tells us that up to the time of his undertaking the Biography, he did not even know that the original of the letter was in existence.  He also tells us that until he and his brother saw the letter they had little idea of the extreme poverty and anxiety which their father had experienced during his time in London.  Obviously Crabbe himself had been reticent on the subject even with his own family.  From the midsummer of 1780, when the “Journal to Mira” comes to an end, to the February or March of the following year, there is a blank in the Biography which the son was unable to fill.  At the time the fragment of Diary closes, Crabbe was apparently at the very end of his resources.  He had pawned all his personal property, his books and his surgical implements, and was still in debt.  He had begged assistance from many of the leading statesmen of the hour without success.  How did he contrive to exist between June 1780 and the early months of 1781?

The problem might never have been solved for us had it not been for the accidental publication, four years after the Biography appeared, of a second letter from Crabbe to Burke.  In 1838, Sir Henry Bunbury, in an appendix to the Memoir and Correspondence of Sir Thomas Hanmer (Speaker of the House of Commons, and Shakspearian editor), printed a collection of miscellaneous letters from distinguished men in the possession of the Bunbury family.  Among these is a letter of Crabbe to Burke, undated save as to the month, which is given as June 26th.  The year, however, is obviously 1781, for the letter consists of further details of Crabbe’s early life, not supplied in the earlier effusion.  At the date of this second letter, Crabbe had been known to Burke three or four months.  During that time Crabbe had been constantly seeing Burke, and with his help had been revising for the press the poem of The Library, which was published by Dodsley in this very month, June 1781.  The first impression, accordingly, produced on us by the letter, is one of surprise that after so long a period of intimate association with Burke, Crabbe should still be writing in a tone of profound anxiety and discouragement as to his future prospects.  According to the son’s account of the situation, when Crabbe left Burke’s house after their first meeting, “he was, in the common phrase, ’a made man’—­from that hour.”  That short interview “entirely, and for ever, changed the nature of his worldly fortunes.”  This, in a sense, was undoubtedly true, though not perhaps as the writer meant.  It is clear from the letter first printed by Sir Henry Bunbury, that up to the end of June 1781, Crabbe’s future occupation in life was still unfixed, and that he was full of misgivings as to the means of earning a livelihood.