East Anglia Part 2

'As in the eye of Nature he has lived, So in the eye of Nature let him die.'

Lowestoft was a frequent attraction for a youthful ramble-perhaps almost too far, unless one could manage to get a lift in a little yellow-painted black-bodied vehicle called a whisky, which was grandfather's property, and into the shafts of which could be put any spare quadruped, whether donkey, or mule, or pony, it mattered little, and which afforded a considerable relief when a trip as far as Lowestoft was determined on.

At that time there was no harbour, and the town consisted simply of one High Street, gradually rising towards the north, with a fine s.p.a.ce for boys to play in between the cliff and the sea, called the denes. I can well remember being taken to view the works of the harbour before the water was let in, and not a little astonished at what then was to me a new world of engineering science and skill. In the High Street there was a little old-fas.h.i.+oned and by no means flouris.h.i.+ng Independent Chapel, where at one time the preacher was the Rev. Mr. Maurice, the father of the Mr. Maurice to whom many owe a great awakening of spiritual life, and whose memory they still regard as that of a beloved and honoured teacher.

Mr. Maurice was a Unitarian, I believe, and, when he retired, handed over the chapel to my father with the remark that it was no use his preaching there any longer. The preacher in my time was the Rev. George Steffe Crisp, a kindly, timid, tearful man, always in difficulties with his people, and who often resorted to Wrentham for advice. Latterly he retired from the ministry, and kept a shop and school. In this capacity one day my old friend John Childs, of Bungay, the far-famed printer-of whom I shall have much to say anon-called on him, when the following dialogue took place: 'Good-morning, Mr. Crisp.' 'Good-morning, Mr.

Childs.' 'Well, how are you getting on?' 'Oh, very well; but there is one thing that troubles me much.' 'What is that?' 'That I am getting deaf, and can't hear my minister.' 'Oh,' was the cynical reply, 'you ought to be thankful for your privileges.'

Lowestoft is reported to have been a fis.h.i.+ng station as early as the time of the Romans; but the ancient town is supposed to have been long engulfed by the resistless sea, for there was to be seen till the 25th of Henry VIII. the remains of an old house upon an inundated spot-left dry at low water about four furlongs east of the present beach. The town has been the birthplace of many distinguished men-of Sir Thomas Allen, for instance, who was steadily attached to the Royal cause, and who after the Restoration rose high in command, and won many a victory over the Dutch and the Algerines; of Sir Andrew Leake, who fell in the attack on Gibraltar; of Rear-Admiral Richard Utbar, also a renowned fighter when England and Holland were at war. To the same town also belong Admiral Sir John Ashby, who died in 1693, and his nephew Vice-Admiral James Migh.e.l.ls. Nor must we fail to do justice to Thomas Nash, a facetious writer of considerable reputation in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The most witty of his productions is a satirical pamphlet in praise of red herrings, intended as a joke upon the great staple of Yarmouth, and the pretensions of that place to superiority over Lowestoft. It must be confessed that Nash is chiefly famous as a caustic pamphleteer and an unscrupulous satirist. For ill.u.s.tration we may point to his battle with Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Edmund Spenser, who desired that he might be epitaphed the inventor of the not yet naturalized English hexameter; and his other battle with Martin Mar Prelate, or the writer or writers who pa.s.sed under that name, and who have acquired a reputation to which poor Nash can lay no claim. His one conspicuous dramatic effort is 'Summer's Last Will and Testament.' Nash wrote for bare existence-to use his own words, 'contending with the cold, and conversing with scarcity.' Nash lived in an unpropitious age. A recent French writer has placed him in the foremost rank of English writers. Dr. Jusserand, the author referred to, in his accounts of the English novel in the time of Shakespeare, tells us Nash was the most successful exponent in England of the picturesque novel. The picturesque novel is the forerunner of the realistic novel of modern times. It portrays the life and fortunes of the picaro-the adventurer who tries all roads to fortune. Spanish in its origin, it developed into a school in which Defoe and Thackeray distinguished themselves. 'Nash,' writes the French author, 'mingled serious scenes with his comedy, in order that his romances might more nearly resemble real life.' In fact (he writes), 'Nash does not only possess the merit of learning how to observe the ridiculous side of human nature, and of portraying in a full light picturesque figures-now worthy of Teniers and now of Callot-some fat and greasy, others lean and lank; he possesses a thing very rare with the picturesque school, the faculty of being moved. He seems to have foreseen the immense field of study which was to be opened later to the novelist. A distant ancestor of Fielding, as Lilly and Sidney appear to us to be distant ancestors of Richardson, he understands that a picture of active life, reproducing only in the Spanish fas.h.i.+on scenes of comedy, is incomplete and departs from reality. The greatest jesters, the most arrogant, the most venturesome, have their days of anguish. No hero has ever yet remained imprisoned from the cradle to the grave, and no one has been able to live an irresponsible spectator, and not feel his heart sometimes beat the quicker, nor bow his head unmoved. Nash caught a glimpse of this.' As an ill.u.s.tration, Dr. Jusserand points to his 'Jack Wilton'-'The best specimen of the picturesque tale in English literature anterior to Defoe.' In Lowestoft they ought to keep his memory green.

