subject of _Hope_, which Crabbe was so fortunate as to win, and the same
magazine printed other short pieces in the same year, 1772. They were
signed "G.C., Woodbridge," and included divers lyrics addressed to Mira.
Other extant verses of the period of his residence at Woodbridge show
that he was making experiments in stanza-form on the model of earlier
English poets, though without showing more than a certain imitative
skill. But after he had been three years in the town, he made a more
notable experiment and had found a printer in Ipswich to take the risk
of publication. In 1775 was printed in that town a didactic satire of
some four hundred lines in the Popian couplet, entitled _Inebriety_.
Coleridge's friend, who had to write a prize poem on the subject of Dr.
Jenner, boldly opened with the invocation--

"Inoculation! Heavenly maid, descend."

As the title of Crabbe's poem stands for the bane and not the antidote,
he could not adopt the same method, but he could not resist some other
precedents of the epic sort, and begins thus, in close imitation of _The
Dunciad_--

"The mighty spirit, and its power which stains
The bloodless cheek and vivifies the brains,
I sing"

The apparent object of the satire was to describe the varied phases of
Intemperance, as observed by the writer in different classes of
society--the Villager, the Squire, the Farmer, the Parish Clergyman, and
even the Nobleman's Chaplain, an official whom Crabbe as yet knew only
by imagination. From childhood he had had ample experience of the vice
in the rough and reckless homes of the Aldeburgh poor. His subsequent