few doubts as to the condition of Clare's mind, and assured him an
eventual recovery. As with the fifty other patients, so he dealt with
Clare: keeping him away from books, and making him work in the garden
and the fields. Poetry, it is said, was made impossible for him, paper
being taken away from him; but it is not conceivable that Clare could
live apart from this kindest of companions for many months together.
Soon he was allowed to go out into the forest at his will, often
taking his new acquaintance Thomas Campbell, the son of the poet,
on these wood-rambles. His hallucinations do not appear to have
diminished, although they changed. He was now convinced that Mary
Joyce was his true wife--Patty was his "second wife." He had known
William Shakespeare, and many other great ones in person. Why such men
as Wordsworth, Campbell and Byron were allowed to steal John Clare's
best poems and to publish them as their own, he could not imagine.
John Clare was not only noble by nature but by blood also.--On such
rumoured eccentricities did the popular notion of his madness rest. It
would seem that anything he said was taken down in evidence against
him. How dared he be figurative?

On the other hand, Miss Mitford records figurative conversations not
so easily explained; his eye-witness's account of the execution of
Charles the First, "the most graphic and minute, with an accuracy as
to costume and manners far exceeding what would probably have been at
his command if sane," and his seaman's narrative of the battle of
the Nile and the death of Nelson in exact nautical detail. These
imaginations she compares to clairvoyance. Cyrus Redding, who left
three accounts of his visit, found him "no longer, as he was formerly,
attenuated and pale of complexion ... a little man, of muscular frame
and firmly set, his complexion fresh and forehead high, a nose
somewhat aquiline, and long full chin." "His manner was perfectly