EAST ANGLIAN WORTHIES.
Suffolk cheese--Danes, Saxons, and Normans--Philosophers and
statesmen--Artists and literati.
Abbo Floriacencis, who flourished in the year A.D. 910, describes East
Anglia as 'very noble, and particularly because of its being watered on
all sides. On the south and east it is encompassed by the ocean, on the
north by the moisture of large and wet fens which, arising almost in the
heart of the island, because of the evenness of the ground for a hundred
miles and more, descend in great rivers into the sea. On the west the
province is joyned to the rest of the island, and, therefore, may be
entered (by land); but lest it should be harassed by the frequent
incursions of the enemy it is fortifyed with an earthen rampire like a
high wall, and with a ditch. The inner parts of it is a pretty rich
soil, made exceeding pleasant by gardens and groves, rendered agreeable
by its convenience for hunting, famous for pasturage, and abounding with
sheep and all sorts of cattle. I do not insist upon its rivers full of
fish, considering that a tongue as it were of the sea itself licks it on
one side, and on the other side the large fens make a prodigious number
of lakes two or three miles over. These fens accommodate great numbers
of monks with their desired retirement and solitude, with which, being
enclosed, they have no occasion for the privacy of a wilderness.' Before
the monks came the place was held by the Iceni--a stout and valiant
people, as Tacitus describes them. In the time of the Heptarchy, King
Uffa was their lord and master. In later times Suffolk, when explored by
Camden, was celebrated for its cheeses, which, to the great advantage of
the inhabitants, were bought up through all England, nay, in Germany
also, with France and Spain, as Pantaleon Medicus has told us, who
scruples not to set them against those of Placentia both in colour and
taste. To the Norfolk people, it must be admitted, Camden gives the
palm. The goodness of the soil of that country, he argues, 'may be
gathered from hence, that the inhabitants are of a bright, clear
complexion, not to mention their sharpness of wit and admirable quickness
in the study of our common law. So that it is at present, and always has
been, reputed the common nursery of lawyers, and even amongst the common
people you shall meet with a great many who (as one expresses it), if
they have no just quarrel, are able to raise it out of the very quirks
and niceties of the law.' In our time it is rather the fashion to run
down the East Anglians, yet that they have done their duty to their
country no one can deny. 'They say we are Norfolk fules,' said a waiter
at a Norfolk hotel, to me, a little while ago; 'but I ain't ashamed of my
county, for all that.' Why should he be, the reader naturally asks?
The Saxons of East Anglia gave the name of England to this land of ours;
but before this time East Anglia had attained, by means of its sons and
daughters, to fame far and near. If we may believe Gildas, a Christian
church was planted in England in the time of Nero. Claudia, to whom Paul
refers in Philippians and Timothy, was a British lady of great wit and
greater beauty, celebrated by the poet Martial. She may have been
converted by Paul, argued the Rev. Mr. Hollingsworth, a local historian,
Rural Dean and Rector of Stowmarket; nor is it at all improbable, he
adds, 'that Claudia, the British beauty, may have been an Iceni, or East
Anglian lady, as her brilliant complexion, for which so many in these
counties are celebrated, had caused a vivid feeling of sensation and
curiosity and envy even among the haughty dames of the imperial city of
Rome.' The Romans were glad to make terms with the Iceni till the
unfortunate Boadicea perished in the revolt which she had so rashly
raised. The Saxons came after the Romans, and took possession of the
land. Saxon proprietors compelled the people, whose lives they spared,
to till the very lands on which their fathers had lived under the Roman
Government or their own chiefs. Pagan worship was reintroduced; but when
Sigberht, the son of Redwald, King of East Anglia, reigned, he sent to
France for Christian ministers, and one of them, Felix, a Burgundian,
landed at Felixstowe, and there commenced his Christian labours. Felix
was held in high repute by the Bishops in other parts of the kingdom.
