terminating his year's hiring at the Blue Bell. It was time for him
to take up some trade in good earnest; accordingly, in an evil hour
disguised as a fortunate one, he was apprenticed to the head gardener
at Burghley Park. The head gardener was in practice a sot and a
slave-driver. After much drunken wild bravado, not remarkable in the
lad Clare considering his companions and traditions, there came the
impulse to escape; with the result that Clare and a companion were
shortly afterwards working in a nursery garden at Newark-upon-Trent.
Both the nursery garden and "the silver Trent" are met again in the
poems composed in his asylum days; but for the time being they meant
little to him, and he suddenly departed through the snow. Arrived home
at Helpston, he lost some time in finding farm work and in writing
verses: sharing a loft at night with a fellow-labourer, he would rise
at all hours to note down new ideas. It was not unnatural in the
fellow-labourer to request him to "go and do his poeting elsewhere."
Clare was already producing work of value, none the less. Nothing
could be kept from his neighbours, who looked askance on his ways of
thinking, and writing: while a candid friend to whom he showed his
manuscripts directed his notice to the study of grammar. Troubled
by these ill omens, he comforted himself in the often intoxicated
friendship of the bad men of the village, who under the mellowing
influences of old ale roared applause as he recited his ballads. This
life was soon interrupted.

"When the country was chin-deep," Clare tells us, "in the fears of
invasion, and every mouth was filled with the terror which Buonaparte
had spread in other countries, a national scheme was set on foot to
raise a raw army of volunteers: and to make the matter plausible a
letter was circulated said to be written by the Prince Regent. I
forget how many were demanded from our parish, but remember the panic