East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations

I have a very strong idea that the calm of the country and the peaceful occupations of the people had not a very rousing influence upon the intellect. I may go further, and say that the cares of the farm, when high farming was unknown, did not much lift at that time the master above the man. The latter wore a smock-frock, while the former, perhaps, sported a blue coat with brass buttons, and had rather a better kind of head-dress, and ambled along on a little steady cob, that knew at which ale-house to call for the regular allowance, quite as well as his master. But as regards talk – which was chiefly of bullocks and pigs – well, there really was no very great difference after all. To such religion was the mainspring which kept the whole intellect going; and religion was to be had at the meeting. And I can well remember how strange it seemed to me that these rough, simple, untutored sons of the soil could speak of it with enthusiasm, and could pray, at any rate, with astonishing fervour. Away from the influence of the meeting-house there existed a Bœotian state of mind, only to be excited by appeals to the senses of the most palpable character, a state of mind in which faith – the evidence of things not seen, according to Paul – was quite out of the question; and I regret to say that, notwithstanding the activity of the last fifty years and the praiseworthy and laborious efforts of the East Anglian clergy in all quarters, suitably to rouse and feed the intellect of the East Anglian peasantry, a good deal yet remains to be done. Only a year or two ago, riding on an omnibus in a Suffolk village, the driver asked me if people could go to America by land. ‘Of course not,’ was my reply. ‘Why do you ask such a question?’ Well, it came out that he had ‘heerd tell how people got to Americay in ten days; and he did not see how they could do that unless they went by land, and had good hosses to get ’em there at that time.’ On my explaining the real state of affairs, he admitted, by way of apology, that he was not much of a traveller himself. Once he had been to Colchester; but that was a long time ago.

But to return to the Suffolk Chronicle. It was my duty as a lad, when it had been duly studied at home, to take it to the next subscriber, and I fancy by the time the paper had gone its round it was not a little the worse for wear. But there were other political impulses which tended to create and feed the sacred flame of civil and religious liberty. In one corner of the village lived a small shopkeeper, who stored away, among his pots and pans of treacle and sugar and grocery, a few well-thumbed copies, done up in dirty brown paper, of the squibs and caricatures published by Hone, whom I can just remember, a red-faced old gentleman in black, in the Patriot office, and George Cruikshank, with whom I was to spend many a merry hour in after-life. This small shopkeeper was one of the chapel people – a kind of superintendent in the Sunday-school, for which office he was by no means fitted, but there was no one else to take the berth, and as the family also dealt with him in many ways, I had often to repair to his shop. It was then our young eyes were opened as to the wickedness in high places by the perusal of the ‘Political House that Jack built,’ and other publications of a similar revolutionary character. Nothing is sacred to the caricaturist, and half a century ago bishops and statesmen and lords and kings were very fair subjects for the exercise of his art. In our day things have changed for the better, partly as the result of the Radical efforts, of which respectability at that time stood so much in awe. London newspapers rarely reached so far as Wrentham. It was the fashion then to look to Ipswich for light and leading. However, as the cry for reform increased in strength, and the debates inside the House of Commons and out waxed fiercer, now and then even a London newspaper found its way into our house, and I can well remember how our hearts glowed within us as some one of us read, while father smoked his usual after-dinner pipe, previous to going out to spend the afternoon visiting his sick and afflicted; and how such names as Earl Grey, and Lord John Russell, and Lord Brougham – the people then called him Harry Brougham; it was a pity that he was ever anything else – were familiar in our mouths as household words.

In another way also there came to the children in Wrentham the growing perception of a larger world than that in which we lived, and moved, and had our being. One of the historic sites of East Anglia is Framlingham, a small market town, lying a little off the highroad to London, a few miles from what always seemed to me the very uninteresting village of Needham Market, though at one time Godwin, the author of ‘Caleb Williams,’ preached in the chapel there. There is now a public school for Suffolk boys at Framlingham, and it may yet make a noise in the world. Framlingham in our time has given London Mr. Jeaffreson, a successful man of letters, and Sir Henry Thompson, a still more successful surgeon. In my young days it was chiefly noted for its castle. The mother of that amiable and excellent lady, Mrs. Trimmer, also came from Framlingham; and it is to be hoped that the old town may have had something to do with the formation of the character of a woman whom now we should sneer at, perhaps, as goody-goody, but who, when George the Third was King, did much for the education and improvement of the young. I read in Mrs. Trimmer’s life ‘that her father was a man of an excellent understanding, and of great piety; and so high was his reputation for knowledge of divinity, and so exemplary his moral conduct, that, as an exception to their general rule, which admitted no laymen, he was chosen member of a clerical club in the town (Ipswich) in which he resided. From him,’ continues the biographer of the daughter, ‘she imbibed the purest sentiments of religion and virtue, and learnt betimes the fundamental principles of Christianity.’ Well, it is hoped Mr. Kirby did his best for his daughter; but, after all, how much more potent is the influence of a mother! And hence I may claim for Framlingham a fair share in the formation of even so burning and shining a light as Mrs. Trimmer.

The name Framlingham, say the learned, or did say – for what learned men say at one time does not always correspond with what they say at another – is composed of two Saxon words, signifying the habitation of strangers; and to strangers the place is still rich in interest. In its church sleeps the unfortunate, but heroic, Earl of Surrey, whose harmonious verse still delights the students of English literature. Some say he was born at Framlingham. This is matter of doubt; but there is no doubt about the fact that he was buried there by his son, the Earl of Northampton, who erected a handsome monument to his father’s memory. The monument is an elevated tomb, with the Earl’s arms and those of his lady in the front in the angles, and with an inscription in the centre. It has his effigy in armour, with an ermined mantle, his feet leaning against a lion couchant. On his left is his lady in black, with an ermined mantle and a coronet. Both have their hands held up as in prayer. On a projecting plinth in front is the figure of his second son, the Earl of Northampton, in armour, with a mantle of ermine, kneeling in prayer. Behind, in a similar plinth, kneeling with a coronet, and in robes, is his eldest daughter, Jane, Countess of Westmoreland, on the right; and his third daughter Catherine, the wife of Lord Henry Berkeley on the left. The monument is kept in order, and painted occasionally, as directed by the Earl of Northampton, out of the endowment of his hospital at Greenwich. In repairing the monument in October, 1835, the Rev. George Attwood, curate of Framlingham, discovered the remains of the Earl lying embedded in clay, directly under his figure on his tomb. It is difficult now to find what high treason the chivalrous and poetic and gallant Earl had been guilty of; but at that time our eighth Henry ruled the land, and if he wished anyone out of the way, he had not far to go for witnesses or judge or jury ready to do his wicked and wanton will. To the shame of England be it said, the Earl of Surrey was beheaded when he was only thirty years of age. No particulars are preserved of his deportment in prison or on the scaffold, but from the noble spirit he evinced at his trial, and from his general character, it cannot be doubted that he behaved in the last scene of his existence with fortitude and dignity. On the barbarous injustice to which he was sacrificed comment is unnecessary; but regret at his early fate is increased by the circumstance that Henry was in extremities when he ordered his execution, and that his swollen and enfeebled hands were unequal to the task of signing his death-warrant. In this respect more fortunate was the father of Surrey, the Duke of Norfolk, who is buried near the altar of the church at Framlingham. He also was condemned to death, but in the meanwhile the King died, and his victim was set free. Not far off is the tomb of Henry Fitzroy, a natural son of King Henry. He was a friend of Surrey, and was to have married his sister. The other monuments which adorn the interior of this magnificent church are a table of black marble, supported by angels, to the memory of Sir Robert Hitcham, a mural monument by Roubillac, and others to commemorate virtues and graces, as embodied in the lives of decent men and women in whom the world has long ceased to take any interest.

