When the yearly engagement at the 'Blue Bell' came to an end, there was serious consultation between John and his parents as to his future course of life. He was too weak to be a farm labourer; too proud to remain a potboy in a public-house; and too poor to get apprenticed to any trade or handicraft. John himself would have liked to be a mason and stone-cutter, which trade one Bill Manton, of Market Deeping, who had a reputation far and wide for setting up gravestones, was ready to teach him. Bill Manton was a big swaggering fellow, who, vibrating constantly to and fro between tavern and graveyard, hinted to John that in becoming his apprentice he would have to write the mortuary poetry as well as to engrave it upon stone; and the notion was so pleasing that he made a desperate effort to get initiated into the art and mysteries of stone-cutting. But the obstacles were insurmountable, for Bill Manton wanted a premium of four pounds, which Clare's parents had no more means of raising than so many millions. There was another chance for learning a trade in the offer of one Jim Farrow, a hunchback, who proposed to teach John the art of cobbling gratis, the sole condition being that the apprentice should provide his own tools. The few pence necessary for this purpose might have been obtained, and the poet might have taken to the calling of St. Crispin, but that he showed a great aversion to the trade. The prospect of passing his whole life in a narrow cabin, mending hobnailed boots, was one he could not face, and he strongly expressed his wish of rather remaining servant in a public-house than submitting to this necessity. One more resource remained, which was to become a gardener's apprentice at Burghley Park, the seat of the Marquis of Exeter, where such a place happened to be vacant. The mere mentioning of the name Burghley Park had charms of its own to John Clare; and although the situation was but a poor one as regarded pay, he eagerly expressed his willingness to apply for it. To make success more sure, old Parker Clare resolved to accompany John in making the application. Accordingly, one morning, father and son, dressed in their very best, made their appearance at the park gates, inquiring for the head gardener of the noble Marquis. After a long delay they were ushered into the presence of the great man. Parker Clare, in whose eyes a head-gardener was quite as important a personage as a prince, took off his hat and bowed to the ground, and the example was followed, in great trepidation of mind, by John. This evidently pleased the high functionary, and he condescended to engage John Clare on the spot. The terms were that John should serve an apprenticeship of three years, receiving wages at the rate of eight shillings per week for the first year, and a shilling more each successive year; out of which sum he would have to provide his board and all other necessaries except lodgings. The arrangement seemed a most advantageous one both to John and his father, and poor old Parker wept tears of joy when returning to Helpston, and informing his wife of the brilliant future in store for their offspring. He was now, they thought, on the high road to fortune.

However, it was an evil day for John when entering upon his service at Burghley Park. The visions of poetry which swept across his mind when first lying under the trees of the park, and, with Thomson's 'Seasons' in hand, surveying the beautiful scenery, soon took flight, to give way to a reality more dreary and more corrupt than any he had yet witnessed. John Clare had not been many weeks in his new place, before he found that his master, the head-gardener, was but a low, foul-mouthed drunkard, while his fellow-apprentices and the other workmen sought pride in rivalling their chief in intemperance and dissipation. It was the custom at Burghley Park to lock up all the workmen and apprentices employed under the head-gardener during the night, to prevent them robbing the orchards. The men did not much relish the confinement in a narrow house, and therefore got into the regular habit of making their escape, at certain days in the week, to a neighbouring public-house, which they reached by getting out of the window of their garden-house prison, and climbing over the park fence. The tavern at which the jolly gardeners held their carousals was kept by one 'Tant Baker,' formerly a servant at Burghley Park, and now retailing fermented liquors under the sign of 'The Hole-in-the-Wall.' To go to the 'Hole-in-the-Wall' was one of the first proposals made to John after he had entered upon his service, and though he at first showed some reluctance, his scruples were soon overcome by the persuasion of his companions, who made the greater effort for this purpose, as they were afraid that by leaving him behind he would become a tell-tale. The young apprentice, in consequence, paid his regular visits with the others to the public-house; and it was not long before he came to like Tant Baker's strong ale as well, if not better, than his companions. Thus John Clare became accustomed, in some measure, to intemperate habits. Not unfrequently he took such a quantity of drink at the 'Hole-in-the-Wall' as to be completely stupified, and disabled to reach his sleeping-place for the night. He would then lie down under any hedge or tree, sleeping off his intoxication, and creeping home, in the early morning, to Burghley Park. Debasing as were the moral effects of this course of life, the physical consequences were not less disastrous. Several times, after having made his bed on the cold ground, John Clare found on awaking his whole body, covered as with a white sheet, the result of the cold dews of the night. Rheumatic complaints followed, permanently enfeebling a body weak from infancy.

