The opening of Preface
The very miscellaneous nature of the contents of this third and last volume of the present edition of Crabbe’s Poems obliges me to trouble the reader with a rather lengthy series of prefatory remarks. Before, however, entering on these, I should like to supplement what was said in the Preface to Vol. 1 with regard to the source of the earliest among the Juvenilia there printed. Since writing that Preface I have at last had an opportunity of examining the whole set of Vols. I-VI (for the years 1770–5) of the elusive Lady’s Magazine, of which Vol. I was published by Robinson and Roberts, and the remaining five volumes by Robinson. Curiously enough, the 1773 volume of this Magazine contains, in the February number, a long piece of verse, apparently a prize poem, entitled An Essay on Hope; but the six lines quoted by the younger Crabbe are not to be found in this poem any more than in that printed in the October number of the 1772 volume of the Magazine. By another coincidence, a poem called The Bee, signed “Louisa Broughton,” appears in the April number of the same Magazine for 1774.