The venerable castle – here I quote Dr. Dugdale’s ‘British Traveller’ – with its eventful history, imparts the strongest interest to the town of Framlingham. Tradition refers its origin to the sixth century, and ascribes it to Redwald, one of the early Saxon monarchs. St. Edmund the Martyr fled hither in 870, and was besieged by the Danes, who took Framlingham and held it fifty years. The Norman King gave the castle to the Bigods. The castle passed through many hands. It was there Queen Mary took shelter when, after the death of Edward VI., Lady Jane Grey was called to the throne, and thence she came to London, on the capture of the former, to take possession of the crown. It was an evil day for England when she came to Framlingham Castle and beguiled the hearts of the Suffolk men. Old Fox tells us that when Mary had returned to her castle at Framlingham there resorted to her ‘the Suffolke men, who, being alwayes forward in promoting the proceedings of the Gospel, promised her their aid and help, so that she would not attempt the alteration of the religion which her brother, King Edward, had before established by laws and orders publickly enacted, and received by the consent of the whole realm in his behalf. She afterwards agreed with such promise made unto them that no innovation should be made of religion, as that no man would or could then have misdoubted her. “Victorious by the aid of the Suffolke men,” Queen Mary soon forgot her promise. They of course remonstrated. It was, methinks,’ adds Fox, ‘an heavie word that she answered to the Suffolke men afterwards which did make supplication unto her grace to performe her promise. “For so much,” saith she, “as you being but members desire to rule your head, you shall one day perceive the members must obey their head, and not look to rule over the same.”’ Well, Queen Mary was as good as her word. As Fox adds, ‘What she performed on her part the thing itself and the whole story of the persecution doth testifie.’ But the stubborn Suffolk gospellers were not to be put down, and a remnant had been left in Framlingham, as well as in other parts of the country. At Framlingham we find a Richard Goltie, son-in-law of Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, was instituted to the rectory in 1630. In 1650 he refused the engagement to submit to the then existing Government, and was removed, when Henry Sampson, M.A., a fellow of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, was appointed by his college to the vacancy. He continued there till the Restoration, when Mr. Goltie returned and took possession of the living, which he continued to hold till his death. Not being satisfied to conform, Mr. Sampson continued awhile preaching at Framlingham to those who were attached to his ministry, in private houses and other buildings, and by his labours laid the foundation of the Congregational or Independent Church in that town, as appears from a note in the Church Book belonging to the Dissenters meeting at Woodbridge, in the Quay Lane. Mr. Sampson collected materials for a history of Nonconformity, a great part of which is incorporated in Calamy and Palmer’s works. It was to him that John Fairfax, of Needham Market, wrote, when he and some other ministers were shut up in Bury Gaol for the crime of preaching the Gospel. It appears that they had met in the parish church, at Walsham-le-Willows, where, after the liturgy was read by the clergyman of the parish, a sermon was preached by a non-licensed minister. The party were then taken and committed to prison, where they remained till the next Quarter Sessions, when they were released upon their recognisances to appear at the next Assizes. Then, it seems, though not convicted upon any other offence, upon the suggestion of the justices, to whom they were strangers, they were committed again to prison, on the plea that they were persons dangerous to the public peace. Thus were Dissenters treated in the good old times. Mr. Sampson seems to have fared somewhat better. After his removal, he travelled on the Continent, returned to London, entered himself at the College of Physicians, and lived and died in good repute. The old congregation having become Unitarian, a new one was formed, and of this Church a pillar was Mr. Henry Thompson – a gentleman well known and widely honoured in his day. This Mr. Thompson had a son, who was sent to Wrentham to be educated for awhile with myself. An uncle of his, one of the most amiable of men, lived at Southwold, close by, and I presume it was by his means that the settlement was effected. Be that as it may, the change was a welcome one, as it gave me a pleasant companion for nearly five years of boyish life. I confess my two sisters – one of whom has, alas! long been in her grave – did all they could in the way of sports and pastimes to meet my wants and wishes, and act like boys; but the fact is, though it may be doubted in these days of Women’s Rights, girls are not boys, nor can they be expected to behave as such.

I confess the advent of this young Thompson from Framlingham was a great event in our small family circle. In the first place he came from a town, and that at once gave him a marked superiority. Then his father kept a horse and gig, for it was thus young Thompson came to Wrentham, and all the world over a gig has been a symbol of the respectability dear to the British heart; and he had been for that time and as an only son carefully and intelligently trained by one of the family who, in the person of the late Edward Miall, founder of the Nonconformist, and M.P. for Bradford, was supposed to be the incarnation of what was termed the dissidence of Dissent. Young Thompson was also what would be called a genteel youth, and gave me ideas as to wearing straps to my trousers, oiling my hair, and generally adorning my person, which had never entered into my unsophisticated head. He also had been to London, and as Framlingham was some twenty miles nearer the Metropolis – the centre of intelligence – than Wrentham, the intelligence of a Framlingham lad was of course expected, à fortiori, to be of a stronger character than that of one born twenty miles farther from the sun of London. There was also a good deal of talent in the family on the mother’s side. Mrs. Thompson was a Miss Medley, and Mr. Medley was an artist of great merit, the son of Mr. Medley, of Liverpool, a leading Baptist minister in his day, and a writer of hymns still sung in Baptist churches. Mr. Medley was also active as a Liberal, and was credited by us boys with a personal acquaintance with no less illustrious an individual than the great Brougham himself. Once or twice he came to lodge during the summer at Southwold; naturally he was visited there by his grandson, who would return well primed with political anecdote to our rustic circle, and was deemed by me more of an authority than ever. Once or twice, too, I had the honour of being a visitor, and heard Mr. Medley, a fine old gentleman, who lived to a very advanced age, talk of art and artists and other matters quite out of my usual sphere. It is not surprising, then, that the grandson became in time quite an artist himself, though he is better known to the world, not so much in that capacity, but as Sir Henry Thompson, certainly not the least distinguished surgeon of our day. In Lord Beaconsfield’s last novel, ‘Endymion,’ we have a passing reference to one Wrentham lad, Sir Charles Wetherell, as ‘the eccentric and too uncompromising Wetherell.’ Assuredly the fame of another lad, Sir Henry Thompson, connected with Wrentham, will longer live.