His opinions were quoted and revered. The diocese was large, and the
fourth Bishop divided it into two parts, the second Bishop being planted
at North Elmham, in Norfolk. In 955 the see was again united, when
Erfastus, the twenty-second Bishop, removed to Thetford. A little while
after the Bishop's residence was removed to Norwich, and there it has
ever since remained; but the land was not long permitted to remain in
peace. In 870 a large party of Danes marched from Lincolnshire into
Suffolk, defeated King Edmund, near Hoxne, and, as he would not become an
idolater, shot him to death with arrows. Bury St. Edmunds still
preserves the name and fame of one of the most illustrious of our
Anglo-Saxon martyrs. King Alfred, with a policy worthy of his sagacity,
made Guthrum, the Danish governor of Suffolk, a Christian, and continued
him in his rule. The Danes in East Anglia were then an immense army, and
thus at once they were turned from foes into friends. Guthrum was
baptized, and it is to be hoped was all the better for it. At any rate,
he returned to Suffolk and divided many of the estates which had been
held by Saxon proprietors killed in war. He died in peace, and had a
fitting funeral at Hadleigh. The children of those Danish soldiers were
dangerous friends, and too frequently betrayed the Saxons. Blood is
thicker than water, and as each succeeding band of Danish adventurers
landed on our eastern coast, they were welcomed by such followers of
Guthrum as had settled in Suffolk as friends and allies. Nevertheless,
the Danes found the conquest of the island impossible. Divine
Providence, Mr. Hollingsworth tells us, did not suffer the Saxon race to
be vanquished by those who were connected with them by blood.
Nevertheless, the struggle was long and severe. The two races were
equally matched in courage, but the Saxon surpassed his foe in that
stern, unyielding endurance which enabled him to resist every defeat and
prepare again for the contest. The whole surface of the country became
studded with entrenchments, moats, and mounds, within whose line the
harassed Saxon defended his property and all he valued in his home.
History begins, as far as England is practically concerned, with the
Norman Conquest. It was then the Norsemen, blue-eyed, fair-haired, the
finest blood in Europe, planted themselves in Norfolk and Suffolk, and
brought with them feudalism and civilization. It was in 787 that,
according to the Saxon Chronicle, they first reached England; but it was
not till William the Conqueror made the land his own that they settled as
English lords, and divided between them the land in which their rapacious
forefathers had won many a precious treasure.
'The red gold and the white silver
He covets as a leech does blood,'
wrote an old poet of the Norseman.
Let us take, as an illustration of the county, a Norfolk family. In
Westminster Abbey there is monument to Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, who was
buried in the ruined chancel of the little church at Overstrand, near
Northrepps, 'a droll, irregular, unconventional-looking place,' as
Caroline Fox calls it, where he loved at all times to live, and where he
retired to die. The family from which Sir Thomas descended resided,
about the middle of the sixteenth century, at Sudbury, in Suffolk. It
was while at Earlham that he made his debut as a public speaker at one of
the earlier meetings of the Norfolk Bible Society. In the winter of 1817
he went over to France with some of the Gurneys and the Rev. Francis
Cunningham, who was anxious to establish a Bible Society in Paris. He
was also anxious to inquire into the way in which the gaols at Antwerp
and Ghent were conducted. On his return he examined minutely into the
state of the London gaols, and, to use his own expression, his inquiries
developed a system of folly and wickedness which surpassed belief. In
the following year he published a work entitled 'An Inquiry whether Crime
be Produced or Prevented by our Present System of Penal Discipline,'
which ran through six editions, and tended powerfully to create a proper
public feeling on the subject. In 1819 we find him in Parliament
seconding Sir James Mackintosh in his efforts to promote a reform of our
criminal law--then the most sanguinary in Europe. One of his earliest
efforts was to get the House to abolish the burning of widows in India;
and in 1821 he received from Wilberforce the command to relieve him of a
responsibility too heavy for his advancing years and infirmities--the
care of the slave: a holy enterprise for which Mr. Buxton had been
qualifying himself by careful thought and study, and which he was spared
to carry to a successful end. At first he resided at Cromer Hall, an old
seat of the Windham family, which no longer exists, having been pulled
down and replaced by a modern residence. It was situated about a quarter
of a mile from the sea, but sheltered from the north winds by closely
surrounding hills and woods, and with its old buttresses, gables, and
porches clothed with roses and jessamine, and its famed lawn, where the
pheasants came down to feed, had a peculiar character of picturesque
simplicity. The interior corresponded with its external appearance, and
had little of the regularity of modern building. One attic chamber was
walled up, with no entrance save through the window: and at different
times large pits were discovered under the floor or in the thick
walls--used, it was supposed, in old times by the smugglers of the coast.
