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Volkswagen Touareg 7LA 2003-2008 Wiring Diagram Component

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Place, Finsbury, and a leading man in London literary society. One of
the best-known men in East Anglia was Allan Ransome, of Ipswich,
the young Quaker, who was on very friendly terms with the
Strickland family, who cultivated literature and business with equal
zest. Nor, in this category, should I pass over the name of George
Bird, of Yoxford, a local chemist, who found time to write of Dunwich
Castle and such-like East Anglian themes—I fancy now read by
none. A Suffolk man who was making his mark in London at that
time was Crabbe Robinson, the pioneer of the special correspondent
of our later day. And just when Queen Victoria began to reign,
Thomas Woolner, the poet-sculptor, was leaving his native town of
Hadleigh to begin life as the pupil of Boehm, sculptor in ordinary to
the Queen. And yet East Anglia was by no means distinguished, or
held to be of much account in the gay circles of wit and fashion in
town. The gentry were but little better than those drawn to the life
in the novels of Fielding and Smollett. I am inclined to think there
was very little reading outside Dissenting circles—where the book
club was a standing institution, and The Edinburgh Review was
looked up to as an oracle, as indeed it was, sixty years ago. There
was little encouragement of manly sports and pastimes—indeed,
very little for any one in the way of amusement but at the public-
house. Not that any one was ever drunk, in the liberal opinion of
the landlord of the public-house, only “a little fresh,” and the village
policeman was unknown. It is true there might be a constable, but
he was a very mythical person indeed. Everybody drank, and as a
rule the poorer people were the more they drank.
One of the early temperance lecturers in the district, Mr. Thomas
Whittaker, who was mobbed, especially at Framlingham, tells us
Essex and Suffolk are clayey soils, in some districts very heavy and
not easily broken up, and the people in many cases correspond. It
was due to Mr. Marriage, of Chelmsford, a maltster, who turned his
malting house into a temperance hall, and Mr. D. Alexander, of
Ipswich, that the temperance reformers made way; and at that time
James Larner, of Framlingham, aided by young Mr. Thompson (now
the great London surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson), was quite a
power. But the difficulties were great in the way of finding places for
meetings, or of getting to them in muddy lanes, or of getting the
anti-teetotalers to behave decently, or of the lecturers finding
accommodation for the night. Education would have been left
almost alone, had not the Liberals started the British and Foreign
schools, which roused the Church party to action. The one village
schoolmaster with whom I came into contact was—as were most of
his class—one who had seen better days, who wore top boots, and
whose chief instrument in teaching the young idea how to shoot was
a ruler, of which he seemed to me to take rather an unfair
advantage. The people were ignorant, and, like Lord Melbourne, did
not see much good in making a fuss about education. They could
rarely read or write, and if they could there was nothing for them to
read—no cheap books nor cheap magazines and newspapers. Now
we have run to the other extreme, and it is to be hoped we are all
the better. Cottages were mostly in an unsanitary state, but the
labourer, in his white smock, looked well on a Sunday at the village
church or chapel, and the children at the Sunday-school were clean,
if a little restless under the long, dry sermon which they were
compelled to hear, the caretaker being generally provided with a
long stick to admonish the thoughtless, to wake up the sleepy, to
prevent too much indulgence in apples during sermon time, or too
liberal a display of the miscellaneous treasures concealed in a boy’s
pocket. Perhaps the most influential person in the village was the
gamekeeper, who was supposed to be armed, and to have the
power of committing all boys in undue eagerness to go bird-nesting
to the nearest gaol. He was to me, I own, a terror by night and by
day, as he was constantly in my way—when tempted to break into
the neighbouring park in search of flowers or eggs. The farmer
then, as now, was ruined, but he was a picture of health and
comfort as he drove to the nearest market town, where after
business he would spend the evening smoking and drinking, with his
broad beaver on his head, his fat carcase ornamented with a blue
coat with brass buttons, and his knee breeches of yellow
kerseymere. It was little he read to wake up his sluggish intellect,
save the county newspaper, which it was the habit for people to take
between them to lessen the expense. A newspaper was
sevenpence, of which fourpence went to pay for the stamp.
