There is an element of tragedy in the rapid change which the unhappy circumstances of his private life wrought in his temperament. Addressing the disciples of Mrs. Grundy in an early essay defending the Bohemianism of his youth, he tells them that they are ignorant how easily good spirits, good digestion, and jolly companions enable a man to triumph over all the ills that flesh is heir to. 'You cannot know,' he adds, 'what a fund of humour there is in common life, and how ridiculous one's shifts and strugglings appear when viewed through Bohemian glass.... Life seems to you but as a "twice told tale, vexing the dull ear of a drowsy man" seems but as a vale of tears, a place of mourning, weeping, and wailing.... I wish ye had lived for a while in "Austin Friars"; it would have enlarged your hearts, believe me.' This was the cheerful philosophy of Clarke as a young bachelor, after he had spent his slender patrimony, disappointed the successive efforts of friends to make a business man of him, and was about to begin the earning of a living by his pen. A dozen years later we see him with developed talents and a valuable name, but broken in fortune and spirit, and gloomily anticipating death months before it came. The Jew usurers, whose race he despised, had long been his real masters, and, with a nature sensitive in the extreme, he writhed in their bondage. Improvidence had been not merely an unhappy incident, as it is in the lives of so many young men of artistic tastes; it had overweighted him more or less for years, and 'the thoughtless writer of thoughtful literature,' as the author of his biographical memoir has called him, sank beneath it while yet at the beginning of a career full of the brightest promise. The sort of companionship that pleased his careless youth had latterly proved unsatisfying, and to some extent distasteful to him. Its effects upon his character were so unfavourable that some who had been his companions in journalism felt it necessary, after his death, to credit him with a greater capacity for kindly forbearance towards humanity than is apparent in the bulk of his writings.