This reference to Sir Henry Thompson reminds me of his early attempts at rhyme, which I trust he will forgive me for rescuing from oblivion. Once upon a time we captured a young cuckoo, and having carefully gorged it with bread-and-milk, and left it in a nest in an outhouse, which we devoted mainly to rabbits, the next morning the poor bird was found to be dead. A prize was offered for the best couplet. Three of us contended. My sister wrote:

‘This lonely sepulchre contains
A little cuckoo’s dead remains.’

I wrote:

‘To our grief, cuckoo sweet
Is lying underneath our feet.’

Thompson took quite a different and, read by the light of his subsequent career, a far more characteristic view of the case. He took care, as a medical man, to dwell on the cause which had terminated the career of so interesting a bird. According to him,

‘It had a breast as soft as silk,
And died of eating bread-and-milk.’

Assuredly in this case the child was father to the man.

But the great awakening of the time, that which made the dry bones live, and fluttered the dove-cotes of Toryism – we never heard the word Conservative then – was the General Election. At that time we were always having General Elections. We had one, of course, when George IV. died and King William reigned in his stead; we had another when the Duke was out and the Whigs came in; and then we had another when the cry ran through the land, and reached even the most remote villages of East Anglia, of ‘The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill!’ Voters were brought down, or up, as the case might be, from all quarters of the land. Coaches-full came tearing along, gorgeous with election flags, and placarded all over with names of rival candidates. Gentlemen of ancient lineage called to request of the meanest elector the favour of his vote and influence. It was with pain the Liberals of our little village resolved to vote against our Benacre neighbour, Sir Thomas Gooch, who had long represented the county, but of whom the Radicals spoke derisively as Gaffer Gooch, or the Benacre Bull, and chose in his stead a country squire known as Robert Newton Shaw, utterly unknown in our quarter of the county.

It was rather a trying time for the Wrentham Liberals and Dissenters to do their duty, for Sir Thomas was a neighbour, and always was a pleasant gentleman in the parish, and had power to do anyone mischief who went against him. Our medical man did not vote at all. Our squire actually, I believe, supported Sir Thomas, and altogether respectable people found themselves in an extremely awkward position. At Southwold the people were a little more independent, for Gaffer Gooch rarely illuminated that little town with his presence; and as my father, with the economy which is part and parcel of the Scotchman as he leaves his native land, but which rarely extends to his children, had, by teaching gentlemen’s sons and other ways, been able to save a little, which little had been devoted to the purchase of cottage property in Southwold (well do I remember the difficulty there was in collecting the rents; never, assuredly, were people so much afflicted or so unfortunate when the time of payment came), it was for Southwold that he claimed his vote. I, as the son, was permitted to share in the glories of that eventful day. The election took place at school-time, and my companion was Henry Thompson. We had to walk betimes to Frostenden, where Farmer Downing lived, who was that rara avis a Liberal tenant farmer; but of course he did not vote tenant farmer, but as a freeholder. It was with alarm that Mrs. Downing saw her lord and master drive off with us two lads in the gig. There had been riots at London, riots as near as Ipswich, and why not at Halesworth? A mile or two after we had started we met, per arrangement, the Southwold contingent, who joined us with flags flying and a band playing, and all the pride and pomp and circumstance of war. We rode in a gig, and our animal was a steady-going mare, and behaved as such; but all had not gigs or steady-going mares. Some were in carts, some were on horseback, some in ancient vehicles furbished up for the occasion; and as the band played and the people shouted, some of the animals felt induced to dance, and especially was this restlessness on the part of the quadrupeds increased as we neared Halesworth, in the market-place of which was the polling-booth, and in the streets of which we out-lying voters riding in procession made quite a show. Halesworth, or Holser, as it was called, was distant about nine miles, lying to the left of Yoxford, a village which its admirers were wont to call the Garden of Suffolk. In 1809 the Bishop of Norwich wrote from Halesworth: ‘The church in this place is uncommonly fine, and the ruins of an old castle (formerly the seat of the Howards) are striking and majestic.’ But when we went there the ruins were gone – the more is the pity – and the church remained, at that time held by no less a Liberal than Richard Whately, afterwards Archbishop of Dublin. I used at times to meet with a country gentleman – a brother of a noble lord – who after he had spent a fortune merrily, as country gentlemen did in the good old times, came to live on a small annuity, and, in spite of his enormous daily consumption of London porter at the leading inn of the town, managed to reach a good old age. The hon. gentleman and I were on friendly terms, and sometimes he would talk of Whately, who had often been at his house. But, alas! he remembered nothing of a man who became so celebrated in his day except that he would eat after dinner any number of oranges, and was so fond of active exercise that he would take a pitchfork and fill his tumbrels with manure, or work just like a labourer on a farm. Of the Doctor’s aversion to church-bell ringing we have a curious illustration in a letter which appeared in the Suffolk Chronicle in 1825: ‘A short time since a wedding took place in the families of two of the oldest and most respectable inhabitants of the town, when it was understood that the Rector had, for the first time since his induction to his living, given permission for the bells to greet the happy pair. After, however, sounding a merry peal a short hour and a half, a message was received at the belfry that the Rector thought they had rung long enough. The tardiness with which this mandate was obeyed soon brought the rev. gentleman in person to enforce his order, which was then reluctantly complied with to the great disappointment of the inhabitants, and mortification of the ringers, several of whom had come from a considerable distance to assist in the festivities of the day.’ The Independent chapel was an old-fashioned meeting-house, full of heavy pillars, which, as they intercepted the view of the preacher, were favourable to that gentle sleep so peculiarly refreshing on a Sunday afternoon – especially in hot weather – in the square and commodious family pew. The minister was an old and venerable-looking divine of the name of Dennant, who was always writing little poems – I remember the opening lines of one,

