Crabbe seems to have told his family that it was written during a severe snow-storm, and at one sitting.

As the poem consists of fifty-five eight-lined stanzas, of somewhat complex construction, the accuracy of Crabbe's account is doubtful.

If its inspiration was in some degree due to opium, we know from the example of S.T.Coleridge that the opium-habit is not favourable to certainty of memory or the accurate presentation of facts.

After Crabbe's death, there was found in one of his many manuscript note-books a copy of verses, undated, entitled _The World of Dreams_, which his son printed in subsequent editions of the poems.

The verses are in the same metre and rhyme-system as _Sir Eustace_, and treat of precisely the same class of visions as recorded by the inmate of the asylum.