The two men who shed most literary fame on the Yarmouth of my childhood were Dawson Turner and Hudson Gurney, who in this respect resembled each other, that they were both bankers and both antiquarians more or less distinguished. Dawson Turner was a man of middle height and of saturnine aspect, who had the reputation of being a hard taskmaster to the ladies of his family, who were quite as intelligent and devoted to literature as himself. He published a ‘Tour in Normandy’—at that time scarcely anyone travelled abroad—and much other matter, and perhaps as an autograph-collector was unrivalled. Most of his books, with his notes, more or less valuable, are now in the British Museum. Sir Charles Lyell, when a young man, visited the Turner family in 1817, and gives us a very high idea of them all. ‘Mr. Turner,’ he says, in a letter to his father, ‘surprises me as much as ever. He wrote twenty-two letters last night after he had wished us “Good-night.” It kept him up till two o’clock this morning.’ Again Sir Charles writes: ‘What I see going on every hour in this family makes me ashamed of the most active day I ever spent at Midhurst. Mrs. Turner has been etching with her daughters in the parlour every morning at half-past six.’ Of Hudson Gurney in his youth we get a flattering portrait in one of the charming ‘Remains of the Late Mrs. Trench,’ edited by her son, Archbishop of Dublin. Writing from Yarmouth in 1799, she says: ‘I have been detained here since last Friday, waiting for a fair wind, and my imprisonment would have been comfortless enough had it not have been for the attention of Mr. Hudson Gurney, a young man on whom I had no claims except from a letter of Mr. Sanford’s, who, without knowing him, or having any connection with him, recommended me to his care, feeling wretched that I should be unprotected in the first part of my journey. He has already devoted to me one evening and two mornings, assisted me in money matters, lent me books, and enlivened my confinement to a wretched room by his pleasant conversation. Mr. Sanford having described me as a person travelling about _for her health_, he says his old assistant in the Bank fancied I was a decrepit elderly lady who might safely be consigned to his youthful partner. His description of his surprise thus prepared was conceived in a very good strain of flattery. He is almost two-and-twenty, understands several languages, seems to delight in books, and to be uncommonly well informed.’ Little credit, however, is due to Mr. Hudson Gurney for his politeness in this case. The lovely and lively widow—she had married Colonel St. George at the age of eighteen, and the marriage only lasted two or three years, the Colonel dying of consumption—must have possessed personal and mental attractions irresistible to a cultivated young man of twenty-two. Had she been old and ugly, it is to be feared his business engagements would