ornaments, “The Village Minstrel” met with rather an icy greeting. Among the several explanations of this coldness put forward by the publishers and by certain friends, the likeliest is that the season of issue was not wisely chosen. In this year such gods of the pen as Scott, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Keats, and Lamb distributed joy to many a reader, so that poor JOHN CLARE naturally ran a great risk of being overlooked. It was now proved how dangerous had been the heat of his first welcome. Superlatives had been done to death; the lion-hunters had exhausted their treacly compliments, and were now eagerly scanning the literary horizon in the hope of seeing approach a fresh victim. Moreover, some injudicious persons had descanted more upon CLARE’S poverty than upon his remarkable powers. It was the general opinion, as Mr. Martin points out in his biography, that a really capable poet should be able to support himself. If he did not succeed in so doing, then he was but a dabbler while pretending to be a priest. The logic was of the sort to shrink from scrutiny, but it contented the shallow sufficiently well. To my thinking, the charge of twelve shillings for these two volumes was a factor in the neglect which overtook them. Be this as it may, a collection of verse containing some exquisite and lovely pieces, and marking in some respects an advance upon the forerunning book, fell upon the stony patch of indifference, there to remain while verse of fifty times less merit enjoyed a vogue out of proportion to its worth. In a word, CLARE’S second luck was the exact opposite of his first. In days saddened by the reflection that he had failed to hold by the glory which he obtained at his first venture, it was balm to CLARE to know that Robert Bloomfield at least warmly approved of what lukewarm triflers failed to appreciate.