n, without a date. The omission is not strange, for the
letter was written by Crabbe in great anguish of mind, and was left by
his own hand at Burke's door. The son, though he evidently obtained from
his father most of the information he was afterwards to use, never
extracted this date from him. He 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 t