There is much picturesque scenery around Cromer, and large parties were
often made up for excursions to Sherringham--one of the most beautiful
spots in all the eastern counties, to the wooded dells of Felbrigg and
Runton, or to the rough heath ground by the beach beacon. One who was a
frequent guest at Cromer Hall wrote: 'I wish I could describe the
impression made upon me by the extraordinary power of interesting and
stimulating others which was possessed by Sir Fowell Buxton some thirty
years ago. In my own case it was like having powers of thinking, powers
of feeling, and, above all, the love of true poetry suddenly aroused
within me, which, though I had possessed them before, had been till then
unused. From Locke "On the Human Understanding," to "William of
Deloraine, good at need," _he_ woke up in me the sleeping principle of
taste, and, in giving me such objects of pursuit, has added immeasurably
to the happiness of my life.' On a Sunday afternoon, we are told, his
large dining-hall was filled with a miscellaneous audience of fishermen
and neighbours, as well as of his own household, to whom he would read
the Bible, commenting on it at the same time. Very simple and beautiful
seems to us that far-away Norfolk life; except that his hospitalities
were more bounded by want of room, his life at Northrepps was much the
same as it had been at Cromer Hall. It is one of the pleasures of my
life that I have heard Sir Thomas speak. In modern England the influence
of the Buxton family and name is yet a power.
Having already alluded to the Windhams and Felbrigg, it remains to say
that the last of that illustrious line died in 1810. Felbrigg was
purchased by the Windhams as far back as 1461. The public life of
Windham, the statesman, may be considered as having commenced in 1783,
when he undertook the office of Principal Secretary to Lord Northington,
who was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The great Marquis of
Lansdowne, when he was last at Felbrigg, in 1861, said Mr. Windham had
the best Parliamentary address of any man he had ever seen, which was
enhanced by the grace of his person and the dignity of his manners.
Still more glowing was the testimony borne to Mr. Windham by Earl Grey
when he heard of his death. A mere glance at his diary is sufficient to
convince us that Windham, when in London, mixed with the first men and
women of his time. The late Lord Chief Justice Scarlett, on being asked
by his son-in-law to name the very best speech he had heard during his
life, and that which he thought most worthy of study, answered, without
hesitation, 'Windham's speech on the Law of Evidence.' In a conversation
with Lord Palmerston, Pitt observed of Windham: 'Nothing can be so
well-meaning or eloquent as he is. His speeches are the finest
productions possible of warm imagination and fancy.' In 1800 we read in
the Malmesbury Diaries that old George III. had meant Windham to be his
First Minister. As a friend of Burke and Johnson, Windham's name will
not easily fade away. It is to him we owe the most pathetic account of
the closing hours of the Monarch of Bolt Court.
Sir Cloudesley Shovel may well claim to be one of Norfolk's heroes. Born
in an obscure village, an apprentice to a shoemaker, he obtained rank and
fame as one of Queen Anne's most honoured Admirals. It is denied that he
was in very humble circumstances, and it is a fact that his original
letters were so well worded as to indicate that he had received a fair
education. At any rate, he went to sea at ten years old with his friend
Sir John Hadough; and although not a cabin-boy in the modern acceptation
of that term, he undertook his captain's errands, swimming on one
occasion through the enemy's fire with some despatches for a distant
ship, carrying the papers in his mouth, displaying a courage worthy of
admiration. He distinguished himself in the Battle of Bantry Bay. As an
enemy of France and Spain, he triumphed in many a fierce fight.
Returning home flushed with victory, his ship and all on board were lost
on the Scilly Isles in an October gale. Some uncertainty hangs over his
last moments. It is asserted that he swam to shore alive, and that he
was put to death for the sake of his ring of emeralds and diamonds. An
ancient woman is stated to have confessed as much. For the honour of
human nature, we would fain believe the story to be untrue. A still
greater Norfolk hero was Lord Nelson, who is buried in St. Paul's
Cathedral. 'My principle,' said Nelson, on one occasion, 'is to assist
in driving the French to the devil, and in restoring peace and happiness
to mankind.' Whether he succeeded as regards the former we are not in a
position to state; but peace and happiness, alas! are still far from
being the common property of mankind. The rectory house at Burnham
Thorpe, where Nelson was born, exists no longer. Sir Cloudesley Shovel
lived in a castellated stone house in the small agricultural village of
Cockthorpe, originally fortified as a defence against the incursions of
smugglers. A room in this house, entered by a doorway arched over with
stone, is shown, which is still called by the villagers Sir Cloudesley's
drawing-room.
