Immortal Memories Part 3

Takes his tasteless food, and when 'tis done, Counts up his meals, now lessen'd by that one,--

a story which Macaulay bluntly charges Robert Montgomery with stealing.

Lord Tennyson, again, at a much later date, admitted that "Crabbe has a world of his own."

Not less impressive surely is the att.i.tude of the two writers as far as the poles asunder in their outlook upon life and its mysteries--Cardinal Newman and Edward FitzGerald. The famous theologian, we learn from the _Letters and Correspondence_ collected by Anne Mozley, writes in 1820 of his "excessive fondness" for _The Tales of the Hall_, and thirty years later in one of his _Discourses_ he says of Crabbe's poems that they are among "the most touching in our language." Still another twenty years, and the aged cardinal reread Crabbe to find that he was more delighted than ever with our poet. That great nineteenth century pagan, on the other hand, that prince of letter-writers and wonderful poet of whom Suffolk has also reason to be proud, Edward FitzGerald, was even more ardent. Praise of Crabbe is scattered freely throughout the many volumes of his correspondence, and he edited, as we all know, a book of Selections, which I want to see reprinted. It contains a preface that, it may be admitted, is not really worthy of FitzGerald, so lacking is it in the force and vigour of his correspondence. But this also was in fact yet another death-bed tribute, for it was, I think, one of the last things FitzGerald wrote. FitzGerald, however, has done more for Crabbe among the moderns than any other man. His keen literary judgment must have brought new converts to that limited brotherhood of the elect, of which this gathering forms no inconsiderable portion.

We have one advantage in speaking about George Crabbe that does not obtain with any other poet of great eminence; that is to say, that his life story has not been hackneyed by repet.i.tion. With almost any other writer there is some standing biography which is widely familiar. The _Life of George Crabbe_, written by his son, although it is one of the very best biographies that I have ever read, is little known. It was quite out of print for years, and it has never been reprinted separately from the poems. It is an admirable biography, and it offers a contradiction of the view occasionally urged that a man's life should not be written by a member of his own family; for George Crabbe the second would seem not only to have been an exceedingly able man, but possessed of a frankness of disposition in criticizing his father which sons are often p.r.o.ne to show in real life, but which, I imagine, they rarely show in print. His book is a model of candid statement, treating of Crabbe's little weaknesses--and who of us has not his little weaknesses--in the most cheery possible manner. It is perhaps a small matter to tell us in one place of his father's want of "taste," his insensibility to the beauty of order in his composition--that had been done by the critics before him; but he even has something to say about the philandering which characterized the old gentleman in the last years of his life, his apparent anxiety to get married again. {106} The only thing that he all but ignores is Crabbe's opium habit--a habit that came to him as a sedative from a painful complaint and inspired, as was the case with Coleridge, his more melodious utterances. Taken altogether the picture is as pleasant as it is capable and exhaustive. We see his early boyhood at Aldeburgh, his schooldays: his first period of unhappiness at Slaughden Quay, his apprentices.h.i.+p near Bury St. Edmunds, where we seem to hear his master's daughters, when he reached the door, exclaim with laughter, "La! Here's our new 'prentice." We follow him a little higher, to the house of the Woodbridge surgeon, then through his prolonged courts.h.i.+p of Sarah Elmy, then to those dreary, uncongenial duties of piling up b.u.t.ter casks on Slaughden Quay. A brief period of starvation in London, and we find him again in a chemist's shop in Aldeburgh. Lastly comes his most important journey to London upon the borrowed sum of 5 pounds, only three of which he carried in hard cash.

His hand to mouth existence in London for some months is among the most interesting things in literature. Chatterton's tragic fate might have been his, but, more fortunate than Chatterton, he had friends at Beccles who helped him, and he was even able to publish a poem, _The Candidate_.

Although this poem contained only thirty-four pages, one is not quite sure but that it helped to ruin its publisher. In any case that publisher went bankrupt soon after.

Crabbe has been reproached for having continually attempted to secure a "patron" at this time, and it has been hinted by Sir Leslie Stephen that he ought to have recognized that the patron was out of date, killed by Dr. Johnson's st.u.r.dy defiance. I do not agree with this view. Dr.

