But on the whole the town is modern, and all of the modern time. It is respectable, thoroughly so, quite as much as any London square or street. Its great industry is a modern one—the manufacture of Electric apparatus, by the firm of Crompton and Co., Ltd., a firm which has for some time occupied a leading place in connection with the installation of Electric light, and has been the means of lighting not only Chelmsford, but many of the principal buildings in London. If you want to see antiquity in Chelmsford, you must pay a visit to the Museum, now incorporated with the Essex Field Club, which is a very good one of its kind. One of the best antiquarian magazines of the day is the _Essex Review_, published in High street, which is really a credit to the town. But Chelmsford is of the present rather than the past. Its men and women move with the times, perhaps in consequence of their nearness to the great metropolis. It has literary and scientific tastes, of which the sette of Odde Volumes is an illustration; and it is further known to fame as the head-quarters of the Essex Bee-keeping Association, established in 1880, which has done much to develop the taste for, and the growth of, honey—an article not unknown to the ancients, and an industry by means of which many a careful cottager may pay his rent. Of that association Mr. Edmund Durrant is the life and soul, and in all parts of the land he has lifted up his voice, on behalf of this new and desirable source of wealth in our country towns and village homes. As to its Beef Steak Club, which was founded in Chelmsford in the time of the Georges—it was second to none. “The position of the town at the junction of the rivers Chelmer and Cann probably” writes Mr. Christy, “led to its being inhabited in very early days.” As Roman remains have been discovered there, there is reason to suppose that it was known to those enterprising people. In the good old times, as some people call them, there was a Priory here (of which no trace now remains), where in the reign of Edward II. resided Thomas Langford, an author, of whose works I know little, save that a local historian describes them as curious. A greater man, I apprehend, was Philemon Holland, a physician and translator of Livy, Pliny, and other classic authors. He has better claims on us as having first translated Camden’s Britannia into English. He was born in Chelmsford, in 1551, and educated at the Grammar School, a school which still exists, but in a recent building, the older one having passed into the hands of the County Council Technical Instruction Committee. One of the old houses still remaining, “Springfield Mill,” is that in which Strutt wrote his Sports and Pastimes. Chelmsford fell into Church hands at an early date: It owes indeed much of its prosperity to Maurice, Bishop of London, who, about the year 1100, built a bridge over the Cann, which brought the main stream of traffic through Chelmsford instead of Writtle.