A chapter might be written about the Norfolk Cokes. Sir Edward Coke, the
great lawyer, was buried at Tittleshale, in Norfolk. The well-known
Coke, the distinguished agriculturist, inhabited that splendid Holkham,
the fame of which exists in our day. It was begun by Lord Leicester in
1734, and finished by his Countess in 1764. Blomefield, the well-known
Norfolk historian, speaks of it as a noble, stately, and sumptuous
palace. Lord Coke and Lord Burlington were men of similar tastes and
pursuits, and were diligent students of classical and Italian art. The
Holkham Library still contains treasures rich and rare. Many of the
latter formed part of the library of Sir Edward Coke; the title-page of
the first edition of the 'Novum Organum,' published in 1620, bears the
design of a ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules into an
undulating sea. The Holkham copy is adorned by the inscription, 'Ex dono
auctoris.'
Above the ship, in the handwriting of Coke, is the couplet:
'It deserveth not to be read in schools,
But to be freighted in the ship of fools.'
Thomas Shadwell, the Poet Laureate and historiographer of William III.,
was a Norfolk man. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. It is said by
Noble that he was an honest man. Of course he was. Chalmers accuses him
of indecent conversation, or Lord Rochester would not have said that he
had more wit and humour than any other poet. I am afraid he confers
little honour on his native county. 'Others,' wrote Dryden in one of his
satires,
'To some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.'
Sir Robert Walpole, who saved England from wooden shoes and slavery, was
of a Norfolk family, yet flourishing; as are the Townshends, to whom we
owe the introduction of the turnip. Norfolk also can boast of Sir Thomas
Gresham and Sir Francis Walsingham. In Norfolk was born that 'great
oracle of law, patron of the Church, and glory of England,' as Camden
calls him, Sir Henry Spelman. At Bickling, in the same county, was born
that ill-starred Anne Boleyn, of whom it is written that
'Love could teach a monarch to be wise,
And Gospel light first beamed from Boleyn's eyes.'
In the same neighbourhood, also, was born John Baconthorpe, the resolute
doctor, of whom Pantias Pansa has written: 'This one resolute doctor has
furnished the Christian religion with armour against the Jews stronger
than that of Vulcan.' Pansa was a Norfolk man, and so was the great
botanist Sir W. Hooker.
Who has not heard of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, when Eugene Aram was the
usher,
'Four-and-twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school'?
It was in that old town Fanny Burney, the friend of Mrs. Thrale and Dr.
Johnson, the author of novels like 'Evelina,' which people even read
nowadays, was born on the 13th of June, 1752. She grew up low of
stature, of a brown complexion. One of her friends called her the dove,
which she thought was from the colour of her eyes--a greenish-gray; her
last editor thinks it must have been from their kind expression. She was
very short-sighted, like her father. In her portrait, taken at the age
of thirty, merriment seems latent behind a demure look. At any rate, her
countenance was what might be called a speaking one. 'Poor Fanny!' said
her father, 'her face tells what she thinks, whether she will or no. I
long to see her honest face once more.' 'Poor Fanny' lived to a good old
age, and her gossiping diary is a mine of wealth as regards the Royal
Family, and Johnson, and Mrs. Thrale, and the cleverest men and women of
her time.
Thomas Bilney, one of our Protestant martyrs, was a Norfolk man. It was
a Norfolk knight, Sir Thomas Erpingham, who gave signal for the archers
at Agincourt. Shakespeare refers to him in his 'King Henry V.' as
follows:
'KING.--Good-morrow, old Sir Thomas Erpingham;
A good soft pillow for that good white head
Were better than a churlish turf of France.
'ERP.--Not so, my liege; this lodging likes me better,
Since I may say, now lie I like a king.'
Many East Anglians helped to win the battle of Agincourt. The Earl of
Kimberley still bears Agincourt on his shield.
