Mental derangement advanced upon CLARE with rapidity. In the spring of 1836 there was a brief period when the flowers made him a clear-minded partaker of their magic, but the improvement was not maintained, and little by little the condition of the poet became more widley known, till at last it reached the ears of several patrons. These advised his immediate removal to the asylum at Northampton, a plan to which Patty refused her consent, for she still had hopes that if her husband were allowed to range at his will and seek a cure from the pharmacy of nature, he would beat the disease. But Patty’s love only delayed the inevitable. CLARE, it is true, escaped from the control suggested by Earl Fitzwilliam, who endeavoured to place the poet at Northampton, where a weekly dole from the nobleman’s purse would secure for the patient some additional comforts; but he had nowhither to fly from the severe benefactions of the friends of former days. Mr. John Taylor and others, willing to heed now that the catastrophe to which their silence had contributed was come by its full dimensions, clubbed together and sent CLARE to Dr. Allen’s private lunatic asylum in Epping Forest, where all the resources of a humane treatment were brought to bear upon his case. He wrote a great quantity of verse, some of which was of real worth; tended the flowers in the garden beds; wandered about the woods hour after hour, smoking, musing, or conversing with some companion. In the middle of July, 1841, he escaped, and eventually reached Werrington, a hamlet lying beyond Peterborough. His chief food had been grass; blood was trickling from his feet when Patty took the wanderer into her arms on the roadside at Werrington. After a day’s rest at Northborough, the poet asked for pen and ink. When these were supplied he commenced to write his Odyssey. It is almost safe to say that no more extraordinary a document belongs to the personal history of any genius born within our boundaries. It is of a character to draw tears from the unsympathetic; your Scrooge, your Quilp, could scarcely withstand its pathos. Well might Christopher North request us to be done with our comments upon Scotland’s usage of Burns! The rest is soon told. CLARE, though quite harmless, was not allowed to pass free among the country sights and sounds. For some reason or other he was haled to the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, where he remained for twenty-two years, neglected alike by kindred, by friends, and by the educated mob which had once made an idol of him. At the Asylum he was treated with unvarying mildness by the authorities, who refused to regulate the comforts of the poet by the eleven shillings a week supplied by Earl Fitzwilliam. That their natures were not subservient to coinage they proved by placing CLARE--poor, eleven-shillings-a-week JOHN CLARE--among private patients in the best ward.