Johnson, in spite of his famous epigram, was always more or less a.s.sisted by the patron, although his personality was strong enough to enable him to turn the tables at the end. When one comes to think of it, Thrale the brewer was a patron of Johnson, so was Strahan the printer. And does he not say in his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield that "Seven years, my lord, have now pa.s.sed since I waited in your outward rooms, or was repulsed from your door," clearly implying that if Chesterfield was not Johnson's patron it was not the great Doctor's fault? In any case the patron must always exist for the poor man of letters in every age. Now, he is frequently a collective personality rather than an individual. He is represented for the author who has tried and failed by the Royal Literary Fund, by such bounty as is awarded by the Society of Authors, or by the Civil List Grant. For the author in embryo he is a.s.sisted above all by the literary log-roller who flourishes so much in our day. If he is not this "collective personality," or one of the others I have named, then he is something much worse--that is, a capitalist publisher. We can none of us who have to earn a living run away from the patronage of capital, and when Sir Leslie Stephen was being paid a salary by the late Mr. George Smith for editing the _Dictionary of National Biography_, and was told, as we remember that he frequently was, that it was not a remunerative venture and that, as Mr. Smith was fond of saying, his publis.h.i.+ng business did not pay for his vineries, Sir Leslie Stephen was experiencing a patronage, if he had known it, not less melancholy than anything Crabbe suffered from Edmund Burke or the Duke of Rutland.

When one meets a writer who desires to walk on high stilts and to talk of the independence of literature, one is ent.i.tled to ask him if it was a greater indignity for Lord Tennyson in his younger days to have received 200 pounds a year from the Civil List than for Crabbe to have received the same sum as the Duke of Rutland's chaplain; in fact, Crabbe earned the money, and Tennyson did not. There are, as I have said, some most wonderful and pathetic touches in the account of Crabbe's attempt to conquer London. There are his letters to his sweetheart, for example, his "dearest Mira," in one of which he says that he is possessed of 6.25_d._ in the world. In another he relates that he has sold his surgical instruments in order to pay his bills. Nevertheless, we find him standing at a bookstall where he sees Dryden's works in three volumes, octavo, for five s.h.i.+llings, and of his few s.h.i.+llings he ventures to offer 3_s._ 6_d._--and carries home the Dryden. What bibliophile but must love such a story as that, even though a day or two afterwards its hero writes, "My last s.h.i.+lling became 8_d._ yesterday." But what a good investment withal. Dryden made him a much better poet. Then comes the famous letter to Burke, and the less known second letter to which I have referred, and Burke's splendid reception of the writer. Nothing, I repeat, in the life of any great man is more beautiful than that. As Crabbe's son finely says: "He went in Burke's room a poor young adventurer, spurned by the opulent and rejected by the publishers, his last s.h.i.+lling gone, and his last hope with it. He came out virtually secure of almost all the good fortune that by successive stages afterwards fell to his lot." The success that comes to most men is built up on such chances, on the kind help of some one or other individual.

Finally there came--for I am hastily recapitulating Crabbe's story--the years of prosperity, curacies, rectories, the praise of great contemporaries, but nothing surely more edifying than the burning of piles of ma.n.u.scripts so extensive that no fireplace would hold them. The son's account of his a.s.sisting at these conflagrations is not the least interesting part of his biography, the merits of which I desire to emphasize.

