In the old times Ipswich must have been a much more picturesque place than it is to-day. All its old records are religiously preserved by a worthy townsman, Mr. John Glyde, in his _Illustrations of Old Ipswich_, a handsome work, which is a credit to the town, and which ought to find a place in the library of East Anglians wealthy enough to purchase it. He writes lovingly of its gates and walls indicating the lamentable state of insecurity by which our forefathers were embarrassed in those good old times, when the Curfew Bell tolled every evening at eight o’clock. “There is, perhaps,” says an antiquarian writer, “no house in the kingdom which, for its size, is more curiously or quaintly ornamented than the ancient house still standing in the Butter Market.” The tradition is that Charles II. was hidden for awhile in that house after his defeat at Worcester. Be that as it may, the Ipswich traders, like John Gilpin, were men of credit and renown, and Fuller, in the seventeenth century, spoke of the number of wealthy merchant houses in Ipswich. It was in the reign of Elizabeth, remarks Mr. Glyde, that Ipswich seems to have attained the zenith of its fame. There is scarcely a branch of foreign commerce carried on at the present time, with the exception of trade with China, that was not prosecuted with more or less entirety in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. At that time Ipswich was much richer in shipping than Yarmouth, Southampton, or Lynn. Foreign weavers discovered the advantage of using English wool, and the gold of Flanders found its way into the pockets of English traders. The town still boasts a memorial of Cardinal Wolsey’s munificent liberality. One of its representatives was no less a distinguished person than Bacon— The wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind. Cavendish, the explorer of the world, was one of the personages at one time often to be seen in its streets—streets along which had ridden in triumph Queens Mary and Elizabeth, to say nothing of the Saxon Queen, who at one time resided in the town. But if Ipswich knows no longer the grandeur and pageantry of the past, if its Black Friars are vanished, it is still the abiding place of that new and better spirit to which Cromwell appealed, and not in vain, when he sought to make this England of ours great and free.