something more valuable than baffling equations resulted from JOHN CLARE’S connection with the sage of Glinton, for Mr. Merrishaw made him free of his books, thus feeding more and more that desire for knowledge which sprang up in him not less rapidly than a mushroom grows in a meadow. Even in such a loose piece of biography as this--an essay which has no other aim than to glance in passing at the salient features of CLARE’S career--a little space must be spared for mention of the boy’s year of service as factotum at the “Blue Bell” at Helpstone, where he had almost as much leisure as work, because it was here that his hermitical notions and moods of dream increased at an extraordinary rate. Served by travelling pedlars, whose packs let him share in fancy the terror of Red Riding Hood, the adventures of Valentine and Orson, to say no word of Sinbad’s amazements, the small student entered for the first time into the recesses of fairy land, there to lave his hands in its abundant jewels, while making extortionate demands upon the swiftness of genies. Little by little, algebra went to the wall, yielding as much to the boy’s spreading passion for Nature’s feast of grass and flowers, as for the limitless enchantments born of imagination, since at this period the list of impulses communicated to him by wayside blossoms, by clouds, by winds, and by the easy ballads of thrushes, daily grew longer. The boy began to appreciate the largeness of God’s school as compared with the limits reigned over by Dame Bullimore and the pedagogue of Glinton; and his increasing sense of hearing enabled him to receive into his understanding fragments of those sermons which are preached by stones. Hunger for expansion lived and lusted in his heart. No better example of this fury of craving could be adduced than the story of how the young poet entered into a combat with circumstances in order that he might obtain a copy of Thomson’s “Seasons.” Mental agony, as well as a superlative degree of hoarding, went to the purchase of that coveted volume, the history of which is fully set forth in Mr. Frederick Martin’s stimulating “Life of John Clare.” During these glowing months the boy of genius had not ceased from utilising every chance scrap of paper for the purpose of jotting down his exercises in rhyme. By means of a forgivable trick he secured the verbal patronage of his father and mother, who could not see any merit in his verses till he pretended that they were the compositions of others. As poem after poem was written their author stored them in a cranny in the wall, a retreat at last invaded by Mrs. Clare, with the result that she was wont to help the boiling of the kettle by burning underneath it the early pipings of her son.