Guild day, with its triumphal arches, carpets and flags hung out of windows, Darby and Joan sitting in a green arbour, the Mayor’s coach attended by “Snap,” and the “whifflers”; the rush-strewn cathedral pavement, as the Corporation marched up the nave—all this gave birth to boyish enthusiasm for the picturesque. Every Guild day, on a green baize platform near the west door of the cathedral, the head boy of the Grammar School delivered a Latin oration before his Worship. What envy that boy aroused in my bosom! Elections, too, were objects of intense interest to me as a childish politician, when Whig candidates were carried in blue-and-white satin chairs, on the shoulders of men who tossed them up, as the Goths did their heroes upon battle shields. As to another part of my education, I loved to read the lives of eminent people, and devoured a good many memoirs of men and women in religious magazines. Norwich was at that time distinguished for literary, artistic, and benevolent celebrities; and I felt proud as a boy to think of them as pertaining to my own birthplace. The appearance of several amongst them I have still, after the lapse of seventy years, vividly before me—Mrs. Opie, the Taylors, the Martineaus, Joseph John Gurney, and Bishop Bathurst, with several beside. May I add, the first sight of the sea at Yarmouth I can never forget. It was a November morning in my ninth year. The sky looked angry; the wind-swept waters and tall billows broke furiously on the beach; the hulk of a stranded vessel lay on the sands—emblem of life’s shattered hopes.