INDEX TO VOLUME LXXXIX. 509 Anglo-Saxon Let Loose, Australia, Birds of, Century, American Crisis, Lesson of, for Englishmen, 495 Englishmen, What they best like to be, England and the War, 709 793 826 860 29 134 171 406 429 France, Pioneers of, in the New World, 880 675 Germany, The Coming War in, 285, 408, 410 832 Gypsies, 288 German Affairs, English Sympathies in 350 Clare, John, 1 Golden Leaves, 499, 499 Claverings, The, 89, 254, 540 Gun Cotton, 904 Germany, Literary Matters in, Happy Families, 191 Hymns of the Reformation, 422 Hell, Visions of, 886 175 412 742 815 877 Christian Year, The, Coal and Smoke, 497 History Anticipated, 884 500 Cant and Counter-cant, 643 Clergymen, 690 Irish Exodus, The, 696 Carlyle's Religion, 707 Congress, The European, 829 Industrial Partnership, 825 LITTELL'S LIVING AGE.-NO. 1140.-7 APRIL, 1866. From the Eclectic and Congregational Review. had the sad accidents of pauperism associat JOHN CLARE.* ed with his life. Forty-five years ago, that terrible critic, William Gifford, in the Quarterly Review, expressed his sense of marvelling admiration over the genius of the poor young peasant. The whole review is cast in the appreciative strain of the following words: We had nearly overlooked, amidst the bulkier works which incessantly solicit our attention, this interesting little volume; which bears indubitable evidence of being composed altosations. Here are no tawdry and feeble paragether from the impulses of the writer's mind, as excited by external objects and internal senphrases of former poets, no attempts at describing what the author might have become acquainted with in his limited reading: the woods, the vales, the brooks "the crimson spots IN the spring of 1864, in the Northamptonshire General County Lunatic Asylum, after a sad incarceration of about twentythree years, an appendix to a previous incarceration in a private asylum, from which he escaped, died John Clare. In the lucid intervals which shone upon him, he had always expressed a wish to sleep his last sleep in the churchyard of his native village, Helpston. Accordingly, when his spirit wrote to the Earl Fitzwilliam, one of the had fled, the superintendent of the asylum great peers of England, and whose propertv lies immediately in the neighbourhood of Helpston, asking for the grant of a small sum to carry the wish of the poor deceased into effect. The illustrious peer briefly replied by a refusal, implying that the deceased died as a pauper, and should be buried in the pauper's burial-ground. There were others who judged more generously or the loftier phenomena of the heavens, conthan the noble earl, and it is a satisfaction templated through the alternations of hope and to feel that this great indignity was not per- despondency, are the principal sources whence petrated towards the remains of one of the youth, whose adverse circumstances and the sweetest village nightingales that ever warbled the notes of pastoral melody in English verse. A requisite burial-fund was raised in a few days; the poet's body was conveyed to Helpston, and now lies beneath the shade of a sycamore-tree, tombed over only by the green grass and the eternal vault of the sky. It is our purpose to inquire a little, while we glance through Mr. Martin's most affectionate and mournfully interesting biography, into the claims John Clare has to memory and affectionate homage as one who has done honour to our land's language, and to inquire how far the Earl Fitzwilliam was justified in treating as a pauper's, the remains of one who certainly *1. The Life of John Clare. By Frederick Martin. Macmillan and Co. taker, 1835. resignation under them extort our sympathy, drew the faithful and vivid pictures before us. Examples of mind, highly gifted by nature, dage of adversity, are not rare in this country; struggling with and breaking through the bonbut privation is not destitution; and the instance before us is, perhaps, one of the most striking, of patient and persevering talent existing and enduring in the most forlorn and seemingly hopeless condition, that literature has at any time exhibited. Our distinguished predecessor of the Eclectic Review for 1820 writes in an equal strain of eloquence and admiration in a review of considerable length, marked by several subtle touches of sympathy; speaking of the poems as "exquisitely vivid descriptions of rural scenery," characterized by minute " fidelity and tastefulness of description; as far supe 2. The Rural Muse: Poems by John Clare. Whit-rior in spirit and picturesque beauty, and 3. Poems descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery. By John Clare, a Northamptonshire peasant. sey. 1821. Fourth Edition. Printed for Taylor and Hes 4. The Village Minstrel, and other Poems. By John Clare, the Northamptonshire peasant. 2 vols. Printed for Taylor and Hessey. FOURTH SERIES. LIVING AGE. VOL. I, 1. tasteful expression, to the namby-pamby - |