‘A while ago when I was nought,
And neither body, soul, nor thought’ —

and whose ‘Soul Prosperity,’ a volume of sober prose, reached a second edition. His grandson, Mr. J. R. Robinson, now the energetic manager of the Daily News, may be said to have achieved a position in the world of London of which his simple-hearted and deeply-devotional grandfather could never have dreamed. As I was the son of a brother minister, Mr. Dennant’s house was open to myself and Thompson, though we did not go there on the particular day of which I write. The leading tradesman of the town was a Liberal, and had at least one pretty daughter, and there we went. Most of the day, however, we mixed with the mob which crowded round, while the voters – you may be sure, not all of them sober – were brought up to vote. The excitement was immense; there was the hourly publication of the state of the poll – more or less unreliable, but, nevertheless, exciting; and what a tumult there was as one or other of the rival candidates drove up to his temporary quarters in a carriage and pair, or carriage and four, made a short speech, which was cheered by his friends and howled at derisively by his foes, while the horses were being changed, and then drove off at a gallop to make the same display and to undergo the same ordeal elsewhere! To be sure, there was a little rough play; now and then a rush was made by nobody in particular, and for no particular reason; or, again, an indiscreet voter – rendered additionally so by indulgence in beer – gave occasion for offence; but really, beyond a scrimmage, a hat broken, a coat or two torn or bespattered with mud, a cockade rudely snatched from the wearer, little harm was done. The voters knew each other, and had come to vote, and had stayed to see the fun. For the timid, the infirm, the old, the day was a trying one; but there was an excitement and a life about the affair one misses now that the ballot has come into play, and has made the voter less of a man than ever. Of course the shops were shut up. All who could afford to do so kept open house, and at every available window were the bright, beaming faces of the Suffolk fair – oh, they were jolly, those election days of old! Well, in East Anglia, as elsewhere, spite of the parsons, spite of the landlords, spite of the slavery of old custom, spite of old traditions, the freeholders voted Reform, and Reform was won, and everyone believed that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. In ten years, I heard people say, there would be no tithes for the farmer to pay, and welcome was the announcement; for then, as now, the agricultural interest was depressed, and the farmer was a ruined man. Now one takes but a languid interest in the word Reform, but then it stirred the hearts of the people; and how they celebrated their victory, how they hoisted flags and got up processions and made speeches, and feasted and hurrahed, ’twere tedious to tell. All over the land the people rejoiced with exceeding joy. Old things, they believed, had passed away – all things had become new.

CHAPTER V.

BUNGAY AND ITS PEOPLE

Bungay Nonconformity – Hannah More – The Childses – The Queen’s Librarian – Prince Albert.

In the beginning of the present century, a disgraceful attack on Methodism – by which the writer means Dissent in all its branches – appeared in what was then the leading critical journal of the age, the Edinburgh Review. ‘The sources,’ said the writer, a clergyman (to his shame be it recorded) of the Church of England – no less distinguished a divine than the far-famed Sydney Smith – ‘from which we shall derive our extracts are the Evangelical and Methodistical magazines for the year 1807, works which are said to be circulated to the amount of 18,000 or 20,000 every month, and which contain the sentiments of Arminian and Calvinistic Methodists, and of the Evangelical clergymen of the Church of England. We shall use the general term of Methodism to designate these three classes of fanatics, not troubling ourselves to point out the finer shades and nicer discriminations of lunacy, but treating them as all in one general conspiracy against common-sense and rational orthodox Christianity.’ To East Anglia came the reputed worthy Canon for an illustration of what he termed their policy to have a great change of ministers. Accordingly, he reprints from the Evangelical Magazine the following notice of an East Anglian Nonconformist ordination, which, by-the-bye, in no degree affects the charge unjustly laid at the door of these ‘fanatics,’ as engaged ‘in one general conspiracy against common-sense and rational orthodox Christianity.’ ‘Same day the Rev. W. Haward, from Hoxton Academy, was ordained over the Independent Church at Rendham, Suffolk; Mr. Pickles, of Walpole, began with prayer and reading; Mr. Price, of Woodbridge, delivered the introductory discourse, and asked the questions; Mr. Dennant, of Halesworth, offered the ordinary prayer; Mr. Shufflebottom [the italics are the Canon’s], of Bungay, gave the charge from Acts xx. 28; Mr. Vincent, of Deal, the general prayer; and Mr. Walford, of Yarmouth, preached to the people from Phil. ii. 16.’ As a lad, I saw a good deal of Bungay, though I never knew the Shufflebottom whose name seems to have been such a stumbling-block and cause of offence to the Reverend Canon of St. Paul’s. I say Reverend Canon of St. Paul’s, because, though the writer had not gained that honour when the review appeared, it was as Canon he returned to the charge when he sanctioned the republication of it in his collected works. It was at Bungay that I had my first painful experience of the utter depravity of the human heart – a truth of which, perhaps, for a boy, I learned too much from the pulpit. The river Waveney runs through Bungay, and one day, fishing there, I lent a redcoat – with whom, like most boys, I was proud to scrape an acquaintance – my line, he promising to return it when I came back from dinner. When I did so, alas! the red-coat was gone.

Nonconformity in Bungay seems to have originated in the days of the Lord Protector, in the person of Zephaniah Smith, who was the author of: (1) ‘The Dome of Heretiques; or, a discovery of subtle Foxes who were tyed tayle to tayle, and crept into the Church to do mischief’; (2) ‘The Malignant’s Plot; or, the Conspiracie of the Wicked against the Just, laid open in a sermon preached at Eyke, in Suffolk, January 23, 1697. Preached and published to set forth the grounds why the Wicked lay such crimes to the charge of God’s people as they are cleare off’; (3) ‘The Skillful Teacher.’ Beloe says of this Smith that ‘he was a most singular character, and among the first founders of the sect of the Antinomians.’ One of the first leaders of this sect is said by Wood to have been John Eaton, who was a minister and preacher at Wickham Market, in which situation and capacity Smith succeeded him. This Smith published many other tracts and sermons, chiefly fanatical and with fantastical titles. One is described by Wood, and is called ‘Directions for Seekers and Expectants, or a Guide for Weak Christians in these discontented times.’ ‘I shall not give an extract from these sermons,’ writes Beloe, who is clearly, like Wood, by no means a sympathetic or appreciative critic, ‘though very curious, but they are not characterized by any peculiarity of diction, and are chiefly remarkable for the enthusiasm with which the doctrine of the sect to which the preacher belonged is asserted and vindicated. The hearers also must have been endowed with an extraordinary degree of patience, as they are spun out to a great length.’ Mr. Smith’s ministry at Bungay led to a contention, which resulted in an appeal to the young Protector, Richard Cromwell. Then we find Mr. Samuel Malbon silenced by the Act of Uniformity, who is described as a man mighty in the Scriptures, who became pastor to the church in Amsterdam. In 1695 we hear of a conventicle in Bungay, with a preacher with a regularly paid stipend of £40 a year. Till 1700 the congregation worshipped in a barn; but in that year the old meeting-house was built, and let to the congregation at £10 per annum. In 1729 it was made over to the Presbyterians or Independents worshipping there, ‘for ever.’ The founders of that conventicle seem to have suffered for their faith; yet the glorious Revolution of 1688 had been achieved, and William of Orange – who had come from a land which had nobly sheltered the earlier Nonconformists – was seated on the throne.

