“Must you, my friends, no longer stay? 
    Thus quickly all my pleasures end;
  But I’ll remember, when I pray,
    My kind physician and his friend: 

  And those sad hours you deign to spend
    With me, I shall requite them all. 
  Sir Eustace for his friends shall send,
    And thank their love at Greyling Hall."[4]

The kind physician and his friend then proceed to diagnose the patient’s condition—­which they agree is that of “a frenzied child of grace,” and so the poem ends.  To one of its last stanzas Crabbe attached an apologetic note, one of the most remarkable ever penned.  It exhibits the struggle that at that period must have been proceeding in many a thoughtful breast as to how the new wine of religion could be somehow accommodated to the old bottles:—­

“It has been suggested to me that this change from restlessness to repose in the mind of Sir Eustace is wrought by a methodistic call; and it is admitted to be such:  a sober and rational conversion could not have happened while the disorder of the brain continued; yet the verses which follow, in a different measure,” (Crabbe refers to the hymn) “are not intended to make any religious persuasion appear ridiculous; they are to be supposed as the effect of memory in the disordered mind of the speaker, and though evidently enthusiastic in respect to language, are not meant to convey any impropriety of sentiment.”

The implied suggestion (for it comes to this) that the sentiments of this devotional hymn, written by Crabbe himself, could only have brought comfort to the soul of a lunatic, is surely as good a proof as the period could produce of the bewilderment in the Anglican mind caused by the revival of personal religion under Wesley and his followers.

According to Crabbe’s son Sir Eustace Grey was written at Muston in the winter of 1804-1805.  This is scarcely possible, for Crabbe did not return to his Leicestershire living until the autumn of the latter year.  Probably the poem was begun in Suffolk, and the final touches were added later.  Crabbe seems to have told his family that it was written during a severe snow-storm, and at one sitting.  As the poem consists of fifty-five eight-lined stanzas, of somewhat complex construction, the accuracy of Crabbe’s account is doubtful.  If its inspiration was in some degree due to opium, we know from the example of S.T.  Coleridge that the opium-habit is not favourable to certainty of memory or the accurate presentation of facts.  After Crabbe’s death, there was found in one of his many manuscript note-books a copy of verses, undated, entitled The World of Dreams, which his son printed in subsequent editions of the poems.  The verses are in the same metre and rhyme-system as Sir Eustace, and treat of precisely the same class of visions as recorded by the inmate of the asylum.  The rapid and continuous transition from scene to scene, and period to period, is the same in both.  Foreign kings and other potentates reappear, as with De Quincey, in ghostly and repellent forms:—­