Let us now pass over into Suffolk. It is worth asking how Suffolk came
to earn the nickname of Silly Suffolk. 'Silly,' say the learned, is
derived from the German _selig_, meaning 'holy or blessed,' and is said
to have been applied to Suffolk on account of the number of beautiful
churches it contains; Suffolk, at any rate, is silly no longer. In the
present day it shows to advantage, if we may judge by the enterprise and
public spirit of such a town as Ipswich, for instance. Not long since,
as I landed on the docks at Hamburg, I had the pleasure of seeing some
dozen or more steam ploughs and agricultural implements waiting to be
transported into the interior. The ploughs and implements bore
well-known Suffolk names, such as Garrett and Sons or Ransomes, Sims and
Jefferies, and were open manifestations of Suffolk skill and energy, and
ability to hold its own against all comers. Amongst the women of the
present generation, where are to be met the superiors of Mrs. Garrett
Anderson or of Mrs. Fawcett, widow of the distinguished statesman, and
mother of a sweet girl-graduate who has beaten all the men at her
University? I was the other day at Haverhill, where Mr. D. Gurteen still
lives to enjoy, at the ripe old age of eighty-three, the fruits of an
energy on his part which has raised Haverhill from a village of paupers
into a flourishing community, whose manufactures are to be met with all
over the land. One day, as I was walking along Gray's Inn Road, a fine,
well-built man stopped me to ask me if I remembered him. When he
mentioned his name I did directly. He was of the poorest of the poor in
his home at Wrentham. He had done well in London. 'You know, sir,' he
said, 'how poor our family was. Well, I had enough of poverty, and I
made up my mind to come to London and be either a man or a mouse.'
In the London of to-day the heads of some of our greatest establishments
are Suffolk men. We all know the stately pile in Holborn, once
Meekings', now Wallis's, where all the world and his wife go to buy. Mr.
Wallis hails from Stowmarket, and the man who fits up London shops in the
most tasty style, Mr. Sage, of Gray's Inn Road, was a Suffolk carpenter,
who, when out of work, with his last guinea got some cards printed, one
of which got him a job, which ultimately led on to fame and fortune.
No, Suffolk has long ceased to be silly. It must have deserved the title
in the days which I can remember when a Conservative M.P., amidst
enthusiastic cheering, at Ipswich, intimated that it was quite as well
the sun and moon were placed high up in the heavens, else
'Some reforming ass
Would soon propose to pluck them down
And light the world with gas.'
One of the oddest, most attractive, and most original women of the last
century was Elizabeth Simpson, a Suffolk girl, who ran away from her
home, where she was never taught anything, at the age of sixteen, to make
her fortune, and to win fame. In both cases she succeeded, though not so
soon as she could have wished. Failing to touch the hard heart of the
manager of the Norwich Theatre, a Welshman of the name of Griffiths, she
packed up her things in a bandbox, and, good-looking and audacious,
landed herself on the Holborn pavement. 'By the time you receive this,'
she wrote to her mother, 'I shall leave Standingfield perhaps for ever.
You are surprised, but be not uneasy; believe the step I have undertaken
is indiscreet, but by no means criminal, unless I sin by not acquainting
you with it. I now endure every pang, am not lost to every feeling, on
thus quitting the tenderest and best of parents, I would say most
beloved, too, but cannot prove my affection, yet time may. To that I
must submit my hope of retaining your regard. The censures of the world
I despise, as the most worthy incur the reproaches of that. Should I
ever think you will wish to hear from me I will write.' A pretty,
unprotected, unknown girl of sixteen, in London, had, we can well
believe, no easy time of it. Strangers followed her in the street,
people insulted her in the theatre, suspicious landladies looked her up.
Happily, a brother-in-law met her in a penniless state and took her home.
Unhappily, at his house she met Inchbald, an indifferent and badly-paid
actor. They were immediately married, and the girl rejoiced to think
that she was an actress, and about to realize the ambition of her youth.
It was no small part which the Suffolk girl felt herself qualified to
fill. On the 4th of September, 1772, she made her debut as Cordelia to
her husband's Lear. In 1821 Mrs. Inchbald, famed for her 'simple story,'
which took the town by storm, was buried in Kensington Churchyard. But
before she got there she had to endure much. At that time theatrical
performers were much worse paid than they are now, when, as Mr. Irving
tells us, any decent-looking young man, with a good suit of clothes, can
command his five or six pounds a week. Mrs. Inchbald and her husband had
to drink of the cup of poverty, and its consequent degradation, to the
dregs. On one occasion they took it into their heads to go to France,
believing that they could make money--he by painting, she by writing.
The scheme, as was to be expected, did not answer, and they were landed
on their return somewhere near Brighton, in the September of 1776,
literally without a crust of bread. On one occasion it was stated that
they dined off raw turnips, stolen from a field as they wandered past.
