, and from what Margaret’s brother Edward could gather Luff had murdered Laud. Margaret did not believe it; but her conduct became so unsatisfactory from grief and disappointment that Mrs. Cobbold, despite all she had done for the family, was compelled to dismiss her from her service. Laud in the meantime had reformed and settled down as a boat builder, and on his uncle’s death he came into the business. But the habit of smuggling was too strong, and he returned to his old courses. This brings us to the tragedy. Margaret has heard that Laud is alive from an old servant of the Cobbolds. She longs for an explanation and is determined to see him. Instead of consulting any of her reputable friends she goes to Ipswich and is persuaded that Laud is in London waiting for her there. Even a letter from him is produced expressing his readiness to marry her if she would join him. This clumsy fraud was devised by a man named Cook in order to induce Margaret, whose fame as a rider was known to him, to steal a horse from Mr. Cobbold, and to ride him up to London. Regardless of the consequences, Margaret took her old master’s best horse, named Rochford, and rode him to London, seventy miles, in eight hours. Of course the loss of the horse was known at once, and handbills were issued offering a reward. Margaret, dressed as a groom, was arrested soon after her arrival in London, and sent back to Ipswich to be tried at the Assizes. On August 9, 1797, she pleaded guilty at Bury St. Edmunds and was condemned to death. Her crime was then considered a most serious one, but she made a very favourable impression, and the witnesses for character gave such good testimony that the judge commuted the death sentence to one of transportation for seven years. For three years Margaret remained in Ipswich gaol; and it is probable that her sentence would have been remitted altogether but for what ensued.

Laud was now smuggling on a large scale. He was deeply concerned with an affair in which two preventive men were beaten and thrown into the sea at Southwold for reporting that they had seen forty carts and horses ready to take a cargo which was to be “run” near Dunwich. A reward of £100 for his apprehension was offered in the newspapers on March 2d, 1799. Shortly after this 880 gallons of gin were seized and the guilt of smuggling it brought home to Laud. All his property was confiscated and he was given a year’s imprisonment and sentenced to pay £100. He was committed to Ipswich gaol, and would have to stay there after his sentence had expired till the fine was paid. Of course Margaret, whose good conduct had made her practically free of the prison, discovered that her lover was an inmate; and, as she had kept intact the prize money he had given her, she was able to give him the means of obtaining his liberation at the end of his year’s imprisonment. Laud persuaded her to try to escape and join him, and the way she did this is one of the most extraordinary in her romantic career. The wall of the prison was twenty-five feet high and protected at the top with iron spikes. Margaret succeeded in getting a flower stand, which placed endways raised her to within thirteen feet of the top. She had made herself a garment like a shepherd’s smock and a pair of trousers so as to be unincumbered in her movements. By casting a clothes-line over the _chevaux-de-frise_ on the top of the wall she managed to climb up to the iron spikes. Then, lowering the line on the other side, she turned over between the revolving spikes and let herself down on the opposite side. She and Laud made for a place called Sudbourn; but were overtaken on the beach where, after a desperate fight, Laud was killed by Edward Barry, and Margaret arrested and taken back to the gaol.

It was one of the strange anomalies of the cruel law of that age that whereas ruffians like Cook, and desperados like Laud escaped the capital sentence, comparatively innocent persons were hanged without mercy. For a reprieved person to escape from prison was death, and, though Margaret was ignorant of the terrible penalty which she had incurred, there seemed no hope of her meeting with any further leniency. She was again brought before the same judge, Lord Chief Baron Sir Archibald Macdonald, who had condemned her in August, 1797, on the third day of the same month in 1800. Again she pleaded guilty, and when the judge condemned her in very stern language she made a short speech accepting his sentence, which impressed everyone present in the court house. Her eloquence and her whole demeanour profoundly impressed the judge, and again he obtained power to respite her, sentencing her this time to lifelong transportation.