In his later years he was given (perhaps a little ostentatiously) to prefixing quotations from Horace, Juvenal, Martial, and oven more recondite authors, to the successive sections of _The Borough_ But wherever he found books--especially poetry--he read them and remembered them.

He early showed considerable acquaintance with the best English poets, and although Pope controlled his metrical forms, and something more than the forms, to the end of his life, he had somehow acquired a wide knowledge of Shakespeare, and even of such then less known poets as Spenser, Raleigh, and Cowley.
After some three years at Stowmarket--it now being settled that medicine was to be his calling--George was taken from school, and the search began in earnest for some country practitioner to whom he might be apprenticed.

An interval of a few months was spent at home, during which he assisted his father at the office on Slaughden Quay, and in the year 1768, when he was still under fourteen years of age, a post was found for him in the house of a surgeon at Wickham-Brook, near Bury St.
Edmunds.

This practitioner combined the practise of agriculture on a small scale with that of physic, and young Crabbe had to take his share in the labours of the farm.

The result was not satisfactory, and after three years of this rough and uncongenial life, a more profitable situation was found with a Mr.Page of Woodbridge--the memorable home of Bernard Barton and Edward FitzGerald.