Bungay, till Sydney Smith made it famous, was not much known to the general public. It was on the borders of the county and out of the way. The only coach that ran through it, I can remember, was a small one that ran from Norwich through Beccles and Bungay to Yarmouth; and, if I remember aright, on alternate days. There was, at any rate, no direct communication between it and London. Bungay is a well-built market town, skirted on the east and west by the navigable river Waveney, which divides it from Norfolk, and was at one time noted for the manufacture of knitted worsted stockings and Suffolk hempen cloth; but those trades are now obsolete. The great Roger Bigod – one of the men who really did come over with the Conqueror – built its castle, the ruins of which yet remain, on a bold eminence on the river Waveney. ‘The castle,’ writes Dugdale, ‘once the residence and stronghold of the Bigods, and by one of them conceived to be impregnable, has become the habitation of helpless poverty, many miserable hovels having been reared against its walls for the accommodation of the lowest class.’ The form of the castle appears to have been octangular. The ruins of two round fortal towers and fortresses of the west and south-west angles are still standing, as also three sides of the great tower or keep, the walls of which are from 7 to 11 feet thick and from 15 to 17 feet high. In the midst of the ruins, on what is called the Terrace, is a mineral spring, now disused, and near it is a vault, or dungeon, of considerable depth. Detached portions of the wall and their foundations are spread in all directions in the castle grounds, a ridge of which, about 40 yards long, forms the southern boundary of a bowling-green which commands delightful prospects. The mounds of earth raised for the defence of the castle still retain much of their original character, though considerably reduced in height. One of them, facing the south, was partly removed in 1840, with the intention of forming a cattle market. As a boy I often heard of the proud boast of Hugh Bigod, second Earl, one of King Stephen’s most formidable opponents, as recorded by Camden:

‘Were I in my castle of Bungay,
Upon the river Waveney,
I would not care for the King of Cockeney.’

In ancient times the Waveney was a much broader stream than it is now, and Bungay was called Le Bon Eye, or the good island, then being nearly surrounded by water. Hence the name, in the vulgar dialect, of Bungay. To ‘go to Bungay to get a new bottom’ was a common saying in Suffolk.

In 1777 we find Hannah More writing to Garrick from Bungay, which she describes as ‘a much better town than I expected, very clean and pleasant.’ ‘You are the favourite bard of Bungay’ – at that time the tragedians of the city of Norwich were staying there – ‘and,’ writes Hannah, who at that time had not become serious and renounced the gaieties of the great world, ‘the dramatic furore rages terribly among the people, the more so, I presume, from being allowed to vent itself so seldom. Everybody goes to the play every night, – that is, every other night, which is as often as they perform. Visiting, drinking, and even card-playing, is for this happy month suspended; nay, I question if, like Lent, it does not stop the celebration of weddings, for I do not believe there is a damsel in the town who would spare the time to be married during this rarely-occurring scene of festivity. It must be confessed, however, the good folks have no bad taste.’ It must be recollected that Hannah More in reality belongs to East Anglia. She was the daughter of Jacob More, who was descended from a respectable family at Harleston. He was a High Churchman, but all his family were Nonconformists. His mother used to tell young people that they would have known how to value Gospel privileges had they lived like her, when at midnight pious worshippers went with stealthy steps through the snow to hear the words of inspiration delivered by a holy man at her father’s house; while her father, with a drawn sword, guarded the entrance from violent or profane intrusion, adding that they boarded the minister and kept his horse for £10 a year. An unfortunate lawsuit deprived the Mores of their property, and thus it was that the celebrated Hannah was born at Gloucestershire, and not in Suffolk or Norfolk. The family mansion was at Wenhaston, not very far from Wrentham.

In my young days Bungay owed all its fame and most of its wealth to the far-famed John Childs, who was one of our first Church Rate martyrs, to whom is due mainly the destruction of the Bible-printing monopoly, and to whom the late Edward Miall was much indebted for establishing the Nonconformist newspaper. For many years it was the habit of Mr. Childs to celebrate that event by a dinner, at which the wine was good and the talk was better. Old John Childs, of Bungay, had a cellar of port which a dean might have envied; and many was the bottle that I cracked with him as a young man, after a walk from Wrentham to Bungay, a distance of fourteen miles, to talk with him on things in general, and politics in particular. He was emphatically a self-made man – a man who would have made his way anywhere, and a man who had a large acquaintance with the reformers of his day in all parts of the country. On one occasion the great Dan O’Connell came to pay him a visit, much to the delight of the Suffolk Radicals, and to the horror of the Tories. The first great dinner at which I had the honour of being present, and to which I was taken by my father, who was a great friend of Mr. Childs, was on the occasion of the presentation to the latter of a testimonial by a deputation of distinguished Dissenters from Ipswich in connection with his incarceration in the county gaol at Ipswich, for having refused to pay rates for the support of a Church in which he did not believe, and for the performance of a service in which he took no part. At that time ‘the dear old Church of England,’ while it was compelled to tolerate Dissent, insisted on Dissent being taxed to the uttermost farthing; and that it does not do so now, and that it is more popular in consequence, is due to the firm stand taken by such men as John Childs of Bungay. He was a great phrenologist. In his garden he had a summer-house, which he facetiously termed his scullery, where he had some three hundred plaster casts, many of which he had taken himself of public individuals and friends and acquaintances. My father was honoured in this way, as also my eldest sister. Sir Henry Thompson and I escaped that honour, but I have not forgotten his dark, piercing glance at our heads, when, as boys, we first came into his presence, and how I trusted that the verdict was satisfactory. Of course the Childses went to Meeting, but when I knew Bungay Mr. Shufflebottom had been gathered to his fathers, and the Rev. John Blaikie, a Scotchman, and therefore always a welcome guest at Wrentham, reigned in his stead. Mr. Childs had a large and promising family, few of whom now remain. His daughter was an exceptionally gifted and glorious creature, as in that early day it seemed to me. She also died early, leaving but one son, Mr. Crisp, a partner in the well-known legal firm of Messrs. Ashurst, Morris, and Crisp. It was in the little box by the window of the London Coffee House – now, alas! no more – where Mr. Childs, on the occasion of his frequent visits to London, always gathered around him his friends, that I first made the acquaintance of Mr. Ashurst, the head of the firm – a self-made man, like Mr. Childs, of wonderful acuteness and great public spirit. In religion Mr. Ashurst was far more advanced than the Bungay printer. ‘It is not a thing to reason about,’ said the latter; and so to the last he remained orthodox, attended the Bungay Meeting-house, invited the divines of that order to his house, put in appearance at ordination services, and openings of chapels, and was to be seen at May Meetings when in town, where occasionally his criticisms were of a freer order than is usually met with at such places.

‘The Bungay Press,’ wrote a correspondent of the Bookseller, on the death of Mr. Charles Childs, who had succeeded his father in the business, ‘has been long known for its careful and excellent work. Established some short time before the commencement of the present century, its founder had, for twenty years, limited its productions to serial publications and books of a popular and useful character, and in the year 1823, soon after Mr. John Childs had taken control of the business, upwards of twenty wooden presses were working, at long hours, to supply the rapidly-increasing demand for such works as folio Bibles, universal histories, domestic medicine books, and other publications then issuing in one and two shilling numbers from the press.’ Originally Mr. Childs had been in a grocer’s shop at Norwich. There he was met with by a Mr. Brightley, a printer and publisher, who, originally a schoolmaster at Beccles, had suggested to young Childs that he had better come and help him at Bungay than waste his time behind a counter. Fortunately for them both the young man acceded to the proposal, and travelled all over England driving tandem, and doing everywhere what we should now call a roaring trade. Then he married Mr. Brightley’s daughter, and became a partner in the firm, which was known as that of John and R. Childs, and, latterly of Childs and Son. ‘Uncle Robert,’ as I used to hear him called, was little known out of the Bungay circle. He had a nice house, and lived comfortably, marrying, after a long courtship, the only one of the Stricklands who was not a writer. Agnes was often a visitor at Bungay, and not a little shocked at the atrocious after-dinner talk of the Bungay Radicals. ‘Do you not think,’ said she, in her somewhat stilted and tragic style of talk, one day, to a literary man who was seated next her, author of a French dictionary which the Childses were printing at the time – ‘Do you not think it was a cruel and wicked act to murder the sainted and unfortunate Charles I.?’ ‘Why, ma’am,’ stuttered the author, while the dinner-party were silent, ‘I’d have p-p-poisoned him.’ The gifted authoress talked no more that day. Naturally, as a lad, seeing so much of Bungay, I wished to be a printer, but Mr. Childs said there was no use in being a printer without plenty of capital, and so that idea was renounced.

