Lynn's commercial history may be described roughly as the dogged and not entirely fruitless struggle of a town once really great and prosperous to fight the new conditions of modern trade, conditions tending to make remote and out of the way a port which was once accessible and almost central. The glory has not all departed, but a great deal of it has gone, leaving its traces plainly to be seen in architecture. The Custom-house, Dutch in appearance (for the trade with Holland was considerable), and the Guildhall speak of the days gone by; the central market square is far too spacious for the present needs of the place. The main streets are narrow, but that was the way of old cities, and their lights, carried on elegant iron arches across the streets, give it a distinctly foreign air. Drive away from the main street towards the Custom-house, and you will find another, running parallel to it, of substantial Queen Anne houses compelling reflection. They speak of a bygone prosperity. I have found no trace that Lynn ever was, as Ipswich and Norwich were in the pre-railway days, and as for that matter nearly every county town in England was, a centre of county society, in which the county families kept their town houses, occupying them for a gay season in each year. These houses seem to speak rather of rich Lynn merchants of the past, trading with the Low Countries on a scale very large for those days. Again, with the sea to the northward, after a few miles of navigable river, and the Fens on every side nearly, living on its trade by sea, Lynn seems to have been placed in a species of natural isolation, which perhaps goes some way to account for the fact that it is not quite like any other town in England. Probably the Lynn "character" of the past most of us would best like to meet, not for very long perhaps, was Miss Mary Breeze, who died, aged seventy-eight, in 1789. It is recorded of her that "she took out her shooting license, kept as good greyhounds, and was as sure a shot as any in the county." But a corporation minute beginning, "Guildhall, Lynn. At a congregation there holden on the 14th day of February, 1758," points to a contemporary of Miss Mary Breeze, in whom the wider world was once keenly interested. On that day Eugene Aram was approved as usher to the Grammar School, on the appointment of Mr. Knox, in the place of John Birkes, "dismissed." Like, probably, most middle-aged men, I remember reading _Eugene Aram_ with eager interest as a boy; in these later years the task has been achieved only after heroic efforts and in obedience to a sense of duty. The noble author, who could describe a chair in front of a public-house as "cathedrarian accommodation," is not for this age. By the help, however, of a paper read by Mr. E. M. Beloe to a county society, and preserved in _Norfolk and Norwich Notes and Queries_, I am able to see something of this celebrated case, once much discussed, as it must have appeared to the inhabitants of Lynn.