15th November 1824

Went to gather pootys on the roman bank for a collection found a scarce sort of which I only saw 2 in my life I pickd up under a hedge at Peakirk town-end & another in Bainton meadow its color is a fine sunny yellow larger than the common sort & round the rim of the base is a black edging which extends no further than the rim it is not in the collection at the British Museum

14th November 1824

Read in old Tusser with whose quaint rhymes I have often been entertaind he seems to have been acquainted with most of the odd measures now in fashion he seems to have felt a taste for enclosures & Mavor that busy note-maker & book-compiler of schoolboy memory has added an impertinent note to Tussers opinion as an echo of faint praise so much for a parsons opinion in such matters I am an advocate for open fields & I think that others experience confirm my opinion every day there is 2 pretty sonnets in Tusser & some natural images scatterd about the book the 4 following lines are pretty:

The year I compare as I find for a truth
The Spring unto Childhood the Summer to Youth
The Harvest to Manhood the Winter to Age
All quickly forgot as a play on a stage

Some of the words in the glossary have different meanings with us — to addle means to earn wages — eddish with us is the grass that grows again as soon as it is mown — staddle, bottom of a stack &c &c

13th November 1824

Lookd into Thomson's 'Winter' there is a freshness about it I think superior to the others tho rather of a pompous cast how natural all his descriptions are nature was consulted in all of them the more I read them the more truth I discover the following are great favourites of mine & prove what I mean describing a hasty flood forcing through a narrow passage he says:

It boils & wheels & foams & thunders through

Snatch'd in short eddies plays the wither'd leaf

& on the flood the dancing feather floats

12th November 1824

Burnt a will which Taylor of Deeping made for me by Mossops orders as it was a jumble of contradictions to my wishes — wrote the outline for another in which I meant to leave everything both in the copyright & fund money &c &c of all my Books M.S.S. & property in the power of my family at least in the trust of those I shall nominate trustees & Lord Radstock is one that I shoud like to trouble for the purpose.

11th November 1824

Recievd a letter from Inskip the friend of Bloomfield* - full of complaints at my neglect of writing what use is writing when the amount on both sides amounts to nothing more than waste paper I have desires to know something of Bloomfields latter days but I can hear of nothing further than his dying neglected so its of no use enquiring further for we know that to be the common lot of genius .

* Later, Thomas Inskip, author of "Cant, A Satire" (1843} was a friend during Clare's first eight years in the asylum at Northampton.

10th November 1824

Read 'Macbeth' what a soul-thrilling power hovers about this tradegy I have read it over about 20 times & it chains my feelings still to its persual like a new thing it is Shakespears masterpiece the thrilling feelings created by the description of Lady Macbeths terror-haunted walkings in her sleep sink deeper than a thousand ghosts—at least in my vision of the terrible she is a ghost herself & feels with spirit & body a double terror

9th November 1824

Read Shakespears 'Henry the Fifth' of which I have always been very fond from almost a boy I first met with it in an odd volume which I got for sixpence yet I thought then that the Welsh officer with 2 other of his companions were tedious talkers & I feel that I think so still yet I feel such an interest about the play that I can never lay it down till I see the end of it