But to return to Mr. John Childs. About the year 1826, in association with the late Joseph Ogle Robinson, he projected and commenced the publication of a series of books known in the trade as the ‘Imperial Edition of Standard Authors,’ which for many years maintained an extensive sale, and certainly then met an admitted literary want, furnishing the student and critical reader, in a cheap and handsome form, with dictionaries, histories, commentaries, biographies, and miscellaneous literature of acknowledged value and importance, such as Burke’s works, Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall,’ Howe’s works, the writings of Lord Bacon – books which are still in the market, and which, if I may speak from a pretty wide acquaintance with students’ libraries fifty years ago, were in great demand at that time. The disadvantage of such a series is that the books are too big to put in the pocket or to hold in the hand. But I do not know that that is a great disadvantage to a real student who takes up a book to master its contents, and not merely to pass away his time. To study properly a man must be in his study. In that particular apartment he is bound to have a table, and if you place a book on a table to read, it matters little the size of the page, or the number of columns each page contains. Mr. Childs set the fashion of reprinting standard authors on a good-sized page, with a couple of columns on each page. That fashion was followed by Mr. W. Smith – a Fleet Street publisher, than whom a better man never lived – and by Messrs. Chambers; but now it seems quite to have passed away. On the failure of Mr. Robinson, Mr. Childs’ valuable reprints were placed in the hands of Westley and Davis, and subsequently with Ball, Arnold, and Co.; and latterly, I think, the late Mr. H. G. Bohn reissued them at intervals. As to his part publications, when Mr. Childs had given up pushing them, he disposed of them all to Mr. Virtue, of Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row, who then secured almost a monopoly of the part-number trade, and thus made a large fortune. ‘I love books that come out in numbers,’ says Lord Montford in ‘Endymion,’ ‘as there is a little suspense, and you cannot deprive yourself of all interest by glancing at the last part of the last volume.’ And so I suppose in the same way there will always be a part-number trade, though the reapers in the field are many, and the harvest is not what it was.

Active and fiery in body and soul, Mr. John Childs, at a somewhat later period, with the sympathy and advocacy of Mr. Joseph Hume and other members of Parliament, and aided to a large extent by Lord Brougham, succeeded in procuring the appointment of a Committee of the House of Commons to inquire into the existing King’s Printers’ Patent for printing Bibles and Acts of Parliament, the period for the renewal of which was near at hand. The principle upon which the patent was originally granted appeared to be correctness secured only by protection– a fallacy which the voluminous evidence of the Committee most completely exposed. The late Alderman Besley, a typefounder, and a great friend of John Childs, as well as Robert Childs, practical printers, gave conclusive evidence on this head, and the result was that, although the patent was renewed for thirty years, instead of sixty as before, the Scriptures were sold to the public at a greatly reduced price, and the trade in Bibles, though nominally protected, has ever since been practically free.

Nor did Mr. Childs’ labours end here. In Scotland the right of printing Bibles had been granted exclusively to a company of private persons, Blaire and Bruce, neither of whom had any practical knowledge of the art of printing, or took any interest in the different editions of the Bible. The same men also had the supplying all the public revenue offices of Government with stationery, by which means they enjoyed an annual profit of more than £6,000 a year. When the Government, in an economical mood, ordered them to relinquish the latter contract, not only were they compensated for the loss, but were continued in their vested rights as regards Bible-printing. In Scotland there was no one to interfere with their rights. In England patents had been given not only to the firm of Messrs. Strahan, Eyre and Spottiswoode, but to each of the two Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Up to 1821 the Bibles of the English monopolists came freely into Scotland, but then a prohibition, supported by decisions in the Court of Sessions and the House of Lords, was obtained. In 1824 Dr. Adam Thompson, of Coldstream, and three ministers were summoned to answer for the high crime and misdemeanour of having, as directors of Bible societies, delivered copies of an edition of Scriptures which had been printed in England, but which the Scotch monopolists would not permit to circulate in Scotland. Bible societies in Scotland had received, in return for their subscription to the London society, copies of an octavo Bible in large type, to which the Scotch patentees had no corresponding edition, and which was much prized by the aged. And it was because Dr. Thompson and others helped to circulate it, as agents of the London Bible Society, that they were proceeded against. The Scotch Bible, in consequence of the monopoly, was as badly printed as the English one. In order to show how monopoly had failed to secure good work, a gentleman sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury an enormous list of errors which he had found in the Oxford Nonpareil Bible. In an old Scotch edition the apostle is made to say, ‘Know ye not that the righteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God?’ In another edition ‘The four beasts of the Apocalypse’ are ‘sour beasts.’ Dr. Lee, afterwards Principal of Edinburgh University, felt deeply the injustice done by the monopoly, and the heavy taxation consequently imposed upon the British and Foreign Bible Society; but he was a man of the study rather than of the street. Yet in 1837 the monopoly, powerfully defended as it was by Sir Robert Inglis, who dreaded cheap editions of the Word of God, as necessarily incorrect and leading to wickedness and infidelity of all kinds, fell, and it was to John Childs, of Bungay, that in a great measure the fall was due, while owing to the repeated labours of Dr. Adam Thompson and others, we got cheaper Bibles and Testaments on the other side of the Tweed.