The writer well remembers the day when Mr., afterwards Sir, Morton Peto, a.s.sembled the inhabitants of Lowestoft in the then dilapidated Town Hall, and promised that if they would sell their ruined harbour works, and back him in making a railway, their mackerel and herrings should be delivered almost alive in Manchester, Liverpool, and London. The inhabitants believed in the power of the enchanter, and Lowestoft is metamorphosed.

The old town remains upon its beautiful eminence, and memory clings to the cliffs and to the denes, tenanted only, the one by wild rabbits, the other by the merry children and the nets of the fishermen. But a new town has grown up around the harbour-a grand hotel, excellent lodging-houses, a new church; a great population have upset the romance, and borne witness to the spirit of enterprise which characterizes this generation. The new town has spread to Kirkley, has Londonized even quiet Pakefield, and awakened a sleeping neighbourhood to what men call life.

At Lowestoft commence what are known to sailors as the Yarmouth Roads-a grand stretch of sea protected by the sands, where an armada might anchor secure; and it was a sight not to be seen now, when gigantic steamers do all the business of the sea, to watch the hundreds of s.h.i.+ps that would come inside the Roads at certain seasons of the year. There, in the winter-time-that is, from Lowestoft to Covehithe-I have seen the beach strewed with wrecks, chiefly of rotten colliers, or s.h.i.+ps in the corn trade; but inside 'Lowestoft Roads,' to which they were guided by a lighthouse on the cliff, they were supposed to be secure. Lowestoft at that time, with its charming sands, was little known to the gay world, and depended far more on the fis.h.i.+ng than the bathing season. The former was a busy time, and kept all the country round in a state of excitement.

Many were the men, for instance, who, even as far off as Wrentham, went herring or mackerel fis.h.i.+ng in the big craft, which, drawn up on the beach when the season was over, seemed to me s.h.i.+ps such as never had been seen by the mariners of Tyre and Sidon; but the chief interest to me were the vans in which the fish were carried from Lowestoft to London-light spring-carts with four wheels and two horses, that, after changing horses at our Spread Eagle, raced like lightning along the turnpike-road, at all hours, and even on Sundays-a sad grievance to the G.o.dly-beating the Yarmouth mail.

Now and then, even at that remote period, when railways were not, and when Lowestoft was no port, nothing but a fis.h.i.+ng-station, distinguished people came to Lowestoft, attracted by its bracing air and exceptional bathing attractions. I can in this way recollect Sir Edward Parry and M.

Guizot. But there were other personages equally distinguished. One of these was Mrs. Siddons, with whom an old Dissenting minister-the Rev. S.

