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 that visit that he had the decisive attack in the streets of Ipswich.  The account may be continued in the son’s own words:—­

“Having left my mother at the inn, he walked into the town alone, and suddenly staggered in the street, and fell.  He was lifted up by the passengers” (probably from the stagecoach from which they had just alighted), “and overheard some one say significantly, ’Let the gentleman alone, he will be better by and by’; for his fall was attributed to the bottle.  He was assisted to his room, and the late Dr. Clubbe was sent for, who, after a little examination, saw through the case with great judgment.  ’There is nothing the matter with your head,’ he observed, ’nor any apoplectic tendency; let the digestive organs bear the whole blame:  you must take opiates.’  From that time his health began to amend rapidly, and his constitution was renovated; a rare effect of opium, for that drug almost always inflicts some partial injury, even when it is necessary; but to him it was only salutary—­and to a constant but slightly increasing dose of it may be attributed his long and generally healthy life.”

The son makes no reference to any possible effects of this “slightly increasing dose” upon his father’s intellect or imagination.  And the ordinary reader who knows the poet mainly through his sober couplets may well be surprised to hear that their author was ever addicted to the opium-habit; still more, that his imagination ever owed anything to its stimulus.  But in FitzGerald’s copy there is a MS. note, not signed “G.C.,” and therefore FitzGerald’s own.  It runs thus:  “It” (the opium) “probably influenced his dreams, for better or worse” To this FitzGerald significantly adds, “see also the World of Dreams, and Sir Eustace Grey.”

As Crabbe is practically unknown to the readers of the present day, Sir Eustace Grey will be hardly even a name to them.  For it lies, with two or three other noticeable poems, quite out of the familiar track of his narrative verse.  In the first place it is in stanzas, and what Browning would have classed as a “Dramatic Lyric.”  The subject is as follows:  The scene “a Madhouse,” and the persons a Visitor, a Physician, and a Patient.  The visitor has been shown over the establishment, and is on the point of departing weary and depressed at the sight of so much misery, when the physician begs him to stay as they come in sight of the “cell” of a specially interesting patient, Sir Eustace Grey, late of Greyling Hall.  Sir Eustace greets them as they approach, plunges at once into monologue, and relates (with occasional warnings from the doctor against over-excitement) the sad story of his misfortunes and consequent loss of reason.  He begins with a description of his happier days:—­