Wesleyan Methodist minister and scholar. Born in County Londonderry, Ireland, he was the son of an Anglican schoolmaster and his Presbyterian wife. He became a follower of John Wesley (1703–1791; DNB) in 1779 and was later a prominent Methodist. An autodidact and gifted linguist, Clarke’s wide-ranging interests encompassed Persian, Arabic, Hindu, Coptic and Sanskrit texts, alchemy, the occult, astronomy, folk tales, mineralogy and conchology. His numerous publications included translations, a six-volume survey of the most important books in ten ancient languages, a multi-volume collection of English translations from the classics (1803–1806), The Use and Misuse of Tobacco (1797) and works on scripture and theology. In 1788 he married Mary Cooke (1760–1836), daughter and heiress of a wealthy clothier, and in his later years lived in some affluence. He died in 1832, a victim of the national cholera epidemic. Clarke was appointed as a Methodist preacher in Bristol in 1798 and initially met Southey, and Humphry Davy, there in 1800 at the home of Charles Fox (1740?–1809; DNB). In 1821 Clarke was commissioned by the Methodist Conference to produce a new biography of John Wesley, partly in response to Southey’s work of the previous year, but instead Clarke published a two-volume Memoirs of the Wesley Family: Collected Principally from Original Documents (1823). Clarke wrote to Southey a few times, including in 1826 to congratulate him on his Vindicæ Ecclesiæ Anglicanæ. Letters to Charles Butler, Esq. comprising Essays on the Romish Religion and Vindicating The Book of the Church (1826) and to suggest further sources for attacking the Catholic Church. Southey also possessed a number of Clarke’s works and admired him as ‘the most learned man the Methodists have ever had among them’.