People who make jokes about that most succulent edible, the crab, when the poet Crabbe is mentioned in their presence--and who can resist an obvious pun--are not really far astray. There can be little doubt but that a remote ancestor of George Crabbe took his name from the "sh.e.l.lfish," as we all persist, in spite of the naturalist, in calling it; and the poet did not hesitate to attribute it to the vanity of an ancestor that his name had had two letters added. Nor when we hear of Cromer crabs, or crabs from some other part of Norfolk as distinct from what I am sure is equally palatable, the crustacean as it may be found in Aldeburgh, are we remote from the story of our poet's life. For there cannot be a doubt but that Norfolk shares with Suffolk the glory of his origin. His family, it is clear, came first from Norfolk. The Crabbes of Norfolk were farmers, the Crabbes of Suffolk always favoured the seacoast, and all the glory that surrounds the name of the poet to whom we do honour to-day is reflected in the town in which he was born and bred. Aldeburgh is Crabbe's own town, and it is an interesting fact that no other poet can be identified with one particular spot in the way in which Crabbe can be identified with this beautiful watering-place in which we are now a.s.sembled. Shakspere was more of a Londoner than a Stratfordian; nearly all his best work was written in London, and many of the most receptive years of his life were spent in that city. Milton's honoured name is identified with many places, apart from London, the city of his birth. Sh.e.l.ley, Byron and Keats were essentially cosmopolitans in their writings as in their lives. Wordsworth was closely identified with Grasmere, although born in a neighbouring county; but he went to many and varied scenes, and to more than one country, for some of his most inspired verses. Then Cowper, the poet of whom one most often thinks when one is recalling the achievement of Crabbe, is a poet of some half- dozen places other than Olney, and perhaps his best verses were written at Weston-Underwood. Now George Crabbe in the years of his success was identified with many places other than Aldeburgh: with Belvoir Castle, with Muston, and with Trowbridge, where he died, and some of his admirers have even identified him with Bath. When all this is allowed, it is upon Aldeburgh that the whole of his writings turned, the place where he was born, where he spent his boyhood, and the earlier years of a perhaps too sordid manhood, whither he returned twice, as a chemist's a.s.sistant and as curate. It is the place that primarily inspired all his verses.

Aldeburgh stands out vividly before us in each succeeding poem--in _The Village_, _The Borough_, _The Parish Register_, _The Tales_, and even in those _Tales of the Hall_, composed in later life in faraway Trowbridge.

Crabbe's vivid observations indeed come home to every one who has studied his works when they have visited not only Aldeburgh but its vicinity.

Every reach of the river Ald recalls some striking line by him: the scenery in _The Lover's Journey_ we know is a description of the road between Aldeburgh and Beccles, and all who have sailed along the river to Orford have recognized that no stream has been so perfectly portrayed by a poet's pen. Here in his writings you may have a suggestion of Muston, here of Allington, and here again of Trowbridge; but in the main it is the Suffolk scenery that most of us here know so well that was ever in his mind.

When an attempt was once made to stir up the Great Eastern Railway to identify this district with the name of Crabbe as the English Lakes were identified with the name of Wordsworth, and the Scots Lakes with that of Sir Walter Scott, a high official of the railway made the statement that up to that moment he had never even heard the name of Crabbe. Well, all that is going to be changed. I do not at all approve of the phrase beloved of certain book-makers and of railway companies that implies that any county or district is the monopoly of one man, be he ever so great a writer. Yet I venture to say that within the next ten years the "Crabbe Country" will sound as familiar to the officials of the Great Eastern as the "Wordsworth Country" does to those of the Midland or the North Western. It is true that once in the bitterness of his heart the poet referred to Aldeburgh as "a little venal borough in Suffolk" and that he more than once alluded to his unkind reception upon his reappearance as a curate, when he had previously failed at other callings. "In my own village they think nothing of me," he once said. But who does not know how the heart turns with the years to the places a.s.sociated with childhood and youth, and Crabbe was a remarkable exemplification of this.

A well-known literary journal stated only last week that "Crabbe's connexion with Aldeburgh was not very protracted." So far from this being true it would be no exaggeration to say that it extended over the whole of his seventy-eight years of life. It included the first five-and- twenty years almost entirely. It included also the brief curacy, the prolonged residence at Parham and Glenham, frequent visits for holidays in after years, and who but a lover of his native place would have done as his son pictures him doing when at Stathern--riding alone to the coast of Lincolns.h.i.+re, sixty miles from where he was living, only to dip in the waves that also washed the beach of Aldeburgh and returned immediately to his home. "There is no sea like the Aldeburgh sea," said Edward FitzGerald, and we may be sure that was Crabbe's opinion also, for revisiting it in later life he wrote:--

There once again, my native place I come Thee to salute, my earliest, latest home.

One picture in Crabbe's life stands out vividly to us all--the long years of devotion given by him to Sarah Elmy, and the reciprocal devotion of the very capable woman who finally became his wife. Crabbe's courts.h.i.+p and marriage affords a pleasant contrast to the usual unhappy relations of poets with their wives. Shakspere, Milton, Dryden, Byron, Sh.e.l.ley, and many another poet was less happy in this respect, and I am not sure how far the belief in Crabbe's powers as a poet has been affected by the fact that he lived on the whole a happy, humdrum married life. The public has so long been accustomed to expect a different state of things.

