er yet received adequate
recognition.

Among Clarke's uncompleted writings are a few brilliant chapters of a
novel which promised to be as permanent a record of his ability as the
well-known convict story, though of a different kind. But the author had
the unlucky faculty of attending to anything rather than the work which
offered him certain fame and fortune, as well as the most natural
employment of his powers. At the time of his death he was only in his
thirty-fifth year. Probably with advancing life he would have become
more settled in his tastes and habits, realising that the work at which
he was happiest in every sense was the writing of novels, and that
alone.

The satire and cynicism so noticeable in Clarke's writings, especially
in his critical sketches and essays, are liable to give an inaccurate
conception of his temperament. They obscure, as such characteristics
nearly always do in literature, the gentler aspects of the writer's
nature. His satire is, perhaps, too uncompromising. It often seems to
reflect a personal bitterness, to take too little cognisance of the
springs of human weakness. Undoubtedly brilliant in force and keenness,
it yet too seldom produces the kind of hearty laugh with which Thackeray
and Swift, for example, relieve their fiercest scorn. His personal
experience of life had been discouraging. He had sounded its depths and
sipped its pleasures; its rude facts found him deficient in self-control
and fortitude. He had refused to learn the common logic of existence.

There is an element of tragedy in the rapid change which the unhappy
circumstances of his private life wrought in his temperament. Addressing
the disciples of Mrs. Grundy in an early essay defending the
Bohemianism of his youth, he tells them that they are ignorant how
easily good spirits, good digestion, and jolly companions enable a man
to triumph over all the ills that flesh is heir to. 'You cannot know,'
he adds, 'what a fund of humour there is in common life, and how
ridiculous one's shifts and strugglings appear when viewed through
Bohemian glass.... Life seems to you but as a "twice told tale, vexing
the dull ear of a drowsy man" seems but as a vale of tears, a place of
mourning, weeping, and wailing.... I wish ye had lived for a while in
"Austin Friars"; it would have enlarged your hearts, believe me.'

This was the cheerful philosophy of Clarke as a young bachelor, after he
had spent his slender patrimony, disappoin