quate
value was vacant at the time. Meanwhile, the house rented by Crabbe,
Great Glemham Hall, was sold over Crabbe's head, by family arrangements
in the North family, and he made his last move while in Suffolk, by
taking a house in the neighbouring village of Rendham, where he remained
during his last four years. Crabbe was looking forward to his elder
son's going up to Cambridge in 1803, and this formed an additional
reason for wishing to remain as long as might be in the eastern
counties.

The writing of poetry seems to have gone on apace. _The Parish Register_
was all but completed while at Rendham, and _The Borough_ was also
begun. After so long an abstinence from the glory of print, Crabbe at
last found the required stimulus to ambition in the need of some further
income for his two sons' education. But during the last winter of his
residence at Rendham (1804-1805), Crabbe produced a poem, in stanzas, of
very different character and calibre from anything he had yet written,
and as to the origin of which one must go back to some previous
incidents in Crabbe's history. His son is always lax as to dates, and
often just at those periods when they would be the most welcome. It may
be inferred, however, that at some date between 1790 and 1792 Crabbe
suffered from serious derangements of his digestion, attended by sudden
and acute attacks of vertigo. The passage in the memoir as to the exact
period is more than usually vague. The writer is dealing with the year
1800, and he proceeds:

"My father, now about his forty-sixth year, was much
more stout and healthy than when I first remember him.
Soon after that early period he became subject to vertigoes,
which he thought indicative of a tendency to apoplexy; and
was occasionally bled rather profusely, which only increased
the symptoms. When he preached his first sermon at Muston
in the year 1789 my mother foreboded, as she afterwards told
us, that he would preach very few more: but it was on one
of his early journeys into Suffolk, in passing through Ipswich,
that he had the most alarming attack."

This account of matters is rather mixed. The "early period" pointed to
by young Crabbe is that at which he himself first had distinct
recollection of his father, and his doings. Putting that age at six
years old, the year would be 1791; and it may be inferred that as the
whole family paid a visit of many months to Suffolk in the year 1790, it
was during tha