Everything was dear—the postage of a letter was 10d. or 1s. The
franking of letters by Members of Parliament existed at that time;
they could receive an unlimited number of letters free of postage, of
any weight, even a pianoforte, a saddle, a haunch of venison, and
they might send out fourteen a day. Loaf sugar was too dear to be
in daily use; tea and coffee were heavily taxed; soap was too dear to
use; and wearing apparel and boots and shoes very expensive; even
if you went for a drive there was the turnpike gate, and a heavy toll
to pay. As to geography, it was a science utterly unknown. Poor
people when they talked of the Midland Counties called them the
Shires, and I have heard serious disputes as to whether you got to
America by sea or land. The finest men in East Anglia were the
sailors at the various sea-ports along the coast, well-shaped, fair-
haired, with grand limbs and blue eyes, evidently of Saxon or Norse
descent, and their daughters were as handsome as any girls I ever
saw. The peasant had his little bit of garden, where he could keep a
pig and grow a few vegetables and flowers, but much of the
furniture was of the poorest description, much inferior to what it is
now, and his lot was not a happy one. As to locomotion, it did not
exist. To go a few miles from home was quite an event; on the main
roads ran coaches, with two, or three, or four horses, but the
general mode of conveyance was the carrier’s cart, sometimes drawn
by one horse and sometimes by two. Some of the happiest days of
my life were spent in the carrier’s cart, where the travellers were
seated on the luggage, their feet well protected by straw, where we
were all hail fellows well met, and each enjoyed his little joke,
especially when the rural intellect was stimulated by beer and
baccy. The old village inn where we stopped to water the horses
and refresh the inner man seemed to me all the more respectable
when compared with the pestiferous beershops that had then begun
to infest the land, to increase the crime, the misery, the pauperism
of a district which already had quite enough of them before.
But to return to locomotion. A post-chaise was generally resorted to
when the gentry travelled. It was painted yellow and black, and on
one of the two horses by which it was drawn was seated an ancient,
withered old man, generally known as the post-boy, whose age
might be anywhere between forty and eighty, dressed in a jockey
costume, in white hat and top boots; altogether, a bent, grotesque
figure whom Tennyson must have had in his eye when he wrote—for
the post-boy was often as not an ostler—

Wrinkled ostler, grim and thin,

Here is custom come your way;
Take my brute and lead him in,
Stuff his ribs with mouldy hay.
 CHAPTER II.
A life’s memories.

Long, long before John Forster wrote to recommend everyone to

write memoirs of himself it had become the fashion to do so. “That
celebrated orator,” writes Dr. Edmund Calamy, one of the most
learned of our Nonconformist divines, “Caius Cornelius Tacitus, in the
beginning of his account of the life of his father-in-law, Julius
Agricola (who was the General of Domitian, the Emperor, here in
Britain, and the first who made the Roman part of Britain a Præsidial
province), excuses this practice from carrying in it anything of
arrogance.” This excellent example was followed by Julius Cæsar,
Marcus Antoninus, many emperors who kept diaries, Flavius
Josephus, St. Gregory of Nazianzen, St. Augustine, to say nothing of
Abraham Schultetus, the celebrated professor at Heidelberg; of the
learned Fuetius; of Basompierre, the celebrated marshal of France;
of the ever-amusing and garrulous Montaigne; or of our own Richard
Baxter, or of Edmund Calamy himself. The fact is, it has ever been
the fashion with men who have handled the pen freely to write more
or less about themselves and the times in which they lived, and
there is no pleasanter reading than such biographical recollections;
and really it matters little whether on the world’s stage the actor
acted high tragedy or low comedy so that he writes truthfully as far
as he can about himself and his times. If old Montaigne is to be
believed there is nothing like writing about oneself. “I dare,” he
writes, “not only speak of myself, but of myself alone,” and never
man handled better the very satisfactory theme. If I follow in the
steps of my betters I can do no harm, and I may do good if I can
show how the England of to-day is changed for the better since I
first began to observe that working men and women are better off,
that our middle and upper classes have clearer views of duty and
responsibility, that we are the better for the political and social and
religious reforms that have been achieved of late, that, in fact,

. . . through the ages one increasing purpose runs,

And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the
suns.

