[2] After receiving a very limited education he was apprenticed to a linen manufacturer, but, finding the employment uncongenial, he resumed school-life at the institution founded by Wesley at Kingswood.

John Wesley invited him to become a pupil in the Methodist seminary lately established at Kingswood, Bristol.

First the classics engaged his especial attention, then the early Christian fathers, and then Oriental writers; Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and other Eastern tongues, with the literature which they represented, being among the subjects of his study.

He contributed to the Eclectic Review from the date of its establishment in 1804, and rendered much literary assistance to the British and Foreign Bible Society.

[7][11] Clarke was an amateur historian and scholar, and was invited by Brandt, secretary of the Royal Society of Antiquarians to see the newly acquired Rosetta Stone.

Clarke proposed that the stone was basalt, a theory which while recently was found to be incorrect was thought to be correct until the late 1900s when better scanning equipment was developed.

[18] He is chiefly remembered for writing a commentary on the Bible which took him 40 years to complete (1831) and which was a primary Methodist theological resource for two centuries.

Clarke's christological view was rejected in large part by Methodist theologians in favour of the traditional perspective.

In his commentary of Isaiah 58:6, he writes : "Let the oppressed go free – How can any nation pretend to fast or worship God at all, or dare to profess that they believe in the existence of such a Being, while they carry on the slave trade, and traffic in the souls, blood, and bodies, of men!

To these may be added the new edition for the Record Commission of Thomas Rymer's Foedera, in folio, of which he saw the first volume, and part of the second, through the press.

by Letitia Elizabeth Landon is based on an engraving of an incident in Dr Clarke's life painted by A. Mosses.

It is included in Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1836, and, as the notes attached refer to Liverpool, it presumably occurred late in his life.