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PREFATORY NOTE.
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period of the Juvenile Poems (1772-1780); but all other poems contained in this edition which have hitherto remained unpublished will be printed after the published poems, in the sequence of their production so far as this is ascertainable. With the poems hitherto unpublished I have also been fortunate enough to obtain permission to include in a later volume, among other posthumously printed pieces, the Two Poetical Epistles by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.
The earliest of the Juvenile Poems here printed are taken from The Lady's Magazine, or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, appropriated solely to their Use and Amusement, for the year 1772, printed at London for Robinson and Roberts, 25 Paternoster Row. The first volume of this Magazine seems to have been that for the year 1770, and to have comprised the numbers from August to December inclusive; but the earlier portion of this volume had been previously published in the same year 1770 under the same title by J. Wheble at 20 Paternoster Row, 'by whom letters to the Editor are requested and received.' This then must be the 'Wheble's Magazine for 1772,' of which George Crabbe the younger in the Life prefixed to the 1834 edition of his father's Poems (p. 22) states that he had after long search discovered a copy. The Magazine seems itself to have been a revival of an earlier Lady's Magazine, of which portions of the volumes for 1760 and 1761 are extant, and which, according to the title-page of the volume for 1761, was printed for J. Wilkie at the Bible in St Paul's Churchyard.