And it may well have been that he was now turning for fresh themes to those real sorrows, those genuine, if homely, human interests of which he had already so intimate an experience.
However that may have been, the combined coldness of his reviewers and failure of his bookseller must have brought Crabbe within as near an approach to despair as his healthy nature allowed.

His distress was now extreme; he was incurring debts with little hope of paying them, and creditors wore pressing.

Forty years later he told Walter Scott and Lockhart how "during many months when he was toiling in early life in London he hardly over tasted butcher-meat except on a Sunday, when he dined usually with a tradesman's family, and thought their leg of mutton, baked in the pan, the perfection of luxury." And it was only after some more weary months, when at last "want stared him in the face, and a gaol seemed the only immediate refuge for his head," that he resolved, as a last resort, to lay his case once more before some public man of eminence and character.

"Impelled" (to use his own words) "by some propitious influence, he fixed in some happy moment upon Edmund Burke--one of the first of Englishmen, and in the capacity and energy of his mind, one of the greatest of human beings." It was in one of the early months of 1781 (the exact date seems to be undiscoverable) that Crabbe addressed his letter, with specimens of his poetry, to Burke at his London residence.

The letter has been preserved, and runs as follows:-- "Sir,--I am sensible that I need even your talents to apologise for the freedom I now take; but I have a plea which, however simply urged, will, with, a mind like yours, sir, procure me pardon.