Says Massey himself:
“Now I began to think that the course of all desire and the sum of all existence was to read and get knowledge. Read, read, read. I used to read at all possible times and all possible places; up in bed till two or three in the morning, nothing daunted by once setting the bed on fire. Greatly indebted was I to the bookstalls, where I have read a great deal, often folding a leaf in a book, and returning the next day to continue the subject; but sometimes the book was gone, and then great was my grief. When out of a situation I have often gone without a meal to purchase a book.”
Another English poet who sprang from as low an origin, and who as a boy was as uneducated as Massey, was John Clare, known as the Northamptonshire poet. He was born at Helpston, a village near Peterboro’, in 1793. His father was a poverty-stricken farm labourer, a cripple, unable to exist without occasional help from the parish, and whose struggle to keep the most wretched of homes, and supply potatoes and water gruel for food, was a ceaseless and desperate one. For all that, when the sickly little fellow Jack was old enough for school, the few pence requisite for sending him there were squeezed out of the poor father’s weekly pittance, and when the boy’s own paltry earnings in the fields began to come in, merely a few pence a week, he was sent to an evening school, the master of which allowed him the run of his little library, a privilege of which John enthusiastically and gratefully availed himself.
Often his parents returning from work found the boy, after being at school till late, crouching down by the fire, and tracing in the faint glimmer of a burning log, incomprehensible signs upon bits of paper and even wood, too poor to buy paper of the coarsest kind. John was in the habit of picking up shreds of the same material, such as used by grocers and other tradesmen, and of scratching thereon signs and figures, sometimes with pencil, oftener with charcoal. Never were there more ungracious and unfavourable conditions for the study of arithmetic and algebra.
A maternal uncle, footman to a lawyer at Wisbech, called one day at Helpston, and told the family there was a vacancy for a clerk in his master’s office. John was to apply. The mother ransacked her scanty wardrobe, to try and give her son a decent appearance, made him a pair of breeches out of an old dress, and a waistcoat out of a shawl, and begged from village crones an old white necktie and a pair of old black woollen gloves. What he wore was very large and also ancient. His costume excited amazement as he went his way. He reached Wisbech by canal boat, saw his uncle, was taken to Mr. Councillor Bellamy, who, after inspecting the nephew, said, “Well, I may see him again.” John, after staying a day or two with his uncle, then went back home and became serving lad at the Blue Bell, where he was treated well, and was able to pursue his beloved studies. There, too, he fell in love with Mary Joyce, daughter of a farmer, who forbade his daughter to have anything to do with the beggar boy, so he carved her name on every tree.
At this time occurred a great event in the poet’s life, one ever to be remembered with a quickening pulse and a sense of mighty triumph. He had read Thomson’s ‘Seasons,’ which had been described to him as only a trumpery book which could be bought for 1s. 6d. at Stamford. John had only sixpence, and his wages were not due. He went to his father for a shilling. Hopeless chance! His mother was also tried for that amount, and by superhuman exertion she raised sevenpence; the fraction remaining and required was raised at the Blue Bell. The day of the purchase came. Unable to sleep through excitement, he was up before daybreak, and started off for Stamford in hot haste. A six or seven mile walk was as nothing to the ardent lad, and he arrived before the bookseller’s shop he was seeking had its shutters down. He waited and waited, and you can imagine his dismay when at last he found that the shop never opened at all that day. So he went back to Helpston. By the way a bright thought occurred. By making a tremendous effort he obtained twopence more—proposed to a cowherd boy that for one penny he should look after the cattle, and for another penny keep the secret that he was going away for a few hours. Monday morning arrived, and his confederate. John soon walked the eight miles to Stamford. Bookseller’s shop closed. John sat on the doorstep and waited. Directly the door opened, the poor, thin, haggard country boy, with wild gleaming eyes, rushed to him for a copy of the ‘Seasons.’ The tradesman asked questions. John told his story in hurried words, and the bookseller said that he would let him have a copy for a shilling. “Keep the sixpence, my boy,” said the man, and away went John. In Barnack Park, amidst some thick shrubs, John Clare read the book. He did not know how to give vent to his happiness, but he had a pencil and a piece of coarse crumpled paper in his pocket, and on that he wrote his poem the ‘Morning Walk.’
The remainder of Clare’s life presents nothing specially remarkable beyond the fact that he was throughout it curiously unlucky; and though from time to time he met with good friends, misfortune had marked him for her own, and eventually, through brooding over some unsuccessful commercial enterprises, his mind gave way.
From John Clare to George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron, is a far cry; the former being purely a small pastoral poet, the latter impurely a great genius. A propos of being involved and being indebted to the children of Israel for supplies, his lordship wrote:
“In my young days they lent me cash that way,
Which I found very troublesome to pay.”
Tom Moore says that Byron’s marriage with the daughter of Sir Ralph Milbank was contracted in the hope that her dowry would extricate him from his monetary difficulties, but it apparently only increased his misery, and, notwithstanding the serious reason for their separation, as given by Mrs. Beecher Stowe, there is no doubt debt had a considerable share in bringing it about, for “during the first year of his marriage his house was nine times in the possession of bailiffs, his door almost daily beset by duns, and he was only saved from gaol by the privileges of his rank.”