Sloper, of Beccles, whom I can well remember-contracted quite an intimacy. She had already pa.s.sed the zenith of her celebrity.

'Providence,' writes my friend, Mr. Wilton Rix, of Beccles, in his 'East Anglian Nonconformity,' published as far back as 1851, 'had repeatedly and recently called her to tread in domestic life the path of sorrow, and her religious advantages, however few, had taught her that

'"That path alone Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown."

'"Sweet, sometimes," said she, "are the uses of adversity. It not only strengthens family affection, but it teaches us all to walk humbly with G.o.d." It is not surprising that she was disposed to cultivate the society of those who could blend piety with cheerfulness, and with whom she might be on friendly terms without ceremony. Such acquaintances she found in Mr. Sloper's family. Mrs. Siddons, with una.s.suming kindness, contributed to their amus.e.m.e.nt by specimens of her powerful reading. She joined willingly in the wors.h.i.+p of the family, and maintained the same invaluable practice at her own lodgings.' Mr. Rix continues: 'Just at that time Mr. Sloper was requested to preach to his own people on an affecting and mournful occasion, the death of a suicide. Though he keenly felt the delicacy and difficulty of the task, a sense of duty and a possibility of usefulness overcame his scruples. He selected for his text the impressive sentiment of the Apostle, "The sorrow of the world worketh death." Mrs. Siddons was one of his auditors. She, who had been the honoured guest of Royalty, who had been enthroned as the Tragic Muse, and whose voice had charmed applauding mult.i.tudes, was seen in the humble Dissenting meeting-house at Beccles shedding abundant and unaffected tears at the plain and faithful exhibition of religious truth. Mr.

Sloper's preaching was as powerfully recommended to her by the delightful ill.u.s.tration of Christian principles exhibited in his private character, as by the intrinsic importance of those principles, and the simple gravity and penetrating earnestness with which they were announced from his lips. He afterwards procured for her, at her request, a copy of Scott's admirable "Commentary on the Bible," which he accompanied with a letter, warmly urging upon her attention the great realities her profession had so manifest a tendency to exclude from her contemplations.

Mrs. Siddons,' again I quote Mr. Rix, 'more than once expressed her grat.i.tude for the interest Mr. Sloper had evinced in her eternal welfare; she thanked him in writing for the advice he had given her, adding an emphatic wish that G.o.d might enable her to follow it-a wish which her pious and amiable correspondent echoed with all the fervour of his heart.

She returned into the glare of popularity, but a hope may easily be indulged that the pressure of subsequent relative afflictions and of old age were not permitted to come upon her unaccompanied by the impressions and consolations of true religion. Her elegant biographer, Mr. Campbell, draws a veil over the state of her mind during her last hours, which it would be deeply interesting to penetrate. Would she not then, if reason were undimmed, reflect upon the faithful counsel she received with Scott's Bible as being of infinitely greater value than the applause of myriads or the fame of ages?'

Beccles, where this good Mr. Sloper lived, and where the writer of this extract was a respectable solicitor-I believe the firm of Rix and Son still exists-was a small market town about eight miles from Wrentham, inland. At that time it ranked as the third town in Suffolk. Towards the west it is skirted by a cliff, once washed by the estuary which separated the eastern portions of Norfolk and Suffolk. There is every reason to believe that ages back the mouth of the Yare was an estuary or arm of the sea, and extended with considerable magnitude for many miles up the country. The herring fishery was thus a princ.i.p.al source of emolument to the inhabitants, and in the time of the Conqueror the fee farm rent of the manor of Beccles to the King was 60,000 herrings, and in the time of the Confessor 20,000. About 956 the manor and advowson of Beccles were granted by King Edwy to the monks of Bury, and remained in their possession until the dissolution of the religious houses under Henry VIII.

As I have said, and as I repeat, in these languid days-when the old creeds have lost their power and the old bottles are bursting with new wine-the glory of East Anglia was that it was the first to stand up in the face of priest or king for the truth-or what it held to be such.