The one great complaint I have to make with respect to my father

and mother, to whom I owe so much, and whose memory I shall
ever revere, was that they brought me into the world forty or fifty
years too soon. In 1820, when I first saw the light of day, England
was in a very poor way. It was what the late Earl of Derby used to
call the pre-scientific era. Gross darkness covered the land. The
excitement of war was over, and the lavish outlay it occasioned
being stopped, life was stagnant, farmers and manufacturers alike
were at low-water mark, and the social and religious and political
reforms required by the times were as yet undreamed of. However,
one good thing my parents did for me. They lived in a country
village in the extreme east of Suffolk, not far from the sea, where I
could lead a natural life, where I could grow healthy, if not wise, and
be familiar with all the impulses which spring up in the heart under
the influences of rural life. “Boyhood in the country,” writes William
Howitt in his autobiography—“Paradise of opening existence! Up to
the age of ten this life was all my own.” And thus it was with me.
Existence was a pleasure, and the weather, I believe, was better
then than it is now. We had summer in summer time. We had fine
weather when harvest commenced, and to spend a day at one of
the neighbouring farmers riding the fore horse was a delight which
thrilled me with joy; and winter, with its sliding and snowballing,
with its clear skies and its glittering snows, rendering the landscape
lovelier than ever, made me forget the inevitable chilblains, which
was the price we had to pay for all its glories and its charms.
Our little village was situated on the high road between London and
Great Yarmouth, along which rolled twice a day the London and
Yarmouth Royal Mail, drawn by four horses, and driven by a fat man
in red, whom we raw village lads regarded as a very superior person
indeed. Behind sat the guard, also in red, with a horn, which he
blew lustily when occasion required. There was a time, but that was
much later, when a day coach was put on, and, as it changed horses
at our village inn, one of our chief delights was to see the tired,
heated, smoking horses taken out, and their places filled by a new
set, much given to kicking and plunging at starting, to the immense
delight of the juvenile spectators. Even the passengers I regarded
with awe. In fourteen hours would they not be in London where the
King lived—where were the Houses of Parliament, the Bank and the
Tower and the soldiers? What would I not have given to be on that
roof urging on, under the midnight stars, my wild career! Now and
then a passenger would be dropped in our little village. What a nine
days’ wonder he was, especially if he were a Cockney and talked in
the language of Cockaigne—if he had heard the Iron Duke, or seen
royalty from afar. Nonconformity flourished in the village in spite of
the fact that the neighbouring baronet, at the gates of whose park
the village may be said to have commenced, was Sir Thomas Gooch
—(Guche was the way the villagers pronounced his dread name)—
for was he not a county magistrate, who could consign people to
Beccles Gaol, some eight miles off, and one of the M.P.’s for the
county, and did not he and his lady sternly set their faces against
Dissent? If now and then there were coals and blankets to be
distributed—and very little was done in that way, charity had not
become fashionable then—you may be sure that no Dissenter,
however needy and deserving, came in for a share.
The churches round were mostly filled by the baronet’s relatives,
who came into possession of the family livings as a matter of course,
and took little thought for the souls of their parishioners. In fact,
very few people did go to church. In our chapel, of which my father
was the minister for nearly forty years, we had a good congregation,
especially of an afternoon, when the farmers with their families, in
carts or gigs, put in an appearance. One of the ejected had been
the founder of Nonconformity in our village, and its traditions were
all of the most honourable character. A wealthy family had lived in
the hall, which Sir Thomas Gooch had bought and pulled down, one
of whom had been M.P. for the county in Cromwell’s time, and had
left a small endowment—besides, there was a house for the minister
—to perpetuate the cause, and it was something amidst the Bœotian
darkness all round to have a man of superior intellect, of a fair
amount of learning, of unspotted life, of devoted piety, such as the
old Nonconformist ministers were, ever seeking to lead the people
upward and onward; while the neighbouring gentry and all the
parsons round, I am sorry to say, set the people a very bad
example. In our time we have changed all that, and the Church
clergy are as zealous to do good as the clergy of any other
denomination. But that things have altered so much for the better, I
hold is mainly due to the great progress made all over the land by
Dissent, which woke up the Church from the state of sloth and
luxury and lethargy which had jeopardised its very existence. Really,
at the time of which I write and in the particular locality to which I
refer, decent godly people were obliged to forsake the Parish Church,
and to seek in the neighbouring conventicle the aids requisite to a
religious life. At the same time, there was little collision between
Church and Dissent. The latter had its own sphere, supporting, in
addition to its local work, the Bible Society, the Tract Society, the
London Missionary Society, and the Anti-Slavery Society. It had also
its Sunday-school, very much inferior to what they are now; and, if
possible, secured a day school on the British and Foreign plan.