I have given thus much time to Crabbe's life story because it interests me, and I do not believe that it is possible nowadays to kindle a very profound interest in any writer without a definite presentation of his personality. Apart from his biography--his three biographies by George Crabbe the second, Mr. T. E. Kebbel, and Canon Ainger, there are the seven volumes of his works. Now I do not imagine that any great accession will be made to the ranks of Crabbe's admirers by asking people to take down these seven volumes and read them right through--a thing I have myself done twice, and many here also I doubt not. Rather would I plead for a reprint of Edmund FitzGerald's Selections, or failing that I would ask you to look at the volume of Selections made by Mr. Bernard Holland, or that other admirable selection by the Rev. Anthony Deane. "I must think my old Crabbe will come up again, though never to be popular,"

wrote FitzGerald to Archbishop Trench. Well, perhaps the "large still books" of the older writers are never destined to be popular again, but they will always maintain with genuine book lovers their place in English Literature, and if the adequate praise they have received from many good judges is well kept to the front there will be constant accessions to the ranks, and readers will want the whole of Crabbe's works in which to dig for themselves. Crabbe's place in English Literature needed not such a gathering as this to make it secure, but we want celebrations of our literary heroes to keep alive enthusiasm, and to encourage the faint-hearted.

In the glorious tradition of English Literature, then, Crabbe comes after Cowper and before Wordsworth. There is a lineal descent as clear and well-defined as any set forth in the peerages of "Burke" or "Debrett." We read in vain if we do not fully grasp the continuity of creative work.

Cowper was born in 1731, Crabbe in 1754, and Cowper was called to the Bar in the year that Crabbe was born. In spite of this disparity of years they started upon their literary careers almost at the same time. _The Village_ was published in 1783, and _The Task_ in 1785, yet Cowper is in every sense the elder poet, inheriting more closely the traditions of Pope and Dryden, coming less near to humanity than Crabbe, and being more emphatically a child of the eighteenth century in its artificial aspects.

It is impossible to indict a whole century with all its varied accomplishments, and the century that produced Swift and Cowper and Crabbe had no lack of the finer instincts of brotherhood. Yet the century was essentially a cruel one. Take as an example the att.i.tude of naturally kindly men to the hanging of Dr. Dodd for forgery. Even Samuel Johnson, who did what he could for Dodd, did not find, as he should have done, his whole soul revolted by such a punishment for a crime against property. Cowper has immense claim upon our regard. He is one of the truest of poets, and one of the most interesting figures in all English literature, although no small share of his one-time popularity was due to his identification with Evangelicalism in religion. Cowper had humour and other qualities which enabled him to make the universal appeal to all hearts which is the test of the greatest literature--the appeal of "John Gilpin," the "Lines" to his Mother's Portrait, and his verses on "The loss of the _Royal George_." Crabbe made no such appeal, and he has not the advent.i.tious a.s.sistance that a.s.sociation with a religious sect affords. Hence the popularity he once enjoyed was more entirely on his merits than was that of Cowper. He was the first of the eighteenth century poets who was able to _see things as they really are_. Therein lies his strength. Were they poets at all--those earlier eighteenth century writers? It sounds like rank blasphemy to question it, but what is poetry? Surely it is the expression artistically in rhythmic form--or even without it--of the sincerest emotions concerning nature and life.

The greatest poet is not the one who is most sincere--a very bad poet can be that--but the poet who expresses that sincerity with the most perfect art. From this point of view the poets before Cowper and Crabbe, Pope, Goldsmith, Johnson and others were scarcely poets at all. Masters of language every one of them, able to command a fine rhetoric, but not poets. Gray in two or three pieces was a poet, but for Johnson that claim can scarcely be made. Cowper was the first to emanc.i.p.ate himself from the conventionality of his age, and Crabbe emanc.i.p.ated himself still further. He had boundless sincerity, and he is really a very great poet even if he has not the perfection of art of some later poets. Many know Crabbe only by the parody of his manner in _Rejected Addresses_:

John Richard William Alexander Dwyer Was footman to Justinian Stubbs Esquire; But when John Dwyer listed in the blues, Emanuel Jennings polished Stubbs's shoes.

and it must be admitted that there are plenty of lines like these in Crabbe, as for example:--

Grave Jonas Kindred, Sybil Kindred's sire Was six feet high, and looked six inches higher.

or this:--

The church he view'd as liberal minds will view And there he fixed his principles and pew.

