image might have occurred to anyone, but it is specially interesting as coming from the mouth of Hans Andersen, because it seems to express so much of his vision of the world. He was, above all men of his century, the magician of the flock of wild swans. XI JOHN CLARE Mr. Arthur Symons edited a good selection of the poems of John Clare a few years ago, and Edward Thomas was always faithful in his praise. Yet Messrs. Blunden & Porter’s new edition of Clare’s work has meant for most of its readers the rediscovery of a lost man of genius. For Clare, though he enjoyed a “boom” in London almost exactly a hundred years ago, has never been fully appreciated: he has never even been fully printed. In 1820 he was more famous than Keats, who had the same publisher. Keats’s 1820 volume was one of the great books of English literature, but the public preferred John Clare, and three editions of _Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery_ were sold between January 16 and the end of March. It was not that the public had discovered a poet: it was merely that they had discovered an agricultural labourer who was a poet. At the same time, to have been over-boomed was bound to do Clare’s reputation harm. It raised hopes that his verse did not satisfy, and readers who come to an author expecting too much are apt in their disappointment to blame him for even more faults than he possesses. It is obvious that if we are asked to appreciate Clare as a poet of the same company as Keats and Shelley, our minds will be preoccupied with the feeling that he is an intruder, and we shall be able to listen to him with all our attention only when he has ceased to challenge such ruinous comparisons. I do not know whether the critics of 1820 gave more praise to Clare than to Keats. But the public did. The public blew a bubble, and the bubble burst. Had Clare, instead of making a sensation, merely made the quiet reputation he deserved, he would not have collapsed so soon into one of the most unjustly neglected poets of the nineteenth century.