Dissenters paid Church rates, which the wealthy Churchmen were
not ashamed to collect. They gave the parson his tithes without a
murmur, and politically they were all on the side of the Whigs, to
whom they were indebted for the repeal of the Test and Corporation
Acts—barbarous laws—which had ostracised intelligent and
conscientious Dissenters from all parochial and municipal and
Parliamentary life. When I was a boy no one could be a parish
constable without going through the hideous farce of taking the
Sacrament at his Parish Church. It was the Dissenters who created
the public opinion which enabled Sir Robert Peel and the Iron Duke
to grant Roman Catholic emancipation. It was they who carried
reform and abolished rotten boroughs, and gave Manchester and
Sheffield and Birmingham the representatives which the Tories, and
especially the parsons, would have denied them. To be a reformer
was held by the clergy and gentry to be a rogue and rascal of the
first rank. I cannot call to mind any public action taken in support of
the suffering and the poor to which the clergy and the gentry in our
village, or in any of the villages round, lent any support whatever.
As regards the great Anti-Slavery agitation, for instance, the only
meeting on the subject was held in our chapel, where a Captain
Pilkington came down from London to lecture, and touched all our
hearts as he showed the lash and the chains, and the other
instruments of torture which that cruel system sanctioned and
required, and you may be quite sure that when next day I, with
boyish pride, pardonable under the circumstances, was sent round
to get signatures for a petition to Parliament on the subject, it was
not long before I got my paper filled. Naturally the Dissenters were
active in the work, for had not one of their number—poor Smith,
missionary at Demerara—been foully murdered by Demerara
magistrates and planters because he took the part of the black slave
against his white owner and tyrant? Yet I was disgusted, after
remembering the effect produced in our Suffolk village by the
captain’s eloquence, to read thirty years after in Sir George
Stephens’s “Anti-Slavery Recollections,” that “Pilkington was a
pleasing lecturer, and won over many by his amiable manners, but
that he wanted power, and resigned the duty in about six months.”
In our simple village it was enough for us that a lecturer or speaker
came from London; or as the country people called it Lunnen. That
was a sufficient guarantee for us of his talent, his respectability, and
his power. Since then the scales have fallen even from the eyes of
the rustic, and he no longer sees men as trees walking. Railways
have rendered the journey to London perilously easy. Hodge, in the
vain hope to better himself, has left his village home, its clear skies,
its bracing air, its healthy toil, its simple hours, and gone to live in
the crowded slums. It may be that he earns better wages, but you
may buy gold too dear. A healthy rustic is far happier in his village.
It is there he should strive to live, rather than in the town; and a
time may come when English legislators will have wisdom enough to
do something to plant the people on the land, rather than compel
them to come to town, to be poisoned by its bad air, its dangerous
companionship, and its evil ways.
As regards intelligence, we were in a poor way. On Saturdays The
Suffolk Chronicle appeared, much to the delight of the Radicals,
while the Tories were cheered by The Ipswich Journal. At a later
time The Patriot came to our house, and we got an idea of what was
going on in the religious and Dissenting world. Foster’s Essays were
to be seen on many shelves, and later on the literary and religious
speculations of Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, and Dick’s writings had also a
wonderful sale. I fancy no one cares much now for any of the
writers I have named. Such is fame!
As a boy it seemed to me I had too much of the Assembly’s
Catechism and Virgil, to whose poetic beauties I was somewhat
blind. I resolved to run away, as I fancied there was something
better and brighter than village life. Religion was not attractive to
me. Sunday was irksome. The land was barren, from Dan to
Beersheba. I longed for the conflict and excitement and life of the
distant town, and I ran away unconscious of the pain I should inflict
on parents I dearly loved. Oh, that running away! If I live—and
there is little chance of that—to the age of Methuselah I shall never
forget it! It took place in the early morn of a long summer’s day.