Ba.n.a.lities of this kind are scattered through his pages as they are scattered through those of Wordsworth. Nevertheless he was a great poet, bringing us before Wordsworth out of the ruck of artificiality and insincerity. Does any one suppose that Pope in his _Essay on Man_, that Johnson in his _London_ or that Goldsmith in his _Deserted Village_ had any idea other than the production of splendid phrases. Each and all of them were brilliant men of letters. Crabbe was not a brilliant man of letters, but he was a fine and a genuine poet. You will look in vain in his truest work for the lyrical and musical gift that we a.s.sociate with poets who came after:--Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Tennyson--poets who made Crabbe's work quite distasteful for some three generations. Crabbe it has been claimed had that gift also, to be found in "Sir Eustace Grey" and other verses written under the inspiration of opium, as much of Coleridge's best work was written--but it is not in these that his admirers will seek to emphasize his achievement--it is in his work which treats of

The simple annals of my parish poor.

_The Village_, _The Parish Register_, _The Borough_, and many of the _Tales_ bear witness to a clear vision of life as it is lived by the majority of people born into this world. I have seen criticism of Crabbe which calls him the poet who took the middle cla.s.ses for his subjects, criticism which compared him with George Eliot. All this is quite beside the mark. Crabbe is pre-eminently the poet of the poor, with a lesson for to-day as much as for a century ago. Villages are not now what they were then, we are told. But I fully believe that there are all the conditions of life to-day hidden beneath the surface as Crabbe's close observations pictured them. "The altered position of the poor," says Mr.

Courthope, "has fortunately deprived his poems of much of the reality they once possessed." I do not believe it. The closely packed towns, the herding together of families, the squalor are still to be found in our midst. Crabbe has his message for our time as well as for his own.

How he tore the veil from the conventional language of his day, the picture of the ideal village where the happy peasantry pa.s.sed through life so joyously. Contrast such pictures with his sad declaration--

I've seldom known, though I have often read Of happy peasants on their dying-bed.

Solution Crabbe offers none for the tragedy of poverty. He was no politician. He signed the nomination paper for John Wilson Croker the Tory in his native Aldeburgh, and he supported a Whig at the same election at Trowbridge. His politics were summed up in backing his friends of both parties. But he did see, as politicians are only beginning to see to-day, that the ultimate solution was a social one and not a mere question of political parties. Generations have pa.s.sed away since he lived, and men are still shouting themselves hoa.r.s.e to prove that in this s.h.i.+bboleth or in that may be found the salvation of the country, yet we have still our thousands on the verge of starvation, we have still the very poor in our midst, and the problem seems as far from solution as ever. But it would be all the better for the State if we could keep the questions raised by Crabbe in his wonderful pictures more continually in view,--lacking in taste as they may sometimes seem to weak stomachs, coa.r.s.e, unvarnished narratives though they be of a life which is really almost entirely sordid.

Then let us turn to Crabbe's gallery of pictures. Phoebe Dawson, and the equally pathetic Ruth, Blaney and Clelia, Peter Grimes and many another.

They are as clearly defined a set of entirely human beings as any Master has given us. It is not a.s.suredly in George Eliot, as Canon Ainger suggests, that I find an affinity to Crabbe among the moderns, but in two much greater writers of quite different texture, Balzac and d.i.c.kens. Had Crabbe not been bounded and restrained by the conventions of his cloth, he might have become one of the most popular story-tellers in our literature--the English Balzac. At a hundred points Charles d.i.c.kens is an entire contrast to Crabbe--in his buoyant humour, his gaiety of heart, in the glamour that he throws over the life of the poor, a glamour that was more present in the early Victorian era than in our own, but Crabbe is with Balzac and with d.i.c.kens in that he presents as no other moderns have done living pictures of suffering human lives.

There is yet one other literary force, powerful in our day, that has been largely influenced by Crabbe. Those who love the novels of Mr. Thomas Hardy, whom we rejoice to see with us at this Celebration,--his _Woodlanders_, _The Return of the Native_, _Far from the Madding Crowd_, and many another book that touches the very heart of things in nature and human life, will rejoice to hear that this great writer has admitted George Crabbe to be the most potent influence that has affected his work.