If you turn to the life of Dr. Adam Thompson, of Coldstream, the man who had the most publicly to do with the fall of the monopoly, there can be no doubt on this head. Though specially interested in the English patents, Mr. Childs was aware that the one for Scotland fell, to be renewed sooner by twenty years, and he kept dunning Joseph Hume on the subject, who, Radical Reformer, at that time had his hands pretty full. Mr. Childs had got so far as to have his Committee, and to get the evidence printed. What was the next step? Dr. Thompson’s biographer shall tell us. ‘Mr. Childs had been looking out for a Scottish Dissenting minister of proved ability, zeal, and influence, who should feel the immense and urgent importance of the question, and after mastering the unjust principles and the injurious results of the monopoly, should testify to these before the Committee, in a weighty and pointed manner, and effectively bring them also before the ministers and people of Scotland. He fixed upon Dr. Thompson, and the letter in which he wrote to the Doctor to prepare for becoming a witness was the beginning of a ten years’ copious correspondence, the first in a series of many hundreds of very lengthy letters, in which Mr. Childs, with great shrewdness, sagacity, and vigour, and with perfect confidence of always being in the right, acted as universal censor, pronouncing oracularly upon all ecclesiastical and political men and organs, expressing unqualified contempt for the House of Lords, and very small satisfaction with the House of Commons, showing no mercy to Churchmen, and little but asperity to Dissenters, and denouncing all British journals as base or blind except the Nonconformist.’ Only two of these letters are published in Dr. Thompson’s biography. I give one, partly because it is interesting, and partly because it is characteristic. Unfortunately, of all John Childs’ letters to myself, written in a fine, bold hand, exactly reproduced by his son and grandson, so that I could never tell one from the other, I have preserved none. Childs thus wrote to Dr. Thompson, July 15th, 1839:

‘My dear Friend,

‘You will be happy to know that I went into Newgate this morning with my friend Ashurst, and heard their pardon read to the Canadians. They were released this afternoon, and Mr. Parker and Mr. Wixon have been dining with me, and are gone to a lodging, taken for them by Mr. A., where they may remain till their departure on Wednesday. I have just sent to Mr. Tidman to inform him they will worship God and return thanks in his place to-morrow, if all be well. How wonderfully God has appeared for these people! My dear friend, when I first saw them in January all things appeared to be against them, but all has been overruled for good.

‘At the time you left on Monday evening, Lord John was making known to the House of Commons, in your own words, the plan proposed by yourself, and adopted by him, to my amazement. Most heartily do I congratulate you on the termination of the event, so decidedly honourable to yourself in every way. I do not expect you will approve of all that I have done, but I felt it to be my duty to address a letter to the Pilot on the subject, calling attention to the liberty taken with you, and the manner in which you were humbugged when in concert with the London societies, and the absolute triumph of your cause when conducted with single-handed integrity, intelligence, and energy. If it shall happen that you do not approve of all I have said, I am sure you ought, because without you, and with you, if you had left it to the fellows here, Scotland’s Dissenters would have now appeared the degraded things which, on the Bible subject, the English Dissenters have appeared in my eyes for some years past. It is due to you. I was fairly rejoiced when I saw Lord John’s declaration, because I could see from his answer to Sir James Graham that he meant the thing should be done. Scotland ought to have a day of rejoicing and thanksgiving, and as I said to a friend to whom I wrote in Edinburgh, “You ought to have a monument – the Thompson monument.” “That, sir,” the guide would say, “is erected to honour a man by whose honest energy and zeal Scotland was freed from the most degrading tyranny – that of a monopoly in printing the Word of God.” The tablet should bear that memorable sentence of yours on the first day of your examination, “All monopolies are bad.” Of all monopolies religious monopolies are the worst, and of all religious monopolies a monopoly of the Word of God is the most outrageous.’ Alas! I have heard nothing of the Thompson monument.

Such a man was John Childs. One more busy in body and brain I never knew. That he was disposed to be cynical was natural. Most men who see much of the world, and who do not wear coloured glasses, are so. Take the history of the Bible monopoly. The work of its abolition was commenced by John Childs, of Bungay, carried on and completed as far as Scotland was concerned by Dr. Adam Thompson, while the British public in its usual silliness awarded £3,000 to Dr. Campbell, on the plea – I quote the words of the late Dr. Morton Brown, of Cheltenham – that, ‘God gave the honour very largely to our friend, Dr. Campbell, to smite this bloated enemy of God and man full in the forehead.’ The bloated enemy, as regards Scotland, was dead before Dr. Campbell had ever penned a line. As regards England, I believe it still exists.

It must have been about 1837 that the name of John Childs, of Bungay, was made specially notorious by reason of his refusal to pay Church-rates, and when he had the honour of being the first person imprisoned for their non-payment. He was proceeded against in the Ecclesiastical Courts, and as his refusal to pay was solely on conscientious grounds, he did not contest the matter. The result was, he was sent to Ipswich Gaol for the non-payment of a rate of 17s. 6d., the animus of the ecclesiastical authorities being manifested by the endorsement of the writ, ‘Take no bail.’ It was the first death-blow to Church-rates. The local excitement it created was intense and unparalleled. In the House of Commons Sir William Foulkes presented several petitions from Norfolk, and Mr. Joseph Hume several from Suffolk, on the subject. One entire sitting of the House of Commons was devoted to the Bungay Martyr, as Sir Robert Peel ironically termed him. The Bungay Martyr had however, right on his side. It was found that a blot had been hit, and it had to be removed.

The excitement produced by putting Mr. Childs into gaol was intense at that time all over the land. ‘I beg to inform you,’ wrote a Halesworth Dissenter, Mr. William Lincoln, to the editor of the Patriot, at that time the organ of Dissent, ‘that my highly-esteemed and talented friend, Mr. John Childs, of Bungay, has just passed through this town, in custody of a sheriff’s officer, on his way to our county gaol, by virtue of an attachment, at the suit of Messrs. Bobbet and Scott, churchwardens of Bungay, for non-payment of 17s. 6d. demanded of him as a Church-rate, and subsequent refusal to obey a citation for appearance at the Bishop’s Court.’ Naturally the writer remarked: ‘It will soon be seen whether proceedings so well in harmony with the days of fire and faggot are to be tolerated in this advanced period of the nineteenth century.’ When, in due time, Mr. Childs obtained his release, the event was celebrated at Bungay in fitting style. I find in a private diary the following note: ‘This day week was a grand day at Bungay. I heard there were not less than six or seven thousand people there to welcome his return, and the request of the police, that the greatest order might be observed, was fully acted up to. Miss C. did not enter Bungay with her father. I suppose when she found so great a multitude of horsemen, gigs, pedestrians and banners, they thought it better for the young lady and the younger children to retire to the close carriages. Mr. C. during his imprisonment had letters from all parts of the kingdom.’ I remember the leading Dissenters came to Bungay with a piece of plate, to present to Mr. Childs, to commemorate his heroism. A dinner was given by Mr. Childs in connection with the presentation. At that dinner, lad as I was, I was permitted to be present. I had never seen anything so grand or stately before; and that was my first interview with John Childs, a dark, restless, eagle-eyed man, whom I was to know better and love more for many a long day. I took to Radical writing, and nothing could have pleased John Childs better. I owed much to his friendship in after-life.