The unhappy course of Clare's life was aggravated by the conduct of those under whom he served. The head gardener, a confirmed drunkard, thought it nevertheless beneath his dignity to get intoxicated at the 'Hole-in-the-Wall,' but sought his alcoholic refreshments at a more aristocratic public-house in the neighbouring town. He often caroused at Stamford so long and so late, that his spouse got impatient at her lonely residence, and despatched one messenger after the other to bring her truant lord home. The policy of the wife, however, was defeated by her drunken husband. He made it a rule of keeping the envoys sent to him, and plying them with strong drink till they were more unable to report their own than his movements. Poor little John, unfortunately, was often sent on these errands, which led to his being made drunk one night at Stamford, by his master, and the next evening, by his fellow-workers, at the way-side 'Hole-in-the-Wall.' What would have become of him had this wretched career been pursued long, is easy to imagine; but, happily, the state of things was brought to an end shorter than at first calculated upon. The drunken master was likewise a brutal master, and, to escape his insults and occasional violence, one of the gardeners, bound by a long engagement, resolved to run away; and, having taken a certain liking to John, persuaded him to become a companion in the flight. This was when John Clare had been about eleven months at Burghley Park, and, by the terms of his agreement with the head gardener, would have had to remain an apprentice for above two years longer. However, he did not think himself bound by the contract, and early one morning in autumn—date again uncertain, but probably about the year 1809, Clare now full sixteen—he scrambled through the window with his companion, and furtively quitted Burghley Park and the service of the Marquis of Exeter. Already on the evening of the same day he repented his rash act. His companion in the flight took him on a long trot to Grantham, a distance of twenty-two miles, where the two lodged at a small beerhouse, and Clare fancied that he was fairly out of the world. Having not the slightest notions about geography, or topography either, he believed he had now arrived at the confines of the habitable earth, and with but little chance of ever seeing his parents again. The thought brought forth tears, and he wept the whole night. On the next morning, the two fugitives tried to find work at Grantham, but did not succeed, so that they were compelled to tramp still further, towards Newark-upon-Trent. Here they were fortunate enough to obtain employment with a nurseryman named Withers, who gave them kind treatment, but very small wages. John, meanwhile, had got thoroughly home-sick, and the idea of being an immense distance away from his father and mother did not let him rest day or night. Not daring to speak to his companion, for fear of being retained by force, he at last made up his mind again to run away from his employer, this time alone. It was beginning to get winter; the roads were partially covered with snow, and swollen streams and rivers interrupted on many points the communication. Nevertheless, John Clare started on his home journey full of courage, though absolutely destitute of money and clothing, leaving part of the latter, together with his tools, at his master's house. During the two or three days that it took him to reach Helpston, he subsisted upon a crust of bread and an occasional draught of water from the nearest stream, while his lodgings were in haystacks on the roadside. His heart beat with tumultuous joy when at last he beheld the loved fields again, and the village where he was born. And when the door swung back which led into the little thatched hut, and he saw his mother and father sitting by the fire, he rushed into their arms, and fairly frightened them with the outburst of his affection.

There now remained nothing for John Clare but to fall back upon his old way of living, and to seek a precarious existence as farm-labourer. This was what he resigned himself to accordingly, only changing his occupation now and then, as circumstances permitted, by doing odd jobs as a shepherd or gardener. It was a very humble mode of life, and its remuneration scarce sufficient to purchase the coarsest food and the scantiest clothing; but it was, after all, the kind of existence which seemed most suited to the habits and inclinations of the strange youth, now growing into manhood. His intense admiration and worship of nature could not brook confinement of any sort, even such as suffered within the vast domain of Burghley Park. While gardener at the latter place, his poetical vein lay entirely dormant; he was never for a moment in the mood of writing nor even of reading verses. Perhaps the habits of dissipation into which he had fallen had something to do with this; yet it was owing still more to the position in which he was placed; The same scenery which had inspired him to his first poetical composition, when viewed in the glowing light of a beautiful morning in spring, left him cold and uninspired ever after. He often complained to his fellow-labourers, that he could not 'see far enough:' it was as if he felt the rattling of the chain, which bound him to the spot. A yearning after absolute freedom, mental as well as physical, was one of his strongest instincts through life, and not possessing this, he appeared to value little else. It was a desire, or a passion, which nearly approached the morbid, and gave rise to much that was painful in the subsequent part of his existence.

