t 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 in