Next year, however, the world began to mend so far as they were
concerned.
At Manchester they met the Siddonses and J. P. Kemble, and one result of
that meeting was peace and prosperity. At this time also the lady's
husband died, and that was no great loss, as the lady was far too
independent for a wife. Yet, if the great Kemble had proposed to her, as
she used to tell Fanny Kemble, she would have jumped at him. To the last
her habits of life were most penurious. She spent nothing on dress, she
was indifferent in the matter of eating and drinking, and when she was
making as much as from 500 to 900 pounds by a new play, in order to save
a trifle she would sit in the depth of winter without a fire. Only fancy
any of our later lady-novelists thus ascetic and self-denying. The idea
is absurd. She was to the last what Godwin described her, a mixture of
lady and milkmaid. And yet the lady had ambition. She had an idea that
she might be Lady Bunbury. However, she marred her chance, at the same
time missing a rich Mr. Glover, who offered a marriage settlement of 500
pounds a year. Mrs. Inchbald, however, well knew how to take care of
herself. No one better. She had learned the art in rather a hard
school, and, besides, she knew how to take care of her poor relations.
None of her sisters seem to have done well, and she had to aid them all.
Sudbury was the birthplace of that William Enfield, whose 'Speaker' was
the terror and delight of more than one generation of England's ingenuous
youth. Lord Chancellor Thurlow, of the rugged eyebrows and the savage
look, and fellow-clerk with the poet Cowper, was born at Ashfield, an
obscure village not far off. Robert Bloomfield, who wrote the 'Farmer's
Boy,' came from Honington, where his mother kept a village school, and
where he became a shoemaker. Capel Loft, an amiable gentleman of
literary sympathies and pursuits, and Bloomfield's warmest friend,
resided at Troston Hall, in the immediate neighbourhood of Honington. At
one time there was no writer better known than John Lydgate, called the
Monk of Bury, born at the village of Lydgate, in 1380. 'His language,'
writes a learned critic, 'is much less obsolete than Chaucer's, and a
great deal more harmonious.' Stephen Gardener, Bishop of Winchester, and
an enemy to the Reformation, was born at Bury. At Trinity St. Martin
lived Thomas Cavendish, the second Englishman who sailed round the globe.
Admiral Broke, memorable for his capture of the _Chesapeake_, when we
were at war with America, was born at Nacton. The great non-juring
Archbishop Sancroft was born at Fressingfield, where he retired to die,
and where he is buried under a handsome monument. The great scholar,
Robert Grossetete, Bishop of Lincoln, was born at Stradbrook. Of him
Roger Bacon wrote that he was the only man living who was in possession
of all the sciences. Wycliff, on innumerable occasions, refers to him
with respect. Arthur Young, the celebrated agriculturist, some of whose
sentences are preserved as golden ones--especially that which says, 'Give
a man the secure possession of a rock, and he will make a garden of
it'--and whose valuable works, I am glad to see, are republished, was
born and lived near Bury St. Edmunds. Echard, the historian, was born at
Barsham, in 1671. Porson was a Norfolk lad.
Sir Thomas Hanmer was one of the most independent men that ever sat for
the county of Suffolk. Mr. Glyde, of Ipswich, terms him the Gladstone of
his age. Pope appears to stigmatize him as a Trimmer,
'Courtiers and patrols in two ranks divide;
Through both he passed, and bowed from side to side.'
His garden at Mildenhall was celebrated for the quality of its grapes,
and Sir Thomas used to send every year hampers filled with these grapes,
and carried on men's shoulders, to London for the Queen. That stubborn
Radical and Freethinker, Tom Paine, was born at Thetford. Sir John
Suckling, a Suffolk poet, has written, at any rate, one verse never
excelled:
'Her feet beneath her petticoat,
Like little mice, stole in and out,
As if they feared the light.
But oh, she dances such a way,
No sun upon an Easter day
Is half so fine a sight.'
England has in all parts of the world sons and daughters who have
deserved well of the State, and not a few of them are East Anglians by
birth and breeding. May their fame be cherished and their examples
followed by their successors in that calm, quiet, Eastern land--far from
the madding crowd--where the roar and rush of our modern life are almost
unknown--where farmers weep and wail but look jolly nevertheless!
* * * * *
THE END.
* * * * *
* * * * *
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.