The whole scene rises distinctly before me. I see myself giving a
note to my sister for father and mother when they came down to
breakfast, I see myself casting an eye to the bedroom window to see
if there was any chance of their being up and so stopping the
enterprise on which I had set my mind. Happily, as I thought, the
blinds were down and there was nothing to forbid my opening the
garden gate and finding myself on the London road. I was anxious
to be off and yet loth to leave. I had a small parcel under my arm,
consisting of very small belongings; and I was free of Latin and the
Assembly Catechism, free as the air—my own master. All the world
was hushed in slumber. There was no one to stop me or bid me
return to the roof where I had been happy, and to the parents whom
I was to return to, to love more than I had ever done before, and
whom it then saddened me to think that I might never see again.
Not a soul was in the street, and the few shops which adorned it
were shut up—cottagers and shopkeepers, they were all in the arms
of Morpheus. I hastened on, not wishing to be seen by any one; but
there was no fear of that, only cows, horses at grass, and pigs and
hens and birds were conscious of my flight, and they regarded me
with the indifference with which a Hottentot would view an ape. In
my path was a hill on which I stayed awhile to take a last look at the
deserted village. The white smoke was then curling up from the
chimneys and the common round of daily life was about to begin.
How peaceful it all seemed. What a contrast to my beating heart!
There was not one of those cottages behind into which I had not
been with my father as he visited the poor and the afflicted—not a
lane or street along which I had not trundled my hoop with boyish
glee—not a meadow into which I had not gone in search of
buttercups and cowslips and primroses or bird’s nests. I only met
one man I knew, the miller, as he came from the mill where he had
been at work all night, and of him I stood somewhat in awe, for
once when the mill was being robbed he had sat up alone in
darkness in the mill till the robbers came in, when he looked,
through a hole in the upper floor, as they were at their wicked work
below, and had thus identified them; and I had seen them in a cart
on their way to Beccles gaol. Perhaps, thought I, he will stop me
and ask me what I am about; but he did nothing of the kind, and
henceforth the way was clear for me to London, where I was to fight
the battle of life. Did I not write poetry, and did not I know ladies
who were paid a guinea a page for writing for the Annuals, and
could not I do the same? And thus thinking I walked three miles till
I came to a small beershop, where I had a biscuit and a glass of
beer. The road from thence was new to me, and how I revelled in
the stateliness of the trees as I passed a nobleman’s (Earl
Stradbrooke’s) mansion and park. In another hour or so I found
myself at Yoxford, then and still known as the Garden of Suffolk.
There lived a Mr. Bird, a Suffolk poet of some note in his day. On
him I called. He gave me a cordial welcome, kept me to dinner, and
set me to play with his children. Alas! Yoxford was to me what
Capua was to Hannibal—I got no further; in fact, my father traced
me to the house, and I had nothing for it but to abandon my London
expedition and return home. I don’t think I was very sorry that my
heroic enterprise had thus miscarried. What annoyed me most was
that I was sent home in an open cart, and as we got into the street
all the women came to their doors to see Master James brought
back. I did not like being thus paraded as a show. I found my way
to the little attic in which I slept, not quite so much of a hero as I
had felt myself in the early morn.
It was a stirring time. The nation was being stirred, as it was never
before or since, with the struggle for Reform. The excitement
reached us in our out-of-the-way village. We were all Whigs, all
bursting with hope. Yet some of the respectable people who feared
Sir Thomas Gooch were rather alarmed by my father’s determination
to vote against him—the sitting Member—and to support the Liberal
candidate. People do not read Parliamentary debates now. They did
then, and not a line was skipped. I was a Radical. An old grocer in
the village had lent me Hone’s “House that Jack Built,” and similar
pamphlets, all illustrated by Cruikshank. My eyes were opened, and
I had but a poor opinion of royalty and the Tory Ministers and the
place men and parasites and other creeping vermin that infest
courts. It is impossible to believe anything more rotten than that
glorious Constitution which the Tories told us was the palladium of
our liberties, the glory of our country, and the envy of surrounding
nations. The Ministry for the time being existed by bribery and
corruption. The M.P. bought his seat and sold his vote; the free and