Once more a farm-labourer at Helpston, John Clare was all his own again. Thomson's 'Seasons' never left his pocket; he read the book when going to the fields in the morning, and read it again when eating his humble meal at noonday under a hedge. The evenings he invariably spent in writing verses, on any slips and bits of paper he could lay hold of. Soon he accumulated a considerable quantity of these fugitive pieces of poetry, and wishing to preserve them, yet ashamed to let it be known that he was writing verses, he hid the whole at the bottom of an old cupboard in his bedroom. What made him more timid than ever to confess his doings to either friends or acquaintances, was their entire want of sympathy, manifested to him on more than one occasion. It sometimes happened, on a Sunday, that he would take a walk through the fields, in company with his father and mother, or a neighbour; and seeing something particularly beautiful, an early rose, or a little insect, or the many-hued sky, John Clare would break forth into ecstasies, declaiming, in his own enthusiastic way, on what he deemed the marvellous things upon this marvellous earth. His voice rose; his eyes sparkled; his heart bounded within him in intense love and admiration of this grand, this incomprehensible, this ever-wonderful realm of the Creator which men call the world. But whenever his companions happened to listen to this involuntary outburst of enthusiasm, they broke out in mocking laughter. A rose was to them a rose, and nothing more; an apple they valued higher, as something eatable; and, perhaps, over plum-pudding they would have got enthusiastic, too. As it was, poor John was a constant butt for all the shafts of coarse ridicule; even his own parents, to whom he was attached with the tendered affection, and who fully returned his love, did not spare him. Old Parker Clare shook his head when he heard his son descanting upon the beauties of nature, and reproved him on many occasions for not using his spare time to better purpose than scribbling upon little bits of paper. Parker Clare's whole notion of poetry was confined to the halfpenny ballads which the hawkers sold at fairs, and it struck him, not unnaturally, that the things being so cheap, it could not be a paying business. This important fact he lost no occasion to impress upon his son, though with no result whatever.

While the father was not sparing in his attacks upon John's poetical manifestations, the mother, on her part, was active in the same direction. She had discovered her son's hiding-place of the curious slips of paper which engrossed his nightly attention, and, to make an end of the matter at once, the good woman swept up the whole lot one morning, and threw it in the chimney. Very likely there was in her mind some intuitive perception of the fact that her son's poems 'wanted fire.' John was greatly distressed when he found his verses gone; and more still when he discovered how the destruction happened. To prevent the recurrence of a similar event, he conceived the desperate plan of instilling into his parents a love of poetry. He boldly told them, what he had hitherto not so much as hinted at, that he was writing verses 'such as are found in books,', coupling it with the assertion that he could produce songs and ballads as good as those sold at fairs, so much admired by his father. Parker Clare again shook his head in a doubting mood, expressing a strong disbelief of his offspring's abilities in writing poetry. Thus put upon his mettle, John resolved to do his best to change the scepticism of his father, and having written some verses which he liked, and corrected them over and over again into desirable smoothness, he one evening read them to his astonished parents. But the result was thoroughly disappointing. So far from admiring his son's poetry, Parker Clare expressed his strong conviction that it was mere rubbish, not to be compared to the half-penny songs of the fairs. John was much humbled to hear this; however, he carried within himself a strong belief that his verses were not quite valueless, and therefore resolved upon one more test. Hearing the constant vaunting of the cheap ballads, he made up his mind to try whether his father was really able to distinguish between his own verses and those in print. Accordingly, when he had finished another composition, he committed it to memory, and rehearsed it to his parents in the evening, pretending to read it from the print. Then his father broke out in the delightful exclamation: 'Ah, John, my boy, if thou couldst make such-like verses, that would do.' This was an immense relief to the poor scribbler of poetry. He now saw clearly that his father's want of confidence was in him, the writer, and not in his writings. Henceforth, he made it his regular habit of reciting his own poetry to his parents as if reading it from a book, or printed sheet of paper. The habit, though it was strictly a dishonest proceeding, proved to him not only a real source of pleasure, in hearing his praises from the lips of those he loved most, but it also served him as a fair critical school. Whenever he found his parents laugh at a sentence which he deemed very pathetic, he set himself at once to correct it to a simpler style; whenever they asked him for an explanation of a word, or line, he noted it down as ill-expressed, or obscure; and whenever either his father or mother asked for a repetition of a song which they had heard before, he marked the slip of poetry so honoured as a success. And all these successful slips of paper John Clare placed in a crevice between his bed and the lath-and-plaster wall; a hole so dark and unfathomable as to be beyond the reach of even his sharp-eyed mother, always on the look-out for manuscript poetry to light the fire.

