category, should I pass over the name of George Bird, of Yoxford, a local chemist, who found time to write of Dunwich Castle and such-like East Anglian themes—I fancy now read by none. A Suffolk man who was making his mark in London at that time was Crabbe Robinson, the pioneer of the special correspondent of our later day. And just when Queen Victoria began to reign, Thomas Woolner, the poet-sculptor, was leaving his native town of Hadleigh to begin life as the pupil of Boehm, sculptor in ordinary to the Queen. And yet East Anglia was by no means distinguished, or held to be of much account in the gay circles of wit and fashion in town. The gentry were but little better than those drawn to the life in the novels of Fielding and Smollett. I am inclined to think there was very little reading outside Dissenting circles—where the book club was a standing institution, and _The Edinburgh Review_ was looked up to as an oracle, as indeed it was, sixty years ago. There was little encouragement of manly sports and pastimes—indeed, very little for any one in the way of amusement but at the public-house. Not that any one was ever drunk, in the liberal opinion of the landlord of the public-house, only “a little fresh,” and the village policeman was unknown. It is true there might be a constable, but he was a very mythical person indeed. Everybody drank, and as a rule the poorer people were the more they drank. One of the early temperance lecturers in the district, Mr. Thomas Whittaker, who was mobbed, especially at Framlingham, tells us Essex and Suffolk are clayey soils, in some districts very heavy and not easily broken up, and the people in many cases correspond. It was due to Mr. Marriage, of Chelmsford, a maltster, who turned his malting house into a temperance hall, and Mr. D. Alexander, of Ipswich, that the temperance reformers made way; and at that time James Larner, of Framlingham, aided by young Mr. Thompson (now the great London surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson), was quite a power. But the difficulties were great in the way of finding places for meetings, or of getting to them in muddy lanes, or of getting the anti-teetotalers to behave decently, or of the lecturers finding accommodation for the night. Education would have been left almost alone, had not the Liberals started the British and Foreign schools, which roused the Church party to action. The one village schoolmaster with whom I came into contact was—as were most of his class—one who had seen better days, who wore top boots, and whose chief instrument in teaching the young idea how to shoot was a ruler, of which he seemed to me to take rather an unfair advantage. The people were ignorant, and, like Lord Melbourne, did not see much good in making a fuss about education. They could rarely read or write, and if they could there was nothing for them to read—no cheap books nor cheap magazines and newspapers. Now we have run to the other extreme, and it is to be hoped