independent electors did the same. The boroughs were almost
entirely rotten and for sale in consequence of the complicated state
of voting in them, and especially in those incorporated by charter. In
one borough the right was acquired by birth, in another by
servitude, in another by purchase, in a fourth by gift, in a fifth by
marriage. In some these rights were exercised by residents, in
others by non-residents; in one place by the mayor or bailiff and
twelve aldermen only, as at Buckingham, Malmesbury, &c.; in
another by eight aldermen or ten or twelve burgesses, as at Bath,
Andover, Tiverton, Banbury, &c.; in another by a small number of
burgesses—three or four or five, as at Rye, Winchelsea, Romney,
&c. As to what was called long ago tenure in boroughs there was no
end to its absurdity. At Midhurst the right was in the possession of a
hundred stones erected in an open field; at Old Sarum it was in the
remaining part of the possession of a demolished castle; at
Westbury in a long wall. In many other places it was in the
possession of half-a-score or a dozen old thatched cottages, the
conveyances to which were made on the morning of election to a
few trusty friends or dependents, who held a farcical election, and
then returned them to the proprietor as soon as the business was
finished. In the little borough of Aldeburgh, where Crabbe was born,
the number of electors was eighty, all the property of a private
individual; at Dunwich, a little further on the coast, the number of
voters was twelve; at Bury St. Edmunds the number of voters was
thirty-seven; another little insignificant village on the same coast was
Orford, where the right of election was in a corporation of twenty
individuals, composed of the family and dependents of the Marquis
of Hertford. No wonder the popular fury swept away the rotten
boroughs, and no wonder that the long struggle for reform ended in
the triumph, not so much of the people, as the middle-class.
 CHAPTER III.
Village Life.

In recalling old times let me begin with the weather, a matter of

supreme importance in country life—the first thing of which an
Englishman speaks, the last thing he thinks of as he retires to rest.
When I was a boy we had undoubtedly finer weather than we have
now. There was more sunshine and less rain. In spring the air was
balmy, and the flowers fair to look on. When summer came what
joy there was in the hayfield, and how sweet the smell of the new-
mown hay! As autumn advanced how pleasant it was to watch the
fruit ripening, and the cornfields waving, far as the eye could reach,
with the golden grain! People always seemed gay and happy then—
the rosy-cheeked squire, the stout old farmer with his knee-breeches
and blue coat with brass buttons, and Hodge in his smock-frock,
white as the driven snow, on Sunday, when he went now to his
parish church, or more generally to the meeting-house, where he
heard sermons that suited him better, and where the musical part of
the service, by means of flute and bass violin and clarionet, was ever
a gratification and delight. And even winter had its charms in the
shape of sliding and skating under a clear blue sky—all the trees and
hedges everywhere decked out with diamonds, ever sparkling in the
rays of an unclouded sun. We were all glad when the snow came
and covered the earth with a robe of white. We were glad when it
went away, and the birds began to build their nests, and the
plougher went forth to turn up the soil, which had a fragrant savour
after the wet and snow of winter, and the sower went forth to sow,
while the rooks cawed in the morning air as they followed like an
army in search of worms and whatever else they could feed on, and
the graceful swallow, under the eaves of the old thatched cottage,
built her clay nest, and lined it carefully for the reception of the little
ones that were to come. They were always welcome, for in the
opinion of the villagers they brought good luck. Abroad in the
meadows there were the white woolly lambs, always at their
gambols, and leaping all over the meadows.
It was a great happiness to be born in a village. Our village was
rather a pretty one. Afar off we heard the murmurs and smelt the
salt air of the distant sea, and that was something. There were no
beerhouses then, and, alas! few attractions to keep raw village lads
under good influence. My father, as I have said, was a Dissenting
minister, painful, godly and laborious, ever seeking the spiritual
welfare of his people, and relieving as far as possible their temporal
wants. I had to accompany him in his pastoral visits, sometimes an
irksome task, as the poor were numerous and garrulous, and made
the most on such occasions of the infirmities of their lot. Some of
the old ones were so worn and withered that their weird faces often
haunted me by night and terrified me in my dreams.
