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)
picture of Norwich I get in Sir James Mackintosh’s Life, where Basil
Montague tells us how he and Mackintosh, when travelling the Norfolk
circuit, always hastened to Norwich to spend their evenings in the circle
of which Mrs. Taylor was the attraction and the centre. The wife of a
Norwich tradesman, we see her sitting sewing and talking in the midst of
her family, the companion of philosophers, who compared her to Lucy
Hutchinson, and a model wife. Far away in India Sir James writes to her:
‘I know the value of your letters. They rouse my mind on subjects which
interest us in common—friends, children, literature, and life. Their
moral tone cheers and braces me. I ought to be made permanently happy by
contemplating a mind like yours; which seems more exclusively to derive
its gratifications from its duties than almost any other.’ It was in the
Norwich Octagon that these Taylors worshipped. Their Unitarianism seemed
to have affected them more favourably than it did Harriet Martineau,
whose family also attended there. I remember Edward Taylor, who was the
Gresham Professor of Music. But theologically, I presume, the palm of
excellence in connection with the Octagon is to be awarded to Dr. Taylor,
the great Hebrew scholar. He wrote to old Newton: ‘I have been looking
through my Bible, and can’t find your doctrine of the Atonement.’ ‘Last
night I could not see to get into bed,’ replied old Newton, ‘because I
found I had my extinguisher on the candle. Take off the extinguisher,
and then you will see.’
Leaving theology, let us get up on the gray old castle, which is to be
turned into a museum, and look round on the city lying at our feet.
Would you have a finer view? Cross the Yare and walk up the new road
(made by the unemployed one hard winter) to Mousehold Heath, and after
you have done thinking of Kitt’s rebellion—an agrarian one, by-the-bye,
and worth thinking about just at this time—and of the Lollards, who were
burnt just under you, look across to the city in the valley, with its
heights all round, more resembling the Holy City, so travellers say, than
any other city in the world. In the foreground is the cathedral, right
beyond rises the castle on the hill; church spires, warehouses, public
buildings, private dwellings, manufactories, chimneys’ smoke, complete
the landscape fringed by the green of the distant hills. There are a
hundred thousand people there—to be preached to and saved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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