Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/430

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Clarke
422
Clarke

danger and désagrémens.' They penetrated into Circassia, and on reaching the Kuban river found the Tchernomorski and the Circassians at war. On 11 March 1801 Clarke dates a letter from 'The source of the Simois, on Mount Ida, below Gargarus.' He was again in vigorous health, and spent fourteen days 'in the most incessant research, traversing the plain of Troy in all directions.' Two artists, Lusieri and Preaux, accompanied him and made forty drawings. Clarke endeavours to identify the village of Chiblak with Ilium, and maintains that 'the spacious plain lying on the north-eastern side of the [river] Mender and watered by the Callifat Osmack' is the plain where 'all the principal events of the Trojan war' were signalised (see Clarke, Travels, ii. (1812); Otter, Life, ii. 97-100; Schliemann, Ilios, ch. iv.) After visiting Rhodes and other classic regions, he paid a brief visit to Rosetta, and, in June 1801, to Cyprus. In July of that year he was in the Holy Land, at Jerusalem. He visited Galilee, and by October had found his way to Athens. He travelled in the Morea and in northern Greece, Macedon, and Thessaly: he collected more than a thousand Greek coins in gold, silver, and copper, and in the Morea procured several Greek vases. His chief prize was obtained at Eleusis, whence he succeeded in carrying off the colossal Greek statue (of the fourth or third century B.C.) of a female figure, supposed by Clarke to be 'Ceres' (Demeter) herself, but now generally called a 'Kistophoros' (from the mystic κίστη, which surmounts the head of the figure). The statue was discovered at Eleusis in 1676 by the traveller Wheler, and several ambassadors had unsuccessfully made applications for its removal. Clarke bribed the waiwode of Athens, purchased the statue, and obtained a firman. Difficulties were then made by the Eleusinian peasants, who were accustomed to burn a lamp before it on days of festival, and believed that the fertility of their cornland would cease when the statue was removed. On 22 Nov. 1801 they were reassured when the priest of Eleusis, arrayed in his vestments, struck the first blow with a pickaxe at the rubbish in which the statue was partially buried. The marble weighed nearly two tons, but Clarke improvised a machine by which it was slowly moved over the brow of the hill of Eleusis to the sea in about nine hours. The Princessa, merchantman, freighted with this statue and with Clarke's other Greek marbles, was wrecked near Beachy Head, not far from the home of Mr. Cripps, whose father saved what he could from the wreck. All the marbles were rescued but a manuscript of the 'Arabian Nights,' procured by Clarke at Cairo, was greatly damaged, and several cases of his drawings and plants were broken up and their contents dispersed. Clarke presented his 'Ceres' and the other sculptures to the university of Cambridge, and the former was placed in the vestibule of the public library in July 1803. The 'Ceres' and the sculptures are now in the basement of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and constitute one of the two principal divisions of the museum's collection of antiquities. Among Clarke's miscellaneous marbles are a statue of Pan, a figure of Eros, a comic mask, a votive relief to Athene, and other reliefs, and also various sepulchral stelæ, &c. In 1809 Clarke published an account of them entitled 'Greek Marbles brought from the Shores of the Euxine, Archipelago, and Mediterranean,' &c. Cambridge, 1809, 8vo. The book was printed at the expense of the university, and contains three engravings of the 'Ceres' by Flaxman and a sketch of Eleusis by Sir William Gell. Clarke justly takes credit for refusing to 'restore' his statues; but his elucidations of them are now of very little archæological value, and the whole collection has been redescribed by Professor Michaelis in his 'Ancient Marbles in Great Britain,' pp. 241-52. In 1802 Clarke had published 'Testimonies of different authors respecting the Colossal Statue of Ceres … at Cambridge,' 1802, 8vo. With his visit to Greece Clarke's travels were over. In February 1802 he was in Constantinople, whence he wrote home to say that he had seventy-six cases (and Cripps more than eighty) containing antiquities &c. collected during his wanderings. In October 1802 he left Paris for England. In 1803 the university of Cambridge conferred upon him the degree of LL.D., and the honorary degree of M.A. upon Cripps. In 1805 Clarke was appointed senior tutor of Jesus College, and was occupied there till 25 March 1806, when he married Angelica, fifth daughter of Sir William Beaumaris Rush, bart., a lady by whom he had five sons and two daughters. In December 1805 he had been ordained and instituted to the vicarage of Harlton; about 1809 he was also presented to the rectory of Yeldham in Essex. Both livings he held till his death.

On 17 March 1807 he began to deliver a course of lectures on mineralogy at Cambridge. At the end of 1808 he was appointed to the university professorship of mineralogy, then first established. Clarke was a good speaker, and worked hard to make his lectures a success; he was still lecturing in 1821. In 1819 he published 'The Gas Blowpipe; or, Art of Fusion by burning the Gaseous Con-