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JANE AUSTEN BY INCLINATION AND CONDITIONING was a natural conservative, as was the man who conducted her so chivalrously around the lower ground-floor library of Carlton House Palace, one gloomy November afternoon in 1815. Both were interested in the established order of English life and society. The Prince Regent's Librarian, James Stanier Clarke, could not always swear, however, to a belief in these respectable standards of conduct and morality. In earlier days he had consorted with an American writer of pronounced revolutionary tendencies.
Let us step back to the fledgling days of James Stanier Clarke's adult life when he was freshly ordained and busy with his church and parish at Preston, near Brighton. He had received this living through the usual channel of patronage. Clarke had made contact with William Hay ley, the poet, in early 179 1, reminding Hayley of his great friendship with William Clarke when the dashing poet had fallen in love with Fanny Page, a girl above his station in life. William Clarke (James's grandfather) had comforted and encouraged the young man, who later penned a memorial verse to him beginning "Mild William Clarke and Anne his wife" (Viveash 15). Hayley's passion for Fanny Page was not a lasting affair as he married Eliza Ball, daughter of the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, just one year later. (Jane Austen owned a set of poems and plays by William Hayley and was thought to have borrowed the name of Sophia Sentiment-from a playlet composed by the poet-for an article in the March 1789 edition of The Loiterer, her brothers' jointly published undergraduate magazine.)
William Hay ley was delighted to welcome James Stanier Clarke to his pleasant home at Eartham, in Sussex, from 1791 onwards and to confer his patronage on the young cleric. While there, Clarke met the writer Charlotte Smith, the sculptor John Flaxman, and other notable artists and writers. William Hayley's home at Eartham was described by his friend William Cowper as "the most elegant mansion that I have ever inhabited, and surrounded by the most delightful pleasure grounds that I have ever seen" (Leary 39,9). (Jane Austen was excited when her father was to purchase Cowper's works [25 November 1798]. Henry Austen averred, in 1818, that Jane's favorite moral writer...