In Taylor's company Clare visited the painter , William Hilton , and sat for his portrait .sx Hilton , elected R.A. in 1819 , was more highly esteemed by the Academy , of which he became Keeper in 1826 , than by the public .sx He suffered from ill health continually ; according to his friend and fellow-student , Benjamin Haydon , " A more amiable creature never lived , nor a kinder heart ; but there was an intellectual and physical feebleness in everything he did .sx " The boisterous Haydon was not among those who considered Hilton " the first historical painter of the age .sx " His picture of Clare now keeps fitting company with his portrait of Keats in the National Portrait Gallery .sx It is a happily conceived and vivid impression of Clare in an inspired moment , " C in alt .sx " The face , with its finely balanced features and fresh colouring , wears an eager and candid expression ; far-seeing , blue eyes look out beneath the high forehead and light-brown wavy hair ; the nose is delicately moulded , the mouth tranquil and sensitive , the cheeks rosy .sx Hilton sloughed away the peasant in Clare and left us the poet and " noble in disguise .sx " We do not know whether Clare appreciated Hilton's historical painting , but he was keenly interested in another branch of the art , and held decided views about it ; and in Peter De Wint , the landscape painter , Hilton's brother-in-law , he recognised an artist who had achieved in his own medium the very effects which Clare sought in his .sx De Wint's Dutch ancestry made the level stretches of fen country around Peterborough especially attractive to him , and in his frequent visits to the district he painted Whittlesey Mere and other scenes familiar to Clare .sx He was never so happy as when in the fields , and loved to paint direct from nature ; his water-colours , faithful renderings of typical English scenes , are notable for their realism , simplicity , and breadth of light and shade .sx Clare's sensitive appreciation of De Wint's work appears again and again , both in his letters and in his rough notes for an " Essay on Landscape Painting , " from which the following passages are taken :sx The " Essay on Landscape Painting " was never published , probably never finished ; but in a sonnet to De Wint , included in the Rural Muse , Clare paid as eloquent a tribute to the painter of " the sunny truth of Nature , " whose pencil .sx It is a pity that Clare had so few opportunities for studying examples of an art about which he could write with such in-sight and authority .sx His impressions of the work of Con-stable , John Crome , Cotman , and other painters of East Anglia , that home of landscape painting , would have been illuminating ; for he is not the least of that group of poets whom East Anglia may claim as peculiarly her own Crabbe , Bloomfield , Fitzgerald , and the Tennysons .sx Clare returned home at the end of the first week in March , and on the 16th his marriage with Patty took place at Caster-ton Magna .sx His account of their troubled courtship ends with this comment :sx " I held out as long as I could and then married her at Casterton Church .sx Her uncle , John Turner , was father and gave us the wedding dinner .sx " John Turner and Sophy Clare signed as witnesses , and Martha Turner made her mark , for though Patty could read she could not write .sx She did not leave Walkherd for some time after the marriage .sx There was no room for another family in the part of the cottage which the Clares then inhabited , and there was a scheme to provide a new home for John and his wife .sx Radstock had already written to Lord Milton to ask for a neat cottage and land , rent free for life .sx Gilchrist wrote on March 28th :sx " Surely Patty and you would be more `snug and canny' in a room together , till the cottage was ready , than two counties asunder as at present .sx " The poem " Proposals for Building a Cottage , " written at this time , describes the kind of dwelling Clare wanted .sx It was to be built beside a runnel , with a thatch which he might pull out here and there to make hiding-places for the sparrows , .sx and with holes within the chimney-top for the swallows' nests .sx There were to be grass plots by the door and " a little garden , not too fine , " with woodbines and spindling sedge and " old man's beard " in it ; inside he wanted shelves and cup-boards in all the corners for his books .sx In April , Lord Milton sent for Clare to meet him in the fields to choose a piece of ground ; but they missed each other .sx Then Clare grew impatient , and wrote to Milton on his own account , against the advice of his friends ; but nothing came of it .sx Finally , when the tenement next door to the Clares became vacant , John took it and brought Patty there .sx His later comments show that he was not sorry to remain under the old roof :sx " I have often been urged and advised to leave it and get a more roomy and better-looking house by visitors who gave me no better encouragement than their words and whom I did not expect would be of any service to me in case their advice happened to lead me into greater inconvenience in the end .sx So I took no notice of them and lived on in the same house and in the same way as I had always done , following my old occupations and keeping my old neighbours as friends , without being troubled or disappointed with climbing ambitions , that , shine as fine as they may , only tempt the restless mind to climb so that he may be made dizzy with a mocking splendour and topple down headlong into a lower degradation than he left behind him .sx " This settlement in a house of his own did not take place until early summer ; meanwhile he lived on with his parents , enjoying the sweet springtime of his good fortune .sx In the " Address to Plenty , " written in December , 1817 , Clare interrupted his passionate plea for the " Sad sons of Poverty , " whose