Another thing that gave me trouble was the fact of being a
Dissenter. It seemed to me a badge of inferiority, as the ignorant
farmers and tradesmen around made Nonconformity the subject of
deprecating remarks. “Dissenters were sly,” said the son of the
village shopkeeper, the only boy of my age in the village, whose
father was the most servile of men himself to the parochial
dignitaries, and I felt that, as a Dissenter, I was under a cloud. It
was the fashion to call us “Pograms,” and the word—no one knew
what it meant—had rather an unpleasant sound to my youthful
ears. This I knew, that most of the leading men of the place went to
church when they went anywhere, and not to our meeting-house,
where, however, we had good congregations. Many of our people
were farmers who came from a distance for the afternoon service,
and at whose homes when the time came I had many a happy day
going out ferreting in the winter and in the autumn riding on the
fore-horse. As the harvest was being gathered in, how proud was I
to ride that fore-horse, though I lost a good deal of leather in
consequence, and how welcome the night’s rest after tumbling
about in the waggon in the harvest field. Happily did the morning of
my life pass away amidst rural scenes and sights. It is a great
privilege to be born in the country. Childhood in the city loses much
of its zest. Yet I had my dark moments. I had often to walk
through a small wood, where, according to the village boys, flying
serpents were to be seen, and in the dark nights I often listened
with fear and trembling to the talk of the villagers of wretched
miscreants who were to be met with at such times with pitch-plaster,
by means of which they took away many a boy’s life for the sake of
selling his dead body to the doctor for the purposes of dissection.
But the winter night had its consolations nevertheless. We had the
stories of English history by Maria Hack and other light literature to
read. We had dissecting maps to put together, and thus acquire a
knowledge of geography. And there was a wonderful game invented
by a French abbé, which was played in connection with a teetotum
and a map of England and Wales, the benefits of which even at this
distance of time I gratefully record. It is true cards were looked
upon as sinful, but we had chess and draughts. Later on we had
The Penny Magazine, and Chambers’s Journal, and The Edinburgh
Review, which had to me all the fascination of a novel. We had also
The Evangelical Magazine and The Youth’s Companion, a magazine
which, I believe, has long ceased to exist, and the volumes with
illustrations of the Society for Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge, and we had the book club meetings, when it was the
fashion for the members to take tea at each other’s homes, and
propose books, and once a year meet to sell the old ones by
auction. My father shone on such occasions. He was a good talker,
as times went—conversation not being much of a gift among the
members of the club, save when the ladies cheered us with their
presence. As a Scotchman he had a good share of the dry humour
of his nation. But chiefly did he shine when the brethren met.
Foremost of the party were Sloper of Beccles, who had talked on
things spiritual with Mrs. Siddons, Crisp of Lowestoft, Blaikie of
Bungay, Longley of Southwold, and others, who discussed theology
and metaphysics all the evening, till their heads were as cloudy as
the tobacco-impregnated room in which they sat. At all these
gatherings Alexander Creak of Yarmouth was a principal figure; a
fine, tall, stately man, minister of a congregation supposed to be of
a very superior class. One of his sons, I believe, still lives in
Norfolk. As to the rest they have left only their memories, and those
are growing dimmer and fainter every year.
At that time amongst the brethren who occasionally dawned upon
our benighted village were Mayhew of Walpole, good old Mr.
Dennant of Halesworth (of whom I chiefly remember that he was a
bit of a poet, and that he was the author of a couplet which
delighted me as a boy—and delights me still—“Awhile ago when I
was nought, and neither body, soul nor thought”), and Mr. Ward of
Stowmarket, who was supposed to be a very learned man indeed,
and Mr. Hickman of Denton, whose library bespoke an erudition rare
in those times. Most of them had sons. Few of them, however,
became distinguished in after life; few of them, indeed, followed
their fathers’ steps as ministers. One of the Creaks did, and became
a tutor, I think, at Spring Hill College, Birmingham; but the fact is
few of them were trained for contest and success in the world. As
regards myself, I own I was led to think a great deal more of the
next world than of this. We had too much religion. God made man
to rule the world and conquer it, to fight a temporal as well as
spiritual battle, to be diligent in business, whilst at the same time
fervent in spirit, serving the Lord. What I chiefly remember was that
I was to try and be good, though at the same time it was awfully
impressed upon me that of myself I could think no good thought nor
do one good thing; that I was born utterly depraved, and that if I
were ever saved—a fact I rather doubted—it was because my
salvation had been decreed in the councils of heaven before the
world was. Naturally my religion was of fear rather than of love. It
seems to me that lads thus trained, as far as my experience goes,
never did turn out well, unless they were namby-pamby creatures,
milksops, in fact, rather than men. I have lived to see a great
change for the better in this respect, and a corresponding
improvement of the young man of the day. It may be that he is less
sentimental; but his religion, when he has any, is of a manlier type.
