When Sir Eustace's condition, as he describes it, seems most hopeless, its alleviation arrives through a religious conversion.

There has been throughout present to him the conscience of "a soul defiled with every stain." And at the same moment, under circumstances unexplained, his spiritual ear is purged to hear a "Heavenly Teacher." The voice takes the form of the touching and effective hymn, which has doubtless found a place since in many an evangelical hymn-book, beginning "Pilgrim, burthen'd with thy sin, Come the way to Zion's gate; There, till Mercy let thee in, Knock and weep, and watch and wait.
Knock!--He knows the sinner's cry.
Weep!--He loves the mourner's tears.
Watch!--for saving grace is nigh Wait,--till heavenly light appears." And the hymn is followed by the pathetic confession on the sufferer's part that this blessed experience, though it has brought him the assurance of heavenly forgiveness, still leaves him, "though elect," looking sadly back on his old prosperity, and bearing, but unresigned, the prospect of an old ago spent amid his present gloomy surroundings.
And yet Crabbe, with a touch of real imaginative insight, represents him in his final utterance as relapsing into a vague hope of some day being restored to his old prosperity: "Must you, my friends, no longer stay?
Thus quickly all my pleasures end; But I'll remember, when I pray, My kind physician and his friend: And those sad hours you deign to spend With me, I shall requite them all.
Sir Eustace for his friends shall send, And thank their love at Greyling Hall."[4] The kind physician and his friend then proceed to diagnose the patient's condition--which they agree is that of "a frenzied child of grace," and so the poem ends.

To one of its last stanzas Crabbe attached an apologetic note, one of the most remarkable ever penned.

It exhibits the struggle that at that period must have been proceeding in many a thoughtful breast as to how the new wine of religion could be somehow accommodated to the old bottles:-- "It has been suggested to me that this change from restlessness to repose in the mind of Sir Eustace is wrought by a methodistic call; and it is admitted to be such: a sober and rational conversion could not have happened while the disorder of the brain continued; yet the verses which follow, in a different measure," (Crabbe refers to the hymn) "are not intended to make any religious persuasion appear ridiculous; they are to be supposed as the effect of memory in the disordered mind of the speaker, and though evidently enthusiastic in respect to language, are not meant to convey any impropriety of sentiment." The implied suggestion (for it comes to this) that the sentiments of this devotional hymn, written by Crabbe himself, could only have brought comfort to the soul of a lunatic, is surely as good a proof as the period could produce of the bewilderment in the Anglican mind caused by the revival of personal religion under Wesley and his followers.
According to Crabbe's son _Sir Eustace Grey_ was written at Muston in the winter of 1804-1805.

This is scarcely possible, for Crabbe did not return to his Leicestershire living until the autumn of the latter year.
Probably the poem was begun in Suffolk, and the final touches were added later.