Having gained the surreptitious approval of his verses by his parents, John Clare began to be moved by a slight and almost unconscious feeling of ambition. Hitherto he had written poetry solely for the sake of pleasing himself, but he now was stirred by anxiety to discover what value others set upon his writings. The crevice in his bed-room, jealously guarded since his mother's grand auto-da-fÉ, and as yet undiscovered by the watchful maternal eye, contained a few dozen songs and ballads, descriptive of favourite trees, and flowers, and bits of scenery, and, after long brooding within himself, John resolved upon showing these pieces to an acquaintance. The person selected for this confidence was one Thomas Porter, a middle-aged man, living at a lonely cottage at Ashton Green, about a mile from Helpston. He was one of those individuals, described, in a class, as 'having seen better days;' besides, a lover of books, of flowers, and of solitary rambles. Their tastes coinciding so far, John Clare and Thomas Porter had become tolerably intimate friends, the former making it a point to visit, almost every Sunday, the little cottage at Ashton Green. Having wound his courage up to the point, John at last, with much secret fear and trembling, showed to his friend the best specimens of his poetry, asking for his opinion on the same. Mr. Thomas Porter, though a very good-natured man, was somewhat formal in his habits, scrutinizing, with visible astonishment, the little pieces of paper—blue, red, white, and yellow, having served the manifold purposes of the baker and tallow chandler before being helpful to poetry—which were submitted to his judgment. Seeing his young friend's disappointed look at the examination, he promised to give his opinion about the poetry in a week, namely, on the following Sunday. The week seemed a long one to John Clare, and he was almost trembling with excitement when again approaching the door of the small cottage of Ashton Green. He trembled still more at the first question of Mr. Thomas Porter:—'Do you know grammar?' It was useless for John to profess that he did know so much as the meaning of the word grammar; or whether it signified a person or a thing. Then Mr. Thomas Porter began to frown. 'You cannot write poetry before you know grammar!' he sternly exclaimed, handing the many-coloured slips of paper back to his poor friend. John Clare was humiliated beyond measure: he felt like one having committed a dreadful, unpardonable crime. Because the sense of the words was not at all clear to him, he was the deeper impressed with the consciousness of the heinous misdeed of having written verses without knowing grammar. So he resolved to know grammar, even should he perish in the attempt.

To ask Mr. Thomas Porter by what means he could get to know grammar, he had not the courage: the ground was burning under his feet in the little cottage at Ashton Green. John Clare, therefore, took his farewell without seeking further information, and hurried off to the house of a lad with whom he had been at Mr. Merrishaw's school. Did he know where or what grammar was? Yes, the lad knew; he had plunged into grammar at Mr. Merrishaw's, instead of into algebra and the pure sciences. But he could not tell how to learn grammar, except through one very difficult work, bound in leather, and called 'The Critical Spelling-book.' To get this wonderful book now became the all-absorbing thought of John Clare. Penny after penny was hoarded by immense exertions, and the greatest frugality, approaching to a want of the necessaries of life. The two shillings for the 'Critical Spelling-book' were saved at length, and John once more made his way to the Stamford bookseller, as eager as when in quest of Thomson's 'Seasons.' He was lucky enough to get 'Lowe's Critical Spelling-book' at once; but, having got it, underwent a fearful disappointment. Reading it under the hedge on the roadside, in his anxiety to possess the contents; reading it at his noonday meal; and reading it again at the evening fireside—the more he read it, the less could he understand it. Algebra and the pure sciences had puzzled him infinitely less than this awful grammar. Worthy Mr. Lowe's 'Critical Spelling-book,' happily forgotten by the present generation, instilled knowledge on the good old plan of making it as dark and mysterious as possible. There was, first, a long preface of twenty-two pages, in which Mr. Lowe deprecated all other spelling-books whatever, especially those of his very dear friends and fellow-teachers, Mr. Dixon, author of the 'English Instructor;' Mr. Kirkby, the learned writer of the 'Guide to the English Tongue;' Mr. Newberry, creator of the 'Circle of the Sciences;' Mr. Palairet, the famous compiler of the 'New English Spelling-book;' and Mr. Pardon, author of 'Spelling New-Modelled.' Having gone through the painful task of deprecating his friends, with the annexed modest statement that the 'Critical Spelling-book' would be found superior to any other work of the kind, past, present, or future, Mr. Lowe proceeded to give his own rules, distinguished 'by the greatest simplicity. Through the first chapter, treating of 'monosyllables,' John Clare made his way, with some trouble; but the second, entering the field of 'polysyllables,' brought him to a stop. Read as he might, poor John could not understand the ever-changing value of 'oxytones,' 'penacutes,' 'ternacutes,' 'quartacutes,' and 'quintacutes,' and was still more bewildered when he found that even after having got through all these hard words, there was a still harder tail at the end of them, in the shape of 'exceptions from the spelling-book—sounds of letters and syllables, some of which are more simple, and may conveniently be learnt by a single direction, others more complex, and may better be explained by being cast into phrases.' Finding it absolutely impossible to get over the oxytones, he shrunk back from the quartacutes and quintacutes as beyond the reach of an ordinary human being, and gave up the study in despair. He next put 'Lowe's Critical Spelling-book' into the old cupboard where his mother used to look after his poems—for culinary purposes. But the good housewife never burnt the 'Critical Spelling-book;' it being, probably, too tough for her, in all its hide-bound solidity. As for John Clare, he entirely failed in learning grammar and spelling, remaining ignorant of the sister arts to the end of his days.