The fourth edition not being exhausted, the account is not closed: but "Advertising" has already swollen to £30, and there is no sign that Clare benefits a penny piece. Small wonder that at the foot of these figures he has written, "How can this be? I never sold the poems for any price--what money I had of Drury was given me on account of profits to be received--but here it seems I have got nothing and am brought in minus twenty pounds of which I never received a sixpence--or it seems that by the sale of these four thousand copies I have lost that much--and Drury told me that 5,000 copies had been printed tho' 4,000 only are accounted for." Had Clare noticed further an arithmetical discrepancy which apparently shortened his credit balance by some £27, he might have been still more sceptical. Not being overweighted, therefore, with instant wealth, Clare returned to Helpston determined to continue his work in the fields. But fame opposed him: all sorts and conditions of Lydia Whites, Leo Hunters, Stigginses, and Jingles crowded to the cottage, demanding to see the Northamptonshire Peasant, and often wasting hours of his time. One day, for example, "the inmates of a whole boarding-school, located at Stamford, visited the unhappy poet"; and even more congenial visitors who cheerfully hurried him off to the tavern parlour were the ruin of his work. Yet he persevered, writing his poems only in his leisure, until the harvest of 1820 was done; then in order to keep his word with Taylor, who had agreed to produce a new volume in the spring of 1821, he spent six months in the most energetic literary labour. Writing several poems a day as he roamed the field or sat in Lea Close Oak, he would sit till late in the night sifting, recasting and transcribing. His library, by his own enterprise and by presents from many friends, was greatly enlarged, and he already knew not only the literature of the past, but also that of the present. In his letters to Taylor are mentioned his appreciations of Keats, "Poor Keats, you know how I reverence him," Shelley, Hunt, Lamb--and almost every other contemporary classic. Nor was he afraid to criticize Scott with freedom in a letter to Scott's friend Sherwell: remarking also that Wordworth's Sonnet on Westminster Bridge had no equal in the language, but disagreeing with "his affected godliness."