Amongst the early martyrs under Mary were three burnt at Beccles-Thomas Spicer, of Winston, labourer, John Deny, and Edmond Poole. This was in the year 1556. Their crime in the indictment, drawn up by Dr. Hopton, Bishop of Norwich, and his Chancellor, Dunning, according to Fox, was:

'1. First was articulate against them that they belieued not the Pope of Rome to bee supreame head immediately in Christ on earth of the Universall Catholike Church.

'2. That they belieued not holie bread and holie water, ashes, palmes, and all other like ceremonies used in the Church to bee good and laudable for stirring up the people to devotion.

'3. Item that they belieued not afterwards of consecration spoken by the priest, the very naturall body of Christ, and no other substance of bread and wine to bee in the Sacrament of the altar.

'4. Item that they belieued it to bee idolatry to wors.h.i.+p Christ in the Sacrament of the altar.

'5. Item that they tooke bread and wine in remembrance of Christ's Pa.s.sion.

'6. Item that they would not followe the crosse in procession nor bee confessed to a priest.

'7. Item that they affirmed no mortal man to have in himself free will to do good or evill.'

It appears that the writ had not come down, nevertheless these brave men were burnt at the stake. 'When they came,' continues Fox, 'to the reciting of the creed, Sir John Silliard spake to them, "That is well said, sirs. I am glad to heare you saie you do belieue the Catholike Church; that is the best word I heard of you yet."

'To which his sayings Edmond Poole answered, "Though they belieue the Catholike Church, yet do they not belieue in their Popish Church, which is no part of Christ's Catholike Church, and, therefore, no part of their beliefe."

'When they rose from praier they all went joyfullie to the stake, and, being bound thereto, and the fire burning about them, they praised G.o.d in such an audible voice that it was wonderful to all those who stood bye and heard them. Then one Robert Bacon, dwelling in the said Beccles, a very enemy to G.o.d's truth, and a persecutor of His people, being then present, within the hearing thereof willed the tormentors to throwe on f.a.ggots to stop the knaues breathes, as he termed them; so hot was his burning charitie. But these good men, not regarding their malice, confessed the truth, and yielded their lives to the death for the testimonie of the same very gloriouslie and joyfullie.'

These men were the precursors of that Nonconformity which has made England the home of the free, and such men abounded in East Anglia.

Under Queen Elizabeth they had as bad a time of it almost as under Queen Mary. For instance, we find under Dr. Freke, Bishop of Norwich, and in the reign of glorious Queen Bess, as her admirers term her, Mathew Hammond, a poor ploughwright, of Hethersett, was condemned as a heretic, had his ears cut off, and after the lapse of a week was committed, in the Castle ditch at Norwich, to the more agonizing torment of the flames.

The translation of Dr. Whitgift to the See of Canterbury was the signal for augmented rigour. He was charged by his imperious mistress to restore religious uniformity, which she confessed, notwithstanding all her precautions, ran out of square. One of the first victims to this new _regime_ was William Fleming, Rector of Beccles. The living of Beccles at this period was vested in Lady Anne Gresham, the widow of Sir Thomas Gresham, the founder of the Royal Exchange. Previously to her marriage, she was the widow of William Rede, merchant, of London and Beccles.

Under James I. and Bishop Wren, men of integrity and conscience fared worse than under Queen Elizabeth, and naturally the people thus persecuted formed themselves into a Church. That in Beccles dated from 1652, and in the covenant drawn up on the occasion we find it was resolved:

'1. That we will for ever acknowledge and admit the Lord to be our G.o.d in Jesus Christ, giving up ourselves to Him to be His people.

'2. That we will alwaies endevour, through the grace of G.o.d a.s.sisting us, to walke in all His waies and ordinances, according to His written Word, which is the only sufficient rule of good life for every man.

Neither will we suffer ourselves to be polluted by any sinful waies, either publike or private, but endeavour to abstaine from the very appearance of evill, giving no offence to the Jew or Gentile, or the Churches of Christ.

