in 1837, the late William Brock had just commenced what proved to be a highly-successful pastoral career.
As to the theology of the cottagers in East Anglia at that time, I can offer no better illustration of it than that given by Miss Caroline Fox of a cottage talk she had somewhere near Norwich. She writes, “A young woman told us that her father was nearly converted, and that a little more teaching would complete the business,” adding “He quite believes that he is lost, which, of course, is a great consolation to the old man.”
Literature flourished in East Anglia in 1837. Bulwer Lytton, an East Anglian by birth and breeding, had just published “Paul Clifford,” and was about to commence a new and better style of novel. Norwich had long been celebrated for its Literary Society, and one of the most remarkable of the literary men of the age was George Borrow, author of the “Bible in Spain,” the materials for which he was then collecting, and who spent much of his life in East Anglia, where he was born. He was five years in Spain during the disturbed early years of Isabella II., and he travelled in every part of Castile and Leon, as well as the southern part of the Peninsula and Northern Portugal. Again and again his adventurous habits brought him into danger among brigands and Carlists, as well as Roman Catholic priests, and he experienced a brief imprisonment in Madrid. At Norwich also was then living Mrs. Opie—as a Quakeress—after having spent the greater part of her life in London gaiety. A lady who met her in Brussels says she spoke with much enthusiasm of the eminent artists, who, in her part of the world—videlicet, the Eastern Counties—had become men of mark. Of her husband, who had been dead many years, she said playfully that if neither Suffolk nor Norfolk could boast of the honour of being his birthplace, he had done his best to remedy the evil by marrying a Norwich woman. At Reydon Hall, rather a tumble-down old place, as I recollect it, lived the Stricklands, and of the six daughters of the house five were literary women more or less successful. Of these the best known was Agnes, author of “The Lives of the Queens of England,” which owed much of its success to being published just after the Princess Victoria had become Queen of England.
It was amusing to hear her talk, in her somewhat affected and stilted style, of politics. She was a Jacobin, and hated all Dissenters, whom she sneered at as Roundheads. With modern ideas she and her sisters had no sympathy whatever. There never was such an antediluvian family. All of them were very long-lived, and must have bitterly bewailed the progress of Democracy and Dissent. I question whether the “Lives of the Queens of England” has many readers now. Near Woodbridge, as rector of Benhall, lived the Rev. J. Mitford, an active literary man, the editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine, and of some of the standard works known as Pickering’s Classics. As a clergyman he was a failure. It was urged in his defence, by his friends, that his profession had been chosen for him by others, and that when it was too late for him to escape from the bonds which held him in thrall he made the discovery that the life that lay before him was utterly uncongenial to his tastes and habits. His life, when in Suffolk, writes Mrs. Houston, author of “A Woman’s Memories of World-known Men,” must have been a very solitary one. For causes which I have never heard explained, his wife had long left him, and his only son was not on speaking terms with the Rector of Benhall. In his small lodgings on the second floor in Sloane Street, he was doubtless a far happier man than, in spite of his well-loved garden and extensive library at Benhall Rectory, he ever, in his country home, professed to be. But perhaps the most notable East Anglian author at the time was Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, whose books—“The Natural History of Enthusiasm” and “The Physical Theory of Another Life”—were most popular, and one of which, at any rate, had been noticed in The Edinburgh Review. In a private letter to the editor, Sir James Stephen describes Taylor “as a very considerable man, with but small inventive but very great diffusive powers, possessing a considerable mastery of language, but very apt to be over-mastered by it—too fine a writer to write very well; too fastidious a censor to judge men and things equitably; too much afraid of falling into cant and vulgarity to rise to freedom and ease; an over-polished Dissenter, a little ashamed of his origin among that body; but, with all this, a man of vigorous and catholic understanding, of eminent purity of mind, happy in himself and in all manner of innocent pleasure, and strenuously devoted to the grand but impracticable task of grafting on the intellectual democracy of our own times the literary aristocracy of the days that are passed.” Quite a different man was dear old Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, of Woodbridge, with whom I dined once, who was more fat than bard beseems, and who seemed to me to enjoy a good dinner, a glass of port—people could drink port in those days—and a pinch of snuff, quite as much as any literary talk. Poor Bernard never set the Thames on fire—he would have been shocked at the thought of doing anything so wicked; but he was a good man, and quite competent to shine in “Fulcher’s Pocket Book,” a work published yearly by Fulcher, of Bury St. Edmund’s, and much better than any of its contemporaries.
In connection with this subject let me quote from Bernard Barton a sketch of a Suffolk yeoman, very rare in these times: “He was a hearty old yeoman of about eighty-six, and occupied the farm in which he lived and died, about fifty-five years. Sociable, hospitable, friendly; a liberal master to his labourers, a kind neighbour, and a right merry companion within the limits of becoming mirth; in politics a staunch Whig; in his theological creed as sturdy a Dissenter; yet with no more party spirit in him than a child. He and I belonged to the same book club for about forty years. He entered it about fifteen years before I came into these parts, and was really a pillar in our literary temple, not that he greatly cared about books or was deeply read in them, but he loved to meet his neighbours and get them round him on any occasion or no occasion at all. As a fine specimen of the true English yeoman I have met few to equal, hardly any to surpass him, and he looked the character as well as he acted it, till within a very few years, when the strong man was bowed with infirmity. About twenty-six years ago, in his dress costume of a blue coat and yellow buckskins, a finer sample of John Bullism you would rarely see. It was the whole study of his long life to make the few who revolved about him in his little orbit as happy as he always seemed to be himself; yet I was gravely queried with, when I happened to say that his children had asked me to write a few lines to his memory, whether I could do so in keeping with the general tenor of my poetry. The speaker doubted if he was a decidedly pious character. He had at times been known in his altitudes to vociferate at the top of his voice a song, the chorus of which was not certainly teetotalish:—
Sing, old Rose, and burn the bellows,
Drink and drive dull care away.”
Can anything be finer than this picture of a Suffolk yeoman? Is it not a pity that such men are no more to be seen? High farming was unknown when the old Suffolk yeoman lived. I claim for Bernard Barton that this sketch of the Suffolk yeoman is the best thing he ever wrote. Bernard Barton’s daughter married the great Oriental scholar, Edward Fitzgerald, the friend of Carlyle and correspondent of Fanny Kemble, who lived in the neighbourhood of Woodbridge, and whose fame now he is no more is far greater than when he lived. Little could he have anticipated that in after years literary men would assemble in the quiet churchyard of Boulge to erect his monument over his grave, or to found a society to perpetuate his name.
As I lean back for another glance, my eyes, as Wordsworth writes, are filled with childish tears—
My heart is idly stirred.
I see the dear old village where I was born, almost encroaching on Sir Thomas Gooch’s park, at Benacre Hall; I see the old baronet, a fine old bigoted Tory, who looked the picture of health and happiness, as he ambled past on his chestnut cob, wearing a blue coat, a white hat and trousers, in summer; his only regret being that things were not as they were—his only consolation the fact that, wisely, the Eternal Providence that overrules all human affairs had provided snug rectories for his kith and kin, however unworthy of the sacred calling; and had hung up the sun, moon and stars so high in the heavens that no reforming ass
Could e’er presume to pluck them down, and light the world with gas.
Then comes the village medico, healthy and shrewd and kindly, with a firm belief—alas!
