Norwich has been a famous city ever since, at any rate, the time when Sir Thomas Browne wrote his famed _Religio de Medici_ there. It was to the house of Mrs. Taylor, wife of a Norwich tradesman, that Sir James Mackintosh and the other leading Liberals of the day used to repair to hold high discourse on the origin of society and the rights of man. Windham, one of the greatest statesmen of his day, the friend of Johnson and Burke, represented Norwich. There lived William Taylor, the friend and correspondent of Southey, who was the first to open up to the public the vast treasury of German thought. Harriet Martineau was born there, as was likewise her more celebrated brother James, who still lives to illustrate the mental and religious speculation of our day. A grand old city is Norwich, with its castle, now a museum, looking over it all, with its St. Andrew’s Hall, now utilised for concerts and public meetings, with its great markets, with its Colman’s Mustard Mills, with its old houses and narrow streets. The workman, with his strikes, has driven away from Northampton a good deal of its boot and shoe manufacture. What Northampton has lost Ipswich, Colchester, and especially Norwich, have gained. There is beautiful country round Norwich; and Norwich ought to be eminently holy, for there are forty churches there, many of them very ancient. We hear a good deal of the piety of our forefathers. In Norwich we realise that fact as well as anywhere. Norwich, consequently, is the home of bell-ringers. Mr. Suffling tells us, “I suppose no other place in England can boast of so many bell-ringers, or such good ones, as Norwich.” On certain occasions you are deafened by the clamour of its bells. Away from Ipswich, and Colchester, and Norwich there is a delicious sleepiness about the old East Anglian towns, as if they feel they have done their duty in their day and are out of the world. They are all in a declining way. They have all seen better days. They have not quite died out, because the Great Eastern Railway has connected them all together and insists on their sharing in the labours and triumphs of the present day. But they had rather not. They would rather live on their past glories—Bungay, with its renowned castle, Framlingham with its castle still more renowned, Bury with its memories of its martyr king, Woodbridge mildly illuminated by the fame of Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, Beccles with its fine church, Halesworth where Archbishop Whateley was for many years the rector. They are all places to live in happily if you have had enough of excitement and would shun the wicked world and its ways. VII. A DAY AT LYNN.