Page:The English Peasant.djvu/320

 One day an old general met him in Mr Drury's shop, and took him home to his mansion, where a romantic young lady made love to him, a proceeding which well-nigh tempted him to the wickedness of repudiating his Patty, to whom he was now bound by the tenderest ties.

As he returned home that night from his wanderings, after the unknown bliss which had beckoned to him so alluringly from the far-off horizon, Clare felt that the clouds had already dropped, and with all his glory he was still a heartsore, struggling man. Happily he overcame the great temptation to forsake Patty, and without more ado he married her, and brought her home to the old cottage at Helpstone.

It is beyond my purpose to trace the history of his literary life. Suffice it to say that his patrons carried him up to London, and made a great show of him for one season. The long overcoat he wore to conceal his poverty he stoutly refused to take off in the hottest of rooms or the densest of crowds, so that he was a great sensation in every saloon to which he was taken. As handsome as a nobleman, yet so clownish, so unsophisticated: it was delicious to have the monotonous perfection of good society broken by such a singular apparition.

Nevertheless, he gave his keepers some anxiety, as he would only make friends with those who he felt really sympathised with him, and these were too often of the Billings' stamp, rowdies of the upper class, men who took him to the lowest theatres, and into the worst company. Happily, he made one friendship of the Holland type. Admiral Lord Radstock, a noble specimen of an English gentleman, who had nothing of the mere patron about him, met him at dinner; and the peer and the peasant being both true, simple-hearted men, felt "that touch of nature which makes the whole world kin," and became fast friends for life. Lord Radstock, who to a fine manly nature united great literary abilities and sound common-sense, was able and willing to be of the] utmost service to the poor poet.

This was not the only time Clare visited London. He came up on three subsequent occasions, and was introduced into the literary society of the day, meeting such men as Hazlitt and Cuaningham, De Quincey, Lamb, and Coleridge. But in the