I never saw a copy of Shakespeare till I was a young man. As a
child, my memory had been exercised in learning passages from
Milton, the hardest chapters in the Old or New Testament, and the
Assembly Catechism. If that Assembly Catechism had never been
written I should have been happier as a child, and wiser and more
useful as a man. I have led an erratic life; I have wandered far from
the fold. At one time I looked on myself as an outcast. With the Old
Psalmist—with brave Oliver Cromwell—with generations of tried
souls, I had to sing, as Scotch Presbyterians, I believe, in Northern
kirks still sing:—

Woe’s me that I in Meshec am

A sojourner so long,
Or that I in the tents do dwell
To Kedar that belong.

Yet nothing was simpler or more beautiful than the lives of those old
Noncons.; I may say so from a wide experience. They were godly
men, a striking contrast to the hunting, drinking, swearing parsons
of the surrounding district. Hence their power in the pulpit, their
success in the ministry. But they failed to understand childhood and
youth; childhood, with its delight in things that are seen and
temporal, and youth with its passionate longing to burst its
conventional barriers, and to revel in the world which looks so fair,
and of which it has heard such evil. Ah, these children of many
prayers; how few of them came to be pious; how many of them fell,
some, alas, to rise no more. One reason was that if you did not see
your way to become a church member and a professor of religion
you were cut off, or felt inwardly that you were cut off, which is
much the same thing, and had to associate with men of loose lives
and looser thoughts. There was no via media; you were either a
saint or a sinner, of the church or the world. It is not so now, when
even every Young Men’s Christian Association has its gymnasium,
and the young man’s passions are soothed by temperance and
exercise and not inflated by drink. There may not be so much of
early piety as there was—though of that I am not sure. There is a
great deal more of religion than there was, not so much of
sensational enjoyment or of doctrinal discussion perhaps, but more
practical religion in all the various walks of life.
We had to teach in the Sunday-school. My services were early
utilised in that direction, for the village was badly supplied with the
stuff of which teachers were made, and as the parson’s son I was
supposed to have an ex-officio qualification for the task. I fear I was
but a poor hand in the work of teaching the young idea how to
shoot, especially when that idea was developed in the bodies of
great hulking fellows, my seniors in years and superiors in size.
However, one of them did turn out well. Many years after he
recognised me in the Gray’s Inn Road, London, where he had made
money as a builder, and where, though he never learned to read—
perhaps that was my fault—he figured for a time largely on the walls
as the Protestant churchwarden. “You know, sir,” he said to me,
“how poor we all were at W—” (the father, I fear, was a drunkard),
“Well, I came to London, resolving to be either a man or a mouse”;
and here he was, as respectable-looking a man as any you could
see, thus proving what I hold to be the truth, that in this land of
ours, however deep in the mire a man may be, he may rise, if he
has the requisite power of work and endurance and self-denial. I
fear he did not much profit by our Sunday-school, though he told me
he had put it down in his will for a small legacy. Our chief man was
a shoemaker named Roberts, who sat with the boys under the pulpit
in face of all the people; the girls, with the modesty of the sex,
retiring to the back seats of the gallery. In his hand he bore a long
wand, and woe to the unfortunate lad who fell asleep while the
sermon was going on, or endeavoured to relieve the tedium of it by
eating apples, sucking sweets, or revealing to his fellows the
miscellaneous treasures of his pocket in the shape of marbles or
string or knife. On such an offender down came the avenging
stroke, swift as lightning and almost as sharp. As to general
education, there was no attempt to give it. Later on, the Dissenters
raised enough money to build a day-school, and then the
Churchmen were stirred up to do the same. There was a school,
kept by an irritable, red-faced old party in knee-breeches, who had
failed in business, where I and most of the farmers’ sons of the
village went; but I can’t say that any of us made much progress, and
I did better when I was taken back to the home and educated, my
father hearing my Latin and Greek as he smoked his pipe, while my
mother—a very superior woman, with a great taste for literature and
art—acted as teacher, while she was at work painting, after the
duties of housekeeping were over. I ought to have been a better
boy. But there were two great drawbacks—one, the absence of all
emulation, which too often means the loss of all worldly success; the
other, the painful and useless effort to be good.