In 1833 the Church-rate question was originally raised in Bungay, and many of the Dissenters refused to pay. The local authorities at once took high ground, and put twelve of the recusants into the Ecclesiastical Court. They caved in, leaving to John Childs the honour of martyrdom. At the time of Mr. Childs’ imprisonment he had recently suffered from a severe surgical operation, and it was believed by his friends impossible that he could survive the infliction of imprisonment. The Rev. John Browne writes: ‘A committee very generously formed at Ipswich undertook the management of his affairs, and when they learned at the end of eleven days’ imprisonment that he had undergone a most severe attack, indicating at least the possibility of sudden death, they sent a deputation to the Court to pay the sum demanded. The Court, however, required, as well as the money, the usual oath of canonical obedience, and this Mr. Childs refused to give. He was told by his friends that he would surely die in prison, but his reply was, ‘That is not my business.’ But it seems so much had been made of the matter by the newspapers that Mr. Childs was released without taking the oath. Charles Childs, the son, followed in his father’s steps. At Bungay the Churchmen seemed to have determined to make Dissenters as uncomfortable as possible. Actually five years after they had thrown the father into prison, the churchwardens proceeded against the son, having been baffled in repeated attempts to distrain upon his goods, and cited him into the Ecclesiastical Court, where it took two and a half years to determine whether the sum of three shillings and fourpence was due. At the end of that time the judge decided it was not, and the churchwardens had to pay Mr. Childs’ costs as well as their own, which in the course of time amounted to a very respectable sum. Charles Childs, who died suddenly a few years since, and who never seemed to me to have aged a day since I first knew him, was truly a chip of the old block. He was much in London, as he printed quite as much as his father for the leading London publishers. An enlightened patriot, he was in very many cases successful in resisting the obstacles raised from time to time by party spirit or Church bigotry. On more than one occasion he conducted a number of his workmen through an illegally-closed path, and opened it by the destruction of the fences, repeated appeals to the persistent obstructions having proved unavailing. He was a man of scholarly and literary attainments, a clever talker, well able to hold his own, and during the Corn Law and Currency agitation he contributed one or more articles on these subjects to the Westminster Review, then edited by his friend, the late General Perronet Thompson, a very foremost figure in Radical circles forty years ago, always trying to get into Parliament – rarely succeeding in the attempt. ‘How can he expect it,’ said Mr. Cobden to me one day, ‘when, instead of going to the principal people to support him, he finds out some small tradesman – some little tailor or shoemaker – to introduce him?’ Once upon a time the Times furiously attacked Charles Childs. His reply, which was able and convincing, was forwarded, but only procured admission in the shape of an advertisement, for which Mr. Childs had to pay ten pounds. The corner of East Anglia of which I write rarely produced two better men than the Childs, father and son. They are gone, but the printing business still survives, though no longer carried on under the well-known name. By their noble integrity and public spirit they proved themselves worthy of a craft to which light and literature and leading owe so much. It is to such men that England is under lasting obligations, and one of the indirect benefits of a State Church is that it gives them a grievance, and a sense of wrong, which compels them to gird up their energies to act the part of village Hampdens or guiltless Cromwells. All the manhood in them is aroused and strengthened as they contend for what they deem right and just, and against force and falsehood. Poets, we are told, by one himself a poet,

‘Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.’

Nonconformists have cause especially to rejoice in the bigotry and persecution to which they have been exposed, since it has led them by a way they knew not, to become the champions of a broader creed and a more general right than that of which their fathers dreamed. It is easy to swim with the stream; it requires a strong man to swim against it. Two hundred years of such swimming had made the Bungay Nonconformists strong, and gave to the world two such exceptionally sturdy and strengthful men as John and Charles Childs. I was proud to know them as a boy; in advancing years I am prouder still to be permitted to bear this humble testimony to their honest worth. It is because Nonconformity has raised up such men in all parts of the land, that a higher tone has been given to our public life, that politics mean something more than a struggle between the ins and the outs, and that ‘Onward’ is our battle-cry.

Of the young men more or less coming under the influence of the Childs’s, perhaps one of the most successful was the late Bernard Bolingbroke Woodward, Librarian to her Majesty. When I first knew him he was in a bank at Norwich. Thence he passed to Highbury College, and in due time, after he had taken his B.A. degree, settled as the Independent minister at Wortwell, near Harleston, in Norfolk. There he became connected with John Childs, and, amidst much hard work, edited for the firm a new edition of ‘Barclay’s Universal English Dictionary.’ In 1860, on the death of Mr. Glover, who had for many years filled the post of Librarian to the Queen at Windsor Castle, Mr. Woodward’s name was mentioned to the Prince, in reply to inquiries for a competent successor. Acting on the advice of a friend at head-quarters, Mr. Woodward forwarded to Prince Albert the same printed testimonials which he had sent in when he was a candidate for the vacant secretaryship of a large and popular society, and to those alone he owed his appointment to the office of Librarian to the Queen. An interview took place at Windsor Castle, which was highly satisfactory; but before the appointment was finally made, Mr. Woodward informed Her Majesty and the Prince that there was one circumstance which he had omitted to mention, and which might disqualify him for the post. ‘Pray, what is that disqualification?’ asked the Prince. ‘It is,’ replied Mr. Woodward, ‘that I have been educated for, and have actually conducted the services of an Independent congregation in the country.’ ‘And why should that be thought to disqualify you?’ asked the Prince. ‘It does nothing of the sort. If that is all, we are quite satisfied, and feel perfectly safe in having you for a librarian.’ Am I not justified in saying that at one time Bungay influences reached far and near?

CHAPTER VI.

A CELEBRATED NORFOLK TOWN

Great Yarmouth Nonconformists – Intellectual life – Dawson Turner – Astley Cooper – Hudson Gurney – Mrs. Bendish.

When David Copperfield, Dickens tells us, first caught sight of Yarmouth, it seemed to him to look rather spongy and soppy. As he drew nearer, he remarks, ‘and saw the whole adjacent prospect, lying like a straight, low line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might have improved it, and also that if the land had been a little more separated from the sea, and the town and the tide had not been quite so much mixed up, like toast-and-water, it would have been much nicer.’ He adds: ‘When we got into the street, which was strange to me, and smelt the fish, and pitch, and oakum, and tallow, and saw the sailors walking about, and the carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I had done so busy a place injustice.’ In this opinion his readers who know Yarmouth will agree. Brighton and Hastings and Eastbourne might envy Yarmouth its sandy beach, where you can lead an amphibious life, watching the fishing-smacks as they come to shore with cargoes often so heavy as to be sold for manure; watching the merchant-ships and yachts that lie securely in the Roads, or the long trail of black smoke of Scotch or northern steamers far away; watching the gulls ever skimming the surface of the waves; or the children, as they build little forts and dwellings in the sand to be rudely swept to destruction by the advancing tide. In the golden light of summer, how blue is the sky, how green the sea, how yellow the sand, how jolly look the men and handsome the women! What health and healing are in the air, as it comes laden with ozone from the North Sea! You have the sea in front and on each side to look at, to walk by, to splash in, to sail on. The danger is, that you grow too fat, too ruddy, too hearty, too boisterous. As we all know, Venus was born out of the sea, and out there on that eastern peninsula, of which Yarmouth is the pride and ornament, there used to flourish bonny lasses, as if to show that the connection between the ocean and lovely woman is as intimate as of yore. Yarmouth and Lowestoft owe a great deal to the Great Eastern Railway, which has made them places of health-resort from all parts of England; and truly the pleasure-seeker or the holiday-maker may go farther and fare worse.