Almost his last words were, "We are all going
to heaven, and Vandyke is of the company."
Gainsborough's letters are the most delightful
compound of simple-hearted sense and nonsense
almost ever written.

Along the Suffolk coast now drifts the crow,
from the Landguard sand-hills to those low
gravel cliffs that reach to Bawdsey. It is the
country painted for us in the Dutch manner so
admirably by Crabbe.

We are bearing away for Aldborough and the
sea-side haunts of George Crabbe, "the poet
of nature and of truth," the simple-minded,
reflective old Suffolk clergyman, who struggled
upwards towards the light, and pondered so
deeply and sadly over the mysteries of our poor
human nature.

At Aldborough Bay a shingly beach parts
the marshes of the Alde from the sea, while
northward the coast, low and flat for a previous
seven monotonous miles, gradually rises into
cliffs of sand and shingle.

From Dunwich to Southwold the cliffs of
chalk, rubble, and sand, with gravel and red
loam below, tell wonderful stories of the slow
changes of the earth's surface. Almost a
complete coral reef exists between Aldborough and
Orford. Shells of the Indian ocean are found
in what was once probably the bed of the old
German Ocean—the grandfather, we mean, of
the present one. From it have been dug teeth
of mastodons, bones of rhinoceros, teeth of
bear and whale, antlers of deer, spikes of rays,
and teeth of leopards and hogs. In this fluvio-marine
formation, says Sir C. Lyell, about
twenty species of land and freshwater shells
have been discovered, and about ninety marine
species; of these the proportion resembling
those now living does not exceed the ratio of
sixty per cent.

The Alde once entered the sea at Aldborough,
but the flood tides, gradually throwing up ridges
of sand and shingle, deflected the river to the
south, and its ancient outlet was transferred ten
miles to the south-west. An ancient sea-cliff
has been left stranded and deserted far inland.
The Alde now flows within two hundred yards
of the coast southward, then suddenly runs
parallel to the sea with strange wilfulness, and
runs divided from it only by a long, narrow,
fenny spit of land. At Orford the stream widens
into the grandeur of an estuary. The not too
lively town consists of one long street in the
valley of the Slaughden, and is sheltered by a
steep hill. The bay is bounded by Thorpe Point
and Orfordness.

Crabbe the poet is the great name here, and
his memory consecrates the dulness of a place
the sea seems bent on slowly swallowing. The
Crabbes are numerous both in Norfolk and
Suffolk. It was a pilot named Crabbe, of
Walton, who was consulted about the fleet of
Edward the Third, not long before Cressy.
The poet's grandfather was a collector of the
customs at Aldborough, and his son George
(the poet's father) kept a parish school in the
porch of the church at Orford, and was afterwards
parish clerk at Norton, near Loddon,
in Norfolk. Returning to Aldborough, he
became first warehouse-keeper, then collector
of the salt dues. He was a man of strong,
vigorous mind, renowned for business tact and
powers of calculation. George Crabbe, the
poet, was born in 1754; his next brother was
a glazier; and the third became captain of a
Liverpool slaver, and was set adrift to perish
by some slaves who had mutinied; the fourth
brother, also a sailor, was taken prisoner by
Spaniards, and sent to Mexico, where he
became a prosperous silversmith, till the priests
persecuted him, and he then fled to Honduras.
Aldborough was at first only a wretched cluster
of small fishermen's houses, lying between the
Church Cliff and the German Ocean. There
were two parallel, unpaved streets running in
dirty and noisome competition between rows
of mean and scrambling houses; those nearest
to the sea were often destroyed by storms.
From a plan of the town in 1559, says the
Reverend J. Ford, it appears that a range of
denes then existed between the town and the
sea, and that the church was then more than
ten times its present distance from the shore.
The beach spread in three ridges: large rolled
boulders, loose shingle, and at the fall of the
tide a long, yellow stripe of fine hard sand.
There were vessels of all sorts lolling with
pitchy sides upon the shore, from the large
heavy troll boat to the yawl and prame. There
were fishermen drying their brown nets or
sorting their fish, and near the gloomy old
town-hall a group of pilots taking their short,
quick, to-and-fro walk, as if longing for the
old restrictions of the narrow and rolling deck,
or watching for signals in the offing. Nor was
the inland landscape either grand or smiling—
only open, dull, sandy, rusty commons and
sterile farms, with trees rusted and stunted by the
salt winds. Crabbe has painted every feature
of the scene. Slaughden quay he touches like
a little Vandervelde:

Here samphire banks and salt wort bound the flood,
There stakes and seaweeds withering on the mud;
And higher up a ridge of all things base,
Which some strong tide has rolled upon the place;
Yon is our quay! those smaller hoys from town
Its various wares for country use bring down.

By the impetuous salt-master, the quiet,
studious, awkward boy was somewhat despised.
"That boy," he used to say "must turn out a
fool. John, and Bob, and Will are of some use
about a boat, but what will that thing be good
for?" Crabbe was known at Aldborough as a
boy of reading, and was regarded with a
certain respect. One day, when a rough lad he had
angered was going to thrash him, an elder boy
gravely put in his veto.

"No, no, you mustn't meddle with him," he
said; "let him alone, for he ha' got larning."

When first sent to school at Bungay, Crabbe
did not yet know how to dress himself, and the
first morning, in great confusion, he whispered
to his bedfellow,

"Can you put on your own shirt, for—for—
I'm—afraid I can't."

In this rough Suffolk school Crabbe nearly