Dissenting Minister at Henley-on-Thames. Of him, the celebrated Edgeworth, the father of the equally celebrated daughter, says he had never known a man of a more inventive mind. Thomas, the artist, must have inherited something of his artistic skill from his mother, for she herself loved to paint fruit and flowers, but with the boy, painting became the one great object of his life, and he was always at it, even when he should have been studying at the ancient grammar school where he was a pupil; and thus it is Sudbury has two great men to boast of—Thomas Gainsborough, the artist, and Simon de Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was beheaded by the populace in Wat Tyler’s rebellion, and whose skull is still shown you in St. Gregory’s Church. I have known many thick skulls in East Anglia, but surely that of the martyred Archbishop must have been one of the thickest to have lasted all this time. Sudbury was the painter’s studio. It is now a clean, well-built, and slightly uninteresting provincial town, with a population of about eight thousand. But, said a commercial traveller to me, as I was deploring the barrenness of the land, “It is a good place for business.” It lies in the flat country of the valley of the Stour, a river which expands into a lake when the waters are out. When Gainsborough was a boy it was ancient and picturesque—and dirty. At any rate it is thus described in a poem written by Daniel Herbert, one of the old Noncons., a bunting manufacturer, and occasional preacher in the old meeting-house, who tells us I live at Sudbury, that dirty place, Where are a few poor sinners saved by grace. —Well, the dirt is gone; but when as late as the disfranchisement of the burgh, for bribery and corruption, which took place early in the reign of Queen Victoria, when the free and independent returned to Parliament a gentleman of colour, renowned for his vanity and wealth, it was evident that a good many poor sinners remained who had not been saved by grace. Allan Cunningham treats the marriage of Gainsborough as all conventional writers do. The lady—her name was Margaret Burr, and she had £200 a year of her own—made Gainsborough “a prudent, a kind, and a submissive wife.” As the lady was but sixteen, and her husband was eighteen, at the time of their wedding, one cannot be surprised to find at a later period Gainsborough looking upon his wife as a somewhat unsuitable companion. Cunningham writes, “The courtship was short. The young pair left Sudbury, leased a small house at a rent of £24 a year in Ipswich, and, making themselves happy in mutual love, conceived they were settled for life.”