I have heard him declare many times how much he was inspired by Crabbe, whereas the later French realists had no influence upon him whatever.

"Crabbe was our first great English realist" Mr. Hardy would tell you if only we could persuade him to speak from this platform, as unfortunately he will not.

Lastly let us take Crabbe as a great story-teller. He has many more ideas than most of the novelists. That is why we do well to recall the hint of the writer who said that when a new work came out we should take down an old one from our shelves. Instead of the "un-idead" novels, that come out by the dozen and are so popular. I wish we could agree to read Crabbe's novels in verse. Unhappily their form is against them in the present age. But it would not be at all a misfortune if we could make Crabbe's _Tales_ once more the vogue. They are good stories, absorbingly interesting. They leave a very vivid impression on the mind. Once read they are unforgettable.

I have seen it stated that these stories are old-fas.h.i.+oned both in manner and in substance. In manner they may be, but in substance I maintain they are intensely modern, alive with the spirit of our time. Any latter- day novelist might envy Crabbe his power of developing a story. It is this essential modernity that is to make Crabbe's place in English literature secure for generations yet to come.

Finally, Crabbe's place in English literature is as the bridge between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. With him begins that "enthusiasm of humanity" which the eighteenth century so imperfectly understood.

Byron and Wordsworth, disliking each other cordially, did well to praise him, for he was their forerunner. A master of pathos, you may find in his work incentive to tears and laughter, although sometimes the humour, as in _The Learned Boy_, is sadly unconscious.

But I must bring these rambling remarks to a close, and in doing so I must once again quote that other Suffolk worthy to whom many of us are very much attached, I mean Edward FitzGerald. When Sir Leslie Stephen wrote what is to my mind a singularly infelicitous essay on Crabbe in the _Cornhill_, he quoted the remark, which seemed to be new to FitzGerald, as to Crabbe being a "pope in worsted stockings"--a remark made by Horace Smith of _Rejected Addresses_, although I have seen it ascribed to Byron and others. "Pope in worsted stockings," exclaimed FitzGerald, "why I could cite whole paragraphs of as fine a texture as Moliere; 'incapable of epigram,' the jackanapes says--why, I could find fifty of the very best epigrams in five minutes," and later, in another letter he writes--

I am positively looking over my everlasting Crabbe again; he naturally comes in about the fall of the year.

Here surely is an appropriate quotation, a little prophetic perhaps, for our gathering--the "everlasting Crabbe." We cannot all love Crabbe as much as FitzGerald loved him, but this gathering will not be vain if after this we handle his volumes more lovingly, read his poems more sympathetically, and continue with more zeal than ever before to be proud of the man who, born in Aldeburgh a century and a half ago, is closely identified with this county of Suffolk as I believe no other great writer is closely identified with any county in England. An Aldeburgh man--a Suffolk man he was--yet even more in the future than in the past, he is destined to gain the whole world for his parish. He is the everlasting Crabbe!

V. THE LITERARY a.s.sOCIATIONS OF EAST ANGLIA

An address to the East Anglian Society on the occasion of a dinner to Mr.

William Dutt, author of "Highways and Byways in East Anglia." March 25, 1901.

I appreciate the privilege of being allowed to speak this evening for a few minutes upon the literary a.s.sociations of East Anglia, of being permitted to ask you, while doing honour to a well-known East Anglian writer of to-day, to cast a glance back upon the literature of the past so far as it affects that portion of the British Empire with which we nearly all of us here are proud to be a.s.sociated. There is necessarily some difference of opinion as to what const.i.tutes East Anglia. I find that our guest of to-night tells us that it is "Norfolk, Suffolk and portions of Ess.e.x, Cambridges.h.i.+re and Lincolns.h.i.+re." Dr. Knapp, the biographer of Borrow, says that it is Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridges.h.i.+re; personally I am content with that cla.s.sification, because, although I was born in London, I claim, apart from schoolboy days at Downham Market, a pretty lengthy ancestry from Norwich on one side--which is indisputably East Anglia--and from Welney, near Wisbeach, on another side, and Welney and Wisbeach are, I affirm, just as much East Anglia as Norwich and Ipswich. With reference to those other counties and portions of counties, I think that the inhabitants must be allowed to decide for themselves. I imagine that they will give every possible stretch to the imagination in order to allow themselves the honour of being incorporated in East Anglia, a name that one never p.r.o.nounces without recalling that fine old-world compliment of St. Augustine of Canterbury to our ancestors, that they ought to be called not "Angles"

but "Angels."

