and the Circe of the modern sorceries of degradation, to feel the hand of a hero upon her, compelling her to restore the swine to their human form. George Crabbe was not merely a poet, but the poet who had the sagacity to see into the real state of things, and the heart to do his duty—the great marks of the true poet, who is necessarily a true and feeling man. To him popular education, popular freedom, popular advance into knowledge and power, owe a debt which futurity will gratefully acknowledge, but no time can cancel.

George Crabbe was born on the borders of that element which he so greatly loved, and which he has so powerfully described in the first chapter of the Borough. He has had the good-fortune to have in his son George a biographer such as every good man would desire. The life written by him is full of the veneration of the son, yet of the candor of the historian; and is at once one of the most graphic and charming of books.

From this volume we learn that the poet was born at Aldborough, in Suffolk, on the Christmas-eve of 1754. His birthplace was an old house in that range of buildings which the sea has now almost demolished. The chamber projected far over the ground-floor; and the windows were small, with diamond panes almost impervious to the light. A view of it by Stanfield forms the vignette to the biography.

The father as well as grandfather of Crabbe bore the name of George, as well as himself. The grandfather, a burgess of Aldborough, and collector of customs there, yet died poor. The father, originally educated for trade, had been in early life the keeper of a parochial school in the porch of the church at Orford. He afterward became schoolmaster and parish clerk at Norton, near Loddon, in Norfolk, and finally, returning to his native Aldborough, rose to the collection of the salt duties, as Salt-master. He was a stern, but able man, and with all his sternness not destitute of good qualities. The mother of Crabbe was an excellent and pious woman. Beside himself there were five other children, all of whom, except one girl, lived to mature years. His next brother, Robert, was a glazier, who retired from business at Southwold. John Crabbe, the third son, was a captain of a Liverpool slave-ship, who perished by an insurrection of the slaves. The fourth brother, William, also a seafaring man, was carried prisoner by the Spaniards into Mexico, and was once seen by an Aldborough sailor on the coast of Honduras, but never heard of again. This sailor brother, in his inquiries after all at home, had expressed much astonishment to find that George was become a clergyman, when he left him a doctor; and on this incident Crabbe afterward founded the sailor's story in The Parting Hour. His only surviving sister married a Mr. Sparkes, a builder of Aldborough, and died in 1827. Such were Crabbe's family. The scenery among which he spent his boyhood has been frequently described in his poetry, especially in the opening letter of his Borough. It is here equally livingly given in his son's prose.

"Aldborough, or, as it is more correctly written, Alderburgh, was, in those days, a poor and wretched place, with nothing of the elegance and gayety which have since sprung up about it, in consequence of the resort of watering-parties. The town lies between a low hill or cliff, on which only the old church and a few better houses were then situated, and the beach of the German ocean. It consisted of two parallel and unpaved streets, running between mean and scrambling houses, the abodes of seafaring men, pilots, and fishers. The range of houses nearest to the sea had suffered so much from repeated invasions of the waves, that only a few scattered tenements appeared erect among the desolation. I have often heard my father describe a tremendous spring-tide of, I think, the 17th of January, 1779, when eleven houses here were at once demolished; and he saw the breakers dash over the roofs, and round the walls, and crush all to ruin. The beach consists of successive ridges—large rolled stones, then loose shingles, and, at the fall of the tide, a stripe of fine, hard sand. Vessels of all sorts, from the large, heavy troll-boat, to the yawl and pram, drawn up along the shore—fishermen preparing their tackle, or sorting their spoil—and, nearer, the gloomy, old town-hall, the only indication of municipal dignity, a few groups of mariners, chiefly pilots, taking their quick, short walks backward and forward, every eye watchful of the signal from the offing—such was the squalid scene which first opened on the author of The Village!

"Nor was the landscape in the vicinity of a more engaging aspect: open commons and sterile farms, the soil, poor and sandy, the herbage, bare and rushy, the trees, 'few and far between,' and withered and stunted by the bleak breezes of the sea. The opening picture of The Village was copied, in every touch, from the scene of the poet's nativity and boyish days:—

'Lo! where the heath, with withering brake grown o'er, Lends the light turf that warms the neighboring poor; From thence a length of burning sand appears, Where the thin harvest waves its withered ears; Rank weeds, that every art and care defy, Reign o'er the land, and rob the blighted rye; There thistles spread their prickly arms afar, And to the ragged infants threaten war.'

"The broad river, called the Ald, approaches the sea close to Aldborough, within a few hundred yards, and then turning abruptly, continues to run for about ten miles parallel to the beach, from which a dreary stripe of marsh and waste alone divides it, until it at length finds its embouchure at Orford. The scenery of this river has been celebrated as lovely and delightful, in a poem called Slaughden Vale, written by Mr. James Bird, a friend of my father's; and old Camden talks of 'the beautiful vale of Slaughden.' I confess, however, that though I have ever found an indescribable charm in the very weeds of the place, I never could perceive its claims to beauty. Such as it is, it has furnished Mr. Crabbe with many of his happiest and most graphical descriptions; and the same may be said of the whole line of coast from Orford to Dunwich, every feature of which has, somewhere or other, been reproduced in his writings. The quay of Slaughden, in particular, has been painted with all the minuteness of a Dutch landscape:—

"For one destined to distinction as a portrayer of character," continues his son, "few scenes could have been more favorable than that of his infancy and boyhood. He was cradled among the rough sons of the ocean—a daily witness of unbridled passions, and of manners remote from the sameness and artificial smoothness of polished society. At home, as has already been hinted, he was subject to the caprices of a stern and imperious, though not unkindly nature; and probably few whom he could familiarly approach but had passed through some of those dark tragedies in which his future strength was to be exhibited. The common people of Aldborough in those days are described as—

Crabbe, though imbibing every thing relating to the sea, and sailors, and fishermen, was by no means disposed to be one of this class himself. He early exhibited a bookish turn, and was