sufferings were then his own , to give a vivid picture of the life he would lead if Plenty smiled on him .sx He narrated with gusto how he would shut out the blast and take his ease before a roaring fire , a pitcher and barrel near at hand , his chimney corner well supplied with coal or wood , his cupboard lined with victuals .sx There he would loll in an elbow-chair , reading a page in a book , peeping at the news , or taking a nap .sx After his return from .sx London , and before he settled down with Patty , Clare came near to realising his dream , and revelled in the favours of his new friend , Plenty .sx The reviewers who hastened to urge Clare not to desert his field labours certainly meant well ; their sympathy for his recent condition was sincere if imperfect .sx For the gulf fixed in those days between a pauper peasantry and the other classes of society was too vast to be bridged by a poem .sx Thus , while they wished to see Clare's poverty relieved , they were unable to sympathize with his expressed desire to escape from the estate to which a wise providence had called him ; nor did they accept him as an advocate for his fellow-peasants .sx He must be helped , not because he was a peasant to whom , as such , the conditions of the time denied a livelihood , but because he was , by some miracle , a peasant-poet .sx The term represents the age's solution of a very awkward problem .sx As poet , Clare ought to be encouraged in his ambition ; as peasant , clearly discouraged .sx So he became a " peasant-poet , " and was half-helped .sx But only the lightest shadow of difficulties to come yet rested upon his life .sx His letters to Gilchrist give glimpses of his enjoyment of the period of respite .sx He is reading Pope , Dryden , and Johnson's Dictionary , gifts from Lord Milton ; he returns Wordsworth and asks for the loan of a Byron .sx He is writing , and requests " a good fair jar of " ; he is quite set up now as to money matters , and will not be much friendly with work for a time .sx He must write an ode to the Marquis of Exeter as his Laureate .sx Flattering verses teem in upon him , accompanied by gifts of money , and he is busy answering them and writing anecdotes of his early life for Gilchrist .sx A guest from Trinity Hall , Cambridge , has paid him a special visit .sx The pitcher and barrel of the " Address to Plenty " also have their place in these celebrations , though he found them a less pure joy in reality than in dream .sx Gilchrist writes on the 28th of March :sx " Is not the headache the denunciation threatened in Scripture - `Woe unto them that drink strong drink' ?sx When will you leave off these sad doings , John Clare , John Clare ?sx " These unwonted excitements , suddenly succeeding yearsof hardship and want , soon threatened more serious trouble than headaches .sx On the 22nd of April , Hessey wrote to Gilchrist in some alarm because Drury , who was in town , had heard that Clare had been attacked by " a fit on the 19th or 20th of a dangerous kind .sx " Rumour had exaggerated ; Clare's own letter of the 19th reported that he was indeed " worse in health than you can conjecture or than myself am aware " ; yet he was in good spirits still .sx The visitor from Cambridge of whom Clare spoke was Chauncy Hare Townshend , then twenty years old and a student at Trinity Hall .sx In his account , written some years later , Clare mis-dated the visit ; it took place in March .sx Townshend's sonnet to Clare was published in the Morning Post ; he sent Beattie's Minstrel in April , and Clare's reply to his letter is interesting :sx As late as 1865 , after the publication of Martin's Life of Clare , Townshend recalled with pleasure his visit to Helpston , remembered the poet's " fine intellectual countenance , the paleness of which gave the impression of weak health , " and criticized the absurd story which Martin concocted from Clare's account of the visit , where among other inventions Townshend is said to have mistaken Clare for a highwayman .sx Early in April , Clare paid a visit to Holywell Hall , the seat of the Reynardson family , descendants of a Jacob Reynardson who was Lord Mayor of London in 1649 and suffered imprisonment for his adherence to the cause of Charles the First .sx This is Clare's story of the visit :sx Soon after this visit to Holywell there came definite news from London that Lord Radstock's efforts were bearing fruit .sx A subscription list had been opened for a fund to pro-vide Clare with a settled income , and , by the end of April , Radstock had collected about 100 .sx To this was added 100 .sx which had been sent to Taylor by Earl Fitzwilliam in February , and a further 100 advanced by the publishers themselves .sx In a letter of April the 18th , Taylor called this last sum a gift , and as such it appeared in the subscription list .sx But the gift was taken back again out of the profits on Poems Descriptive ; the policy of generosity for which the firm was at this time renowned underwent drastic changes in the next few years .sx On the 28th of April , 250 was invested in Navy 5 per cents .sx , and on the 7th of June a further 125 was added .sx The investment was held in trust to Clare by Taylor , who took Richard Woodhouse as joint trustee in September , and the half-yearly dividend of 9 7s .sx 6d .sx , which fell to 7 17s .sx 6d .sx in 1823 , was paid through the publisher .sx Clare was not consulted in this transaction , but , if he had been , he was too amazed by his good fortune and too aware of his ignorance of business affairs to question the wisdom of his benefactors .sx In May came a further addition to his income through his friend Dr. Bell of Stamford , who had pleaded his cause with Earl Spencer .sx The earl promised an annuity of 10 , which was also paid through Taylor and Hessey .sx Thus , with the 15 from the Marquis of Exeter , Clare now had a yearly income of 43 15s .sx