Every one in particular who loves books must be proud to partake of our great literary tradition. If it is difficult to decide precisely what East Anglia is, it is perhaps equally difficult to speak for a few minutes on so colossal a theme as the literature of East Anglia. It would be easy to recapitulate what every biographical dictionary will provide, a long list of famous names a.s.sociated with our counties; to remind you that we have produced two poet-laureates--John Skelton, of Diss, the author of _Colyn Cloute_, and Thomas Shadwell, of Broomhill, the playwright--the latter perhaps not entirely a subject for pride; two very rough and ready political philosophers, Thomas Paine, born at Thetford, and William G.o.dwin, born at Wisbeach; a very popular novelist in Bulwer Lytton, and a very popular theologian in Dr. Samuel Clarke; as also the famous brother and sister whose works appealed to totally different minds, James and Harriet Martineau. Then there was that pathetic creature and indifferent poet, Robert Bloomfield, whose _Farmer's Boy_ once appeared in the luxurious glories of an expensive quarto. Finally, one recalls that two of the most popular women writers of an earlier generation, Clara Reeve, the novelist, and Agnes Strickland, the historian, were Suffolk women.

But I am not concerned to give you a recapitulation of all the East Anglian writers, whose names, as I have said, can be found in any biographical dictionary, and the quality of whose work would rather suggest that East Anglia, from a literary point of view, is a land of extinct volcanoes. I am naturally rather anxious to make use of the golden opportunity that has been afforded me to emphasize my own literary sympathies, and to say in what I think lies the glory of East Anglia, at least so far as the creation of books is concerned. Here I make an interesting claim for East Anglia, that it has given us in Captain Marryat perhaps the very greatest prose writer of the nineteenth century who has been a delight to youth, and two of the very greatest prose writers of all times for the inspiration of middle-age, Sir Thomas Browne and George Borrow. It has given us in Sarah Austin an example of a learned woman who was also a fascinating woman; it has given us again the most remarkable letter-writers in the English language--Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole and Edward FitzGerald. To these there were only three serious rivals as letter-writers--William Cowper, Thomas Grey and Charles Lamb; and the first found a final home and a last resting-place in our midst. It has given us that remarkable novelist and entertaining diarist, f.a.n.n.y Burney. Finally, it has given us in that same William Cowper--who rests in East Dereham Church, and for whom we claim on that and for other reasons some share and partic.i.p.ation in his genius--a great and much loved poet. It has given us indeed in William Cowper and George Crabbe the two most natural and the two most human poets in the English literature of two centuries, only excepting the favourite poet of Scotland--Robert Burns. It is to these of all writers that I would pin my faith in talking of East Anglia and its literature; it is their names that I would have you keep in your mind when you call up memories of the literature which has most inspired our East Anglian life.

In connexion with many writers a point of importance will occur to us.

Only occasionally has a great English author a special claim on one particular portion of England. He has not been the lesser or the greater for that, it has merely been an accident of his birth and of his career.

The greatest of all writers, the one of whom all Englishmen are naturally the most proud, Shakspere, has, it is true, an abundant a.s.sociation with Warwicks.h.i.+re, but Shakspere stands almost alone in this, as in many things. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron and Keats were born in London; they travelled widely, they lived in many different counties or countries, and cannot be said to have adorned any distinctively local tradition. Sh.e.l.ley was born in Suss.e.x, but a hundred cities, including Rome, where his ashes rest, may claim some partic.i.p.ation in his fine spirit. Wordsworth, on the other hand, who was born in c.u.mberland, certainly obtained the greater part of his inspiration from the neighbouring county of Westmorland, where his life was pa.s.sed. But when we come to East Anglia we are face to face with a body of writers who belong to the very soil, upon whom the particular character of the landscape has had a permanent effect, who are not only very great Englishmen and Englishwomen, but are great East Anglians as well.