'3. That we will humbly and willingly submit ourselves to the government of Christ in this Church-in the administration of the Word, the seals, and discipline.

'4. That we will in all love approve our communion as brethren by watching over one another, and as such shall be; counsel, administer, relieve, a.s.sist, and bear with one another, serving one another in love.

'5. Lastly, we do not covenant or promise these things in our own, but in Christ's strength; neither do we confine ourselves to the words of this covenant, but shall at all time account it our duty to embrace any further light or covenant which shall be revealed to us out of G.o.d's Word.'

This covenant, however, was not to prevent in after time censure being cast on others who, endeavouring to preserve its spirit, were led to think differently from the majority. For instance, we find in 1656 two persons, who had been members of the Independent church at Beccles, received adult baptism, and in so doing were considered to have given 'offence' to the church, and were desired to appear and give an account of their practices.

At one time there was little of what we know as congregational singing.

In 1657 it was agreed by the Beccles church 'that they do put in practice the ordinance of singing in the publick upon the forenoon and afternoon of the Lord's daies, and that it be between praier and sermon; and also it was agreed that the New England translation of the Psalmes be made use of by the church at their times of breaking of bread, and it was agreed that the next Lord's day, seventh night, might be the day to enter upon the work of singing in publick.' It is interesting to note that one of the pastors of the Beccles church was a Mr. Nokes, who had been trained-where Calamy and many others were trained-at the University of Utrecht, and that in the same year in which Dr. Watts accepted the pastoral office, he addressed to Mr. Nokes a poem on 'Friends.h.i.+p,' which is still included in the Doctor's works. Dissent, when I was a boy, was considered low. We were contemptuously termed 'pograms,' a term of reproach the origin of which I have never learnt. The landed gentry, the small squires, the lawyers and the doctors, and the tradespeople who pandered to their prejudices and fattened on their patronage, were slow to say a word in favour of a Dissenter. The poor who went to chapel were excluded from many benefits enjoyed by their fellow-paris.h.i.+oners. It was the fas.h.i.+on to treat them with scorn, yet I have heard one of the most excellent and finished gentlemen in the district declare that he heard better talk in my father's parlour than he did anywhere else in the neighbourhood, and I can well believe it, for the Dissenting minister, as a rule, at that time, was a better read man, and a more studious one, than the clergyman of the district, in spite of his University education; and in matters affecting the welfare of the nation, and that came under the denomination of politics, his views were far more rational than those of Churchmen in general, and the clergy in particular. We learn from Milton's State Papers that the churches of East Anglia pet.i.tioned Oliver Cromwell that the three nations might enjoy the blessings of a G.o.dly, upright magistracy; that they might have Courts of Judicature in their own country; and that honest men of known fidelity and uprightness might be authorized to determine trivial matters of debt or difference.

a.s.suredly the East Anglian saints-the latter term was, and, strange to say, is still, used as a term of reproach-were wise and right-thinking men where Church government and public policy were concerned. We love to read the story of the Pilgrim Fathers. With what rapture Mrs. Hemans wrote:

'What sought they thus afar?

Bright jewels of the mine?

The wealth of seas? the spoils of war?

They sought a faith's pure shrine.

'Ay, call it holy ground, The soil where first they trod; They left unstained what there they found- FREEDOM TO WORs.h.i.+P G.o.d.'

But it seems to me that a greater glory was won by, and a greater honour should be paid to, the men who did not cross the Atlantic; who did not seek an asylum in a foreign land; who remained at home to suffer-to die, if need be, to uphold the rights of conscience, and to fight the good fight of faith. It is not even in our tolerant, and, as we deem it, more enlightened day, that full justice is done to these men. In what calls itself good society you meet men and women whose ancestors were Dissenters, and yet who are ashamed of the fact-a fact of which no one can be ashamed who feels how in East Anglia, at any rate, the religious teaching of Dissent purified the life of the people, enlarged their political views, and helped this great land of ours to sweep into a better and a younger day.

