and did transfer from field to Court his just rewarde of praise.
Descended of an antient house, with honour ledd his life
only with one daughter blest, and with a vertuous wife.
God gave him here on earth to live twise fortie years and odd,
with life well spent he liveth now for aye with God.
XXIV
“GREAT PAUL”
Loughborough, standing among ecclesiologists for bells, succeeds to Quorndon. The bell-founding firm of John Taylor & Sons, established here in 1840, is the birthplace of many of these instruments of the barbarous practice of bell-ringing that has survived into an otherwise civilised age, and here in 1881 was cast the monster bell of St. Paul’s Cathedral, “Great Paul,” whose hoarse growl—like a bell with bronchitis—is heard daily at one o’clock in the City of London. It is the largest bell in England, weighing 17½ tons, and one of the most useless, being practically little else than the City man’s luncheon bell. “Great Paul,” being too big for the railway bridges, was brought to London by road.
But there are other industries beside bell-founding at Loughborough. The ancient trade of bobbin-net making is still carried on, together with the hosiery and weaving and stocking-knitting that so thoroughly pervade Leicestershire and a good deal of Notts; and there are dye-works and engineering-shops too, a whole basketful of unromantic but useful and mutually dependent trades: the extensive coal-trade of the town ministering to the engineering and other power-using factories, and the big breweries subsisting upon the magnificent thirsts produced by coal-grit and the heat of furnaces. It will be guessed from the foregoing that Lovely Loughborough is not a phrase by which the place can rightly be known. Only the narrow main street, where the old “Bull’s Head” inn still exhibits a gallows sign stretching from side to side overhead, is at all removed from commonplace, and the broad market-place is lined with modern buildings in which many of the great number of Loughborough’s flashily rebuilt inns that call themselves “hotels,” and are really nothing but drinking shops, are situated.
LOUGHBOROUGH