anapes says--why, I could find fifty of the very
best epigrams in five minutes," and later, in another letter he writes--

I am positively looking over my everlasting Crabbe again; he naturally
comes in about the fall of the year.

Here surely is an appropriate quotation, a little prophetic perhaps, for
our gathering--the "everlasting Crabbe." We cannot all love Crabbe as
much as FitzGerald loved him, but this gathering will not be vain if
after this we handle his volumes more lovingly, read his poems more
sympathetically, and continue with more zeal than ever before to be proud
of the man who, born in Aldeburgh a century and a half ago, is closely
identified with this county of Suffolk as I believe no other great writer
is closely identified with any county in England. An Aldeburgh man--a
Suffolk man he was--yet even more in the future than in the past, he is
destined to gain the whole world for his parish. He is the everlasting
Crabbe!

V. THE LITERARY ASSOCIATIONS OF EAST ANGLIA

An address to the East Anglian Society on the occasion of a dinner to Mr.
William Dutt, author of "Highways and Byways in East Anglia." March 25,
1901.

I appreciate the privilege of being allowed to speak this evening for a
few minutes upon the literary associations of East Anglia, of being
permitted to ask you, while doing honour to a well-known East Anglian
writer of to-day, to cast a glance back upon the literature of the past
so far as it affects that portion of the British Empire with which we
nearly all of us here are proud to be associated. There is necessarily
some difference of opinion as to what constitutes East Anglia. I find
that our guest of to-night tells us that it is "Norfolk, Suffolk and
portions of Essex, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire." Dr. Knapp, the
biographer of Borrow, says that it is Norfolk, Suffolk and
Cambridgeshire; personally I am content with that classification,
because, although I was born in London, I claim, apart from schoolboy
days at Downham Market, a pretty lengthy ancestry from Norwich on one
side--which is indisputably East Anglia--and from Welney, near Wisbeach,
on another side, and Welney and Wisbeach are, I affirm, just as much East
Anglia as Norwich and Ipswich. With reference to those other counties
and portions of counties, I think that the inhabitants must be allowed to
decide for themselves. I imagine that they will give every possible
stretch to the imagination in