CHAPTER IV.

POLITICS AND THEOLOGY.

Homerton academy-W. Johnson Fox, M.P.-Politics in 1830-Anti-Corn Law speeches-Wonderful oratory.

About 1830 there was, if not a good deal of actual light let into such dark places as our Suffolk village-where it was considered the whole duty of man, as regards the poor, to attend church and make a bow to their betters (a rustic ceremony generally performed by pulling the lock of hair on the forehead with the right hand), and to be grateful for the wretched station of life in which they were placed-at any rate, a great shaking among the dry bones. One summer morning an awe fell on the parish as it ran from one to another that the guard of the Yarmouth and London Royal Mail had left word with the ostler at the Spread Eagle that George the Fourth was dead; then a certain dull sound as of cannon firing afar off had been wafted across the German Ocean, and had given rise to mysterious speculations on the subject of Continental wars, in which Suffolk lads might have to ''list' as 'sogers'; and last of all there came that grand excitement when-North and South, East and West-the nation rose as one man to demand political and Parliamentary Reform. It was a delusion, perhaps, that cry, but it was a glorious one, nevertheless; that the millennium could be delayed when we had Parliamentary Reform no one for a moment doubted. The sad but undeniable fact that mostly men are fools with whom beer is omnipotent had not then entered into men's minds, and thus England and Scotland some sixty years ago wore an aspect of activity and enthusiasm of which the present generation can have no idea, and which, perhaps, can never occur again.

Far away in the distant city which the Suffolk villagers called Lunnon, there was a Suffolk lad, whose relations kept a very little shop just by us, who was born at Uggeshall-p.r.o.nounced Ouch.e.l.l by the common people-on a very small farm, and who, as Unitarian preacher and newspaper writer, had been and was doing his best in the good cause; but it was not the influence of W. Johnson Fox-for it is of him I write-that did much in our little village to leaven the ma.s.s with the leaven of Reform. While quite a lad the Foxes went to Norwich, where the future preacher and teacher worked as a weaver boy. In after-years it was often my privilege to meet Mr. Fox, who had then attained no small share of London distinction, amongst whose hearers were men, often many of the most distinguished _literati_ of the day-such as d.i.c.kens and Forster-and who was actually to sit in Parliament as M.P. for Oldham, where, old as he was-and Mr.

Gladstone says, 'People who wish to succeed in Parliament should enter it young'-he occupied a most respectable position, all the more creditable when you remember that Parliament, even at that recent date, was a far more select and aristocratic a.s.sembly than any Parliament of our day, or of the future, can possibly be. Mr. Fox had been educated at Homerton Academy-as such places were then termed (college is the word we use now)-under the good and venerable Dr. Pye-Smith, whose 'Scripture Testimony to the Messiah' was supposed to have given Unitarianism a deadly blow, but whom I chiefly remember as a very deaf old man, and one of the first to recognise the fact that the Bible and geology were not necessarily opposed to each other, and to welcome and proclaim the truth-at that time received with fear and trembling, if received at all-that the G.o.d of Nature and the G.o.d of Revelation were the same.

