Some of Our East Coast TownsRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
History
Some of Our East Coast Towns
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
East Anglia (England) -- Description and travel
In the churchyard of Hadleigh there are no monuments which require
description. There is, however a curious inscription on a headstone on
the south-east side leading to the market-place regarding the name and
fame of one John Turner, a blacksmith, who died 1715.
My sledge and hammer lie declined,
My bellows have quite lost their wind;
My fire’s extinct, my forge decayed,
My vice is in the dust all laid;
My coal is spent, my iron gone,
My nails are drove, my work is done;
My fire-dried corpse lies here at rest,
My soul smoke-like is soaring to be blest.
Hadleigh has seen better days. At one time it flourished by reason of
its cloth trade; then it took to making silk, and up to recent times it
did a great trade in malt.
I would not live in Hadleigh all my life, but it is certainly a quiet
corner into which to creep, and houses are to be had a bargain,
considering, after all, how near it is to town. I can’t find that
Hadleigh has given birth to any great men. It may be that they may come
in time. One distinguished personage born there, Bishop Overall, was one
of the translators of the Bible, and wrote that part of the Church
Catechism which treats of the Sacraments. Another, William Alabaster,
wrote a play called _Roxana_, which was so pathetic when acted at Trinity
College, Cambridge, that it drove a young woman quite out of her wits.
No wonder our Puritan forefathers had a horror of the stage.
One of the most eminent men born in Hadleigh, was Dr. Reeve, whose
monument is in the Octagon chapel, Norwich, written by the earliest of
English German scholars. William Taylor still records his worth and
fame, a student at the University of Edinburgh, he became intimate with
Francis Horner, and helped to write in the early numbers of the
_Edinburgh Review_. In 1802, he was elected a member of the far famed
Speculative Society. In London, where he went to continue his
professional studies, he frequently met Coleridge, and the elder Disraeli
at dinner. In the spring of 1805, while travelling on the continent—a
place then rarely visited by the English, he saw Napoleon on the morrow
of Austerlitz—was introduced to Haydn—was present when Beethoven
conducted Fidelio—heard Humboldt relate his travels—and Fichte explain
his philosophy. Thus, as life opened around with him, with the most
brilliant prospects, he died at his father’s house Hadleigh, in
September, 1814. It was his son, who for a while was the editor of the
_Edinburgh_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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