[1] Clarke was partly raised in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, on the French-Spanish border, where his father was Anglican chaplain.
He studied at the University of Oxford, and in 1890 was appointed lecturer on Spanish at the Taylor Institution.
He resigned as a lecturer for reasons of health in 1894, but remained Fereday Fellow of St John's College, Oxford, and continued to write and research.
In 1898 he was invited to give the annual Taylorian Lecture, choosing as his subject the picaresque novel.
After his death, the portion of his library acquired by St John's College was catalogued by Fernando de Arteaga y Pereira, Taylorian Teacher of Spanish, who also revised Clarke's Spanish Grammar for Schools for a second edition in 1914.