East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical AssociationsRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
History
East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
East Anglia (England)
Of Mrs. Taylor, wife of the grandson of the eminent Hebraist, Mackintosh
declared that she was the Madame Roland of Norwich. We owe to her Mrs.
Austen and Lady Duff Gordon. Mr. Reeve, the translator of De
Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy,’ has preserved the memory of his father, Dr.
Henry Reeve, by the republication of his ‘Journal of a Tour on the
Continent.’ Let me also mention that Dr. Caius, the founder of Caius
College, Cambridge, was a Norwich man.
To Noncons Norwich offers peculiar attractions. We have in Dr.
Williams’s library ‘The Order of the Prophesie in Norwich’; and Robinson,
the leader of the Pilgrim Fathers, had a Norwich charge. Even in a later
day some of the Norwich divines had a godly zeal for freedom, worthy of
Milton himself, and on which the Pilgrim Fathers would have smiled
approval. It is told of Mark Wilks, the brother of Matthew, and the
grandfather of our London Mark Wilks, that when a deputation went from
Norwich during the Thelwall and Horne Tooke trials, when, if the
Castlereagh gang had had their will, there would have been found a short
and easy way with the Dissenters, and came back on the Sunday morning,
entering the place after the service had commenced, that he called out,
‘What’s the news?’ as he saw them enter. ‘Acquitted,’ was the reply.
‘Thank God!’ said the parson, as they all joined in singing
‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.’
It is a fact that Wilks’s first sermon in the Countess of Huntingdon’s
Chapel at Norwich was from the text, ‘There is a lad here with five
barley loaves and a few small fishes.’ Let me tell another story, this
time in connection with that Old Meeting which has so much to attract the
visitor at Norwich. It had a grand old man, William Youngman, amongst
its supporters; I see him now, with his choleric face, his full fat
figure, his black knee-breeches and silk stockings, his gold-headed cane.
He was an author, a learned man, as well as a Norwich merchant, the very
Aristarchus of Dissent—a kind-hearted, hospitable man withal, if my
boyish experience may be relied on. One Sunday there came to preach in
the Old Meeting a young man named Halley from London, who lived to be
honoured as few of our Dissenting D.D.’s have been. He was young, and he
felt nervous as he looked from the pulpit on the austere critic in his
great square pew just beneath. Well, thought the young preacher, a
sermon on keeping the Sabbath will be safe, and he selected that for his
morning discourse. The service over, up comes the grand old man. ‘The
next time, young man, you preach, preach on something you understand;’
and, having said so, he bought a pennyworth of apples of a woman in the
street, leaving the young man to digest his remarks as best he could.
Again the service was to be carried on. The young man was in the pulpit,
the grand old man below. There was singing and prayer, but no sermon,
the young man having bolted after opening the service. I like better the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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