Far away in the distant city which the Suffolk villagers called Lunnon, there was a Suffolk lad, whose relations kept a very little shop just by us, who was born at Uggeshall—pronounced Ouchell by the common people—on a very small farm, and who, as Unitarian preacher and newspaper writer, had been and was doing his best in the good cause; but it was not the influence of W. Johnson Fox—for it is of him I write—that did much in our little village to leaven the mass with the leaven of Reform. While quite a lad the Foxes went to Norwich, where the future preacher and teacher worked as a weaver boy. In after-years it was often my privilege to meet Mr. Fox, who had then attained no small share of London distinction, amongst whose hearers were men, often many of the most distinguished _literati_ of the day—such as Dickens and Forster—and who was actually to sit in Parliament as M.P. for Oldham, where, old as he was—and Mr. Gladstone says, ‘People who wish to succeed in Parliament should enter it young’—he occupied a most respectable position, all the more creditable when you remember that Parliament, even at that recent date, was a far more select and aristocratic assembly than any Parliament of our day, or of the future, can possibly be. Mr. Fox had been educated at Homerton Academy—as such places were then termed (college is the word we use now)—under the good and venerable Dr. Pye-Smith, whose ‘Scripture Testimony to the Messiah’ was supposed to have given Unitarianism a deadly blow, but whom I chiefly remember as a very deaf old man, and one of the first to recognise the fact that the Bible and geology were not necessarily opposed to each other, and to welcome and proclaim the truth—at that time received with fear and trembling, if received at all—that the God of Nature and the God of Revelation were the same. There was a good deal of free inquiry at Homerton Academy, which, however, Mr. Fox assured me, gradually subsided into the right amount of orthodoxy as the time came for the student to exchange his sure and safe retreat for the fiery ordeal of the deacon and the pew. My father and Johnson Fox had been fellow-students, and for some time corresponded together. The correspondence in due time, however, naturally ceased, as it was chiefly controversial, and nothing can be more irksome than for two people who have made up their minds, and whom nothing can change, to be arguing continually, and the friendship between them in some sense ceased as the one remained firm to, and the other wandered farther and farther from, the modified Calvinism of the Wrentham Church and pulpit, where, as in all orthodox pulpits at that time, it was taught that men were villains by necessity, and fools, as it were, by a Divine thrusting on; that for some a Saviour had been crucified, that there might be a way of escape from the wrath of an angry and unforgiving God; whilst for the vast mass—to whom the name of Christ had never been made known, to whom