given to rumours of his new benefits (variously estimated between two
hundred and a thousand a year), were to this gentleman as meat and
drink; and _The Alfred_ for October the 5th, 1832, contained a violent
manifesto condemning publishers and patrons in the most fiery fashion
and apparently inspired by the poet himself. This did his cause much
damage, and Clare wrote to the perpetrator in anger: "There never
was a more scandalous insult to my feelings than this officious
misstatement.... I am no beggar; for my income is L36, and though
I have had no final settlement with Taylor, I expect to have
one directly." Clare ended by demanding a recantation. None was
forthcoming, and the effect on patrons and poet was unfortunate
indeed. Yet still he could write of himself in this uncoloured style:
"I am ready to laugh with you at my own vanity. For I sit sometimes
and wonder over the little noise I have made in the world, until I
think I have written nothing yet to deserve any praise at all. So
the spirit of fame, of living a little after life like a noise on a
conspicuous place, urges my blood upward into unconscious melodies;
and striding down my orchard and homestead I hum and sing inwardly
these little madrigals, and then go in and pen them down, thinking
them much better things than they are--until I look over them again.
And then the charm vanishes into the vanity that I shall do something
better ere I die; and so, in spite of myself, I rhyme on and write
nothing but little things at last."

With the gear that Mrs. Emmerson's kindness and activity had provided,
Clare kept his garden and ground in order; yet the winter of 1832 was
a time of great hardship and foreboding. His youngest son Charles was
born on the 4th of January, 1833; the event shook Clare's nerve more
terribly perhaps than anything before had done and he went out
into the fields. Late in the day his daughter Anna found him lying