In my young days Bungay owed all its fame and most of its wealth to the far-famed John Childs, who was one of our first Church Rate martyrs, to whom is due mainly the destruction of the Bible-printing monopoly, and to whom the late Edward Miall was much indebted for establishing the _Nonconformist_ newspaper. For many years it was the habit of Mr. Childs to celebrate that event by a dinner, at which the wine was good and the talk was better. Old John Childs, of Bungay, had a cellar of port which a dean might have envied; and many was the bottle that I cracked with him as a young man, after a walk from Wrentham to Bungay, a distance of fourteen miles, to talk with him on things in general, and politics in particular. He was emphatically a self-made man—a man who would have made his way anywhere, and a man who had a large acquaintance with the reformers of his day in all parts of the country. On one occasion the great Dan O’Connell came to pay him a visit, much to the delight of the Suffolk Radicals, and to the horror of the Tories. The first great dinner at which I had the honour of being present, and to which I was taken by my father, who was a great friend of Mr. Childs, was on the occasion of the presentation to the latter of a testimonial by a deputation of distinguished Dissenters from Ipswich in connection with his incarceration in the county gaol at Ipswich, for having refused to pay rates for the support of a Church in which he did not believe, and for the performance of a service in which he took no part. At that time ‘the dear old Church of England,’ while it was compelled to tolerate Dissent, insisted on Dissent being taxed to the uttermost farthing; and that it does not do so now, and that it is more popular in consequence, is due to the firm stand taken by such men as John Childs of Bungay. He was a great phrenologist. In his garden he had a summer-house, which he facetiously termed his scullery, where he had some three hundred plaster casts, many of which he had taken himself of public individuals and friends and acquaintances. My father was honoured in this way, as also my eldest sister. Sir Henry Thompson and I escaped that honour, but I have not forgotten his dark, piercing glance at our heads, when, as boys, we first came into his presence, and how I trusted that the verdict was satisfactory. Of course the Childses went to Meeting, but when I knew Bungay Mr. Shufflebottom had been gathered to his fathers, and the Rev. John Blaikie, a Scotchman, and therefore always a welcome guest at Wrentham, reigned in his stead. Mr. Childs had a large and promising family, few of whom now remain. His daughter was an exceptionally gifted and glorious creature, as in that early day it seemed to me. She also died early, leaving but one son, Mr. Crisp, a partner in the well-known legal firm of Messrs. Ashurst, Morris, and Crisp. It was in the little box by the window of the London Coffee House—now, alas! no more—where Mr.