There was a good deal of free inquiry at Homerton Academy, which, however, Mr. Fox a.s.sured me, gradually subsided into the right amount of orthodoxy as the time came for the student to exchange his sure and safe retreat for the fiery ordeal of the deacon and the pew. My father and Johnson Fox had been fellow-students, and for some time corresponded together. The correspondence in due time, however, naturally ceased, as it was chiefly controversial, and nothing can be more irksome than for two people who have made up their minds, and whom nothing can change, to be arguing continually, and the friends.h.i.+p between them in some sense ceased as the one remained firm to, and the other wandered farther and farther from, the modified Calvinism of the Wrentham Church and pulpit, where, as in all orthodox pulpits at that time, it was taught that men were villains by necessity, and fools, as it were, by a Divine thrusting on; that for some a Saviour had been crucified, that there might be a way of escape from the wrath of an angry and unforgiving G.o.d; whilst for the vast ma.s.s-to whom the name of Christ had never been made known, to whom the Bible had never been sent-there was an impending doom, the awful horror of which no tongue could tell, no imagination conceive. But to the last Mr. Fox-especially if you met him with his old-fas.h.i.+oned hat on in the street-looked far more of a Puritan divine than of the literary man, or the chief of the advanced thinkers in Church and State, or an M.P. At a later time what pleasure it gave me to listen to this distinguished East Anglian as he appeared at the crowded Anti-Corn Law meetings held in Covent Garden or Drury Lane! Ungainly in figure, monotonous in tone, almost without a particle of action, regarded as free in his religious opinions by the vast majority of his audience, who were, at that time, p.r.o.ne, even in London, to hold that Orthodoxy, like Charity, covered a mult.i.tude of sins. What an orator he was! How smoothly the sentences fell from his lips one after the other; with what happy wit did he expose Protectionist fallacies, or enunciate Free Trade principles, which up to that time had been held as the special property of the philosopher, far too subtle to be understood and appreciated by the mob! With what felicity did he ill.u.s.trate his weighty theme; with what clearness did he bring home to the people the wrong and injustice done to every one of them by the landlord's attempt to keep up his rent by a tax on corn; and then with what glowing enthusiasm did they wait and listen for the climax, which, if studied, and perhaps artificial, seemed like the ocean wave to grow grander and larger the nearer it came, till it fell with resistless force on all around. It seems to me like a dream, all that distant and almost unrecorded past. I see no such meetings, I hear no such orators now. As Mr. Disraeli said of Lord Salisbury when he was Lord Robert Cecil, there was a want of finish about his style, and the remark holds good of the orator of to-day as contrasted with the platform speaker of the past. It is impossible to fancy anyone in our sober age attempting, to say nothing of succeeding in the attempt (my remarks, of course, do not apply to Irish audiences or Irish orators), to get an audience to rise _en ma.s.se_ and swear never to fold their arms, never to relax their efforts, till their end was gained and victory won; yet Mr. Fox did so, and long as I live shall I remember the night when, in response to his impa.s.sioned appeal, the whole house-and it was crowded to the ceiling-rose, ladies in the boxes, decent City men in the pit, G.o.ds in the gallery-to swear never to tire, never to rest, never to slacken, till the peasant at the plough, the cotton-spinner in the mill, the collier in the mine, the lone widow st.i.tching for life far into the early morning in her wretched garret, and the pauper in his still more wretched cellar, ate their untaxed loaf. As the 'Publicola' of the _Weekly Dispatch_, Mr. Fox laboured to the end of his life in the good cause of Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform. It is not right that his memory should remain unrecorded-his life a.s.suredly was an interesting one. Harriet Martineau writes in her autobiography that 'his editorial correspondence with me was unquestionably the reason, and in great measure the cause, of the greatest intellectual progress I ever made before the age of thirty.'

But it was not from William Johnson Fox that at that time came to our small village the grain of light that was to leaven the lump around.

Lecturing and oratory, and even public tea-meetings, were things almost unknown. Now and then a deputation from the London Missionary Society came to Wrentham, and in this way I remember William Ellis, then a missionary from Madagascar, and Mr. George Bennett, who, in conjunction with the Rev. Mr. Tyerman, had been on a tour of inspection to the islands of the South Seas, and to whose tales of travel rustic audiences listened with delight. Once upon a time-but that was later-the Religious Tract Society sent a deputation in the shape of a well-known travelling secretary, Mr. Jones. This Mr. Jones was inclined to corpulency, and I can well remember how we all laughed when, on one occasion, the daughter of a neighbouring minister, having opened the door in reply to his knock, ran delightedly into her papa's study to announce the arrival of the Tract Society!