composition while he remained densely ignorant of so important a branch of knowledge. So he procured, without delay, one of those puzzling works called English grammars. He tried his best to make it out, but finally gave it up in despair, and resolved to get on without understanding grammar.
Meanwhile the young man, craving above all things for a little sympathetic appreciation of his poetic efforts, fell into the hands of a couple who had nothing to recommend them but the faculty of "good fellowship."
At the end of the village lived, on their own little freehold, two brothers named Billings. They loafed away their time in the day, and poached at night; gathering around them every evening in their cottage, which went by the name of " Bachelors' Hall," the most reckless characters in the place. It was very easy, after the Burghley Park experiences, for John Clare to fall into this kind of temptation, and night after night he spent at Bachelors' Hall, reciting his songs amidst the thumping applause of heavy fists and hob-nailed boots.
At home things began to look more dreary than ever. The poor father was more and more a burden, and John found he had less and less money to spare. It was a dark time in Clare's life, and he made it still darker and more wretched for his unhappy parents, by committing the usual folly of a rural labourer when he loses his head in drink. He fell into the hands of the recruiting sergeant—
"With high-crowned hat and ribbons hung about,
With tuteling fife, and hoarse rap-tapping drum."
Clare was marched off with a number of other poor waifs to learn the goose-step. It must have been a queer Falstaffian regiment, for Clare was clad in trousers so long that he had to tuck them into his shoes. Indeed, the recruiting was managed on such slipshod principles, that the whole district set their faces against it determinately, so that in the end the military authorities quietly gave way, and disbanded the men. Thus Clare had just enough of soldiering to give him a taste for vagabondism.
Accordingly, we find him next consorting with the gipsies. Happily the very cause which rendered his life a burden saved
