In the present edition of Crabbe's Poems the general arrangement adopted is that of the chronological order of publication. The poem entitled Midnight has been inserted at a conjectural date as belonging to the period of the Juvenile Poems (1772-1780); but all other poems contained in this edition which have hitherto remained unpublished will be printed after the published poems, in the sequence of their production so far as this is ascertainable. With the poems hitherto unpublished I have also been fortunate enough to obtain permission to include in a later volume, among other posthumously printed pieces, the Two Poetical Epistles by Crabbe, first published, from a manuscript in the collection of Mr Buxton Forman, in Vol. II of Literary Anecdotes of the Nineteenth Century edited by W. Robertson Nicoll and Thomas J. Wise (London, 1896). From the second of these Epistles were taken, but not in their original order, the ten lines reproduced in the present volume from George Crabbe the younger's 1834 edition of his father's Poems.
