Page:Views in Suffolk, Norfolk, and Northamptonshire.djvu/14

. Powerful, indeed, must be his genius, who can dissever the brazen trammels that Poverty has forged for her children, and 'outstepping' the control of circumstance, make literature his passport to affluence and to fame.

, the Farmer's Boy, was born at the little village of Honington, in Suffolk, on the 3d of December, 1766. He was the younger son of George Bloomfield, a tailor; and Elizabeth, daughter of Robert Manby, who was the village schoolmistress, and who instructed her own offspring with those of her neighbours. His father died a victim to the small-pox, when the subject of this Memoir was less than a twelvemonth old, and his mother was left a widow with six children.

It is observable that Bloomfield has incorporated the most material events of his life with some one or other of his poems, so that were all the passages selected, and duly arranged, his history would want but few additional particulars to be told in the descriptive language of his own muse. Thus, in his "Good Tidings," after alluding to the family distress occasioned by the fell disease just mentioned, he