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)
Another memory also comes to me in connection with the old Dragon,—not of
Revelation, but of Norwich—a huge green monster, which was usually kept
in St. Andrew’s Hall, and dragged out at the time of city festivities.
Men inside of it carried it along the street, and the sight was terrible
to see, as it had a ferocious head and a villainous tail, and resembled
nothing that is in the heaven above or the earth beneath or the waters
under the earth. I fancy, however, since the schoolmaster has gone
abroad, that kind of dragon has ceased to roar. I think it was at a
Norwich election that I saw it for the first and the only time, and it
followed in the procession formed to chair the Members—the Members being
seated in gorgeous array on chairs, borne on the heads of people, and
every now and then, much to the delight of the mob, though I should
imagine very little to his own, the chair, with the Member in it, was
tossed up into the air, and by this means it was supposed the general
public were able to get a view of their M.P. and to see what manner of
man he was. It was in some such way that I, as a lad, realized, as I
never else should have done, the red face and the pink-silk stockings of
the Hon. Mr. Scarlett, the happy candidate who pretended to enjoy the
fun, as with the best grace possible under the circumstances he smiled on
the ladies in the windows of the street, as he was borne along and bowed
to all. From my recollection of the chairing I saw that time, I am more
inclined to admire the activity of Wilberforce, of whom we read, when
elected for Hull, ‘When the procession reached his mother’s house, he
sprang from the chair, and, presenting himself with surprising quickness
at a projecting window—it was that of the nursery in which his childhood
had been passed—he addressed the populace with such complete effect that
he was afterwards able to decide the election of its successor.’ At
Norwich the Hon. Mr. Scarlett did well in not attempting a similar
display of agility. Perhaps, however, it is quite as well that we have
got rid of the chairing and the humour—Heaven help us!—to which it gave
rise on the part of an English mob.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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