Cardinal Newman and Edward FitzGerald at the opposite poles, as it were, of religious impressions, agree in a devotion to Crabbe’s poetry. Cardinal Newman speaks of Tales of the Hall as “a poem whether in conception or in execution one of the most touching in our language,” and in a footnote to his Idea of a University he tells us that he had read the poem thirty years earlier with extreme delight, “and have never lost my
love of it,” and he goes on to plead that it is an absolute classic.
Not to have read Crabbe, therefore, is not to know one of the most individual in the glorious muster-roll of English poets, and Crabbe was pre-eminently an East Anglian, born and bred in East Anglia, and taking in a peculiar degree the whole character of his environment, as only Shakspere, Cowper and Wordsworth among our great poets, have done.
In conclusion, let me recapitulate that the names of Marryat, Sir Thomas Browne, George Borrow, Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole, Sarah Austin, Fanny Burney, Edward FitzGerald, and George Crabbe are those that I prefer to associate with East Anglian Literature. We are well aware that literature is but an aspect of our many claims on the gratitude of those Englishmen who have not the good fortune to be East Anglians. We have given to the Empire a great scholar in Porson, a great statesman in Sir Robert Walpole, a great lawyer in Sir Edward Coke, great ecclesiastics in Cardinal Wolsey and Archbishop Parker, great artists in Gainsborough, Constable and Crome, and perhaps above all great sailors in Sir Cloudesley
Shovel and the ever memorable Lord Nelson. Personally I admire a certain rebel, Kett the Tanner, as much as any of those I have named.
Of all these East Anglian worthies the praise has often been sung, but let me be pardoned if, on an occasion like this, I have dwelt rather at length on the less familiar association of East Anglia with letters. That I have but touched the fringe of the subject is obvious. What might not be said, for example, concerning Norwich as a literary centre under Bishop Stanley—the Norwich of the Taylors and the Gurneys, possessed of as much real intellectual life as London can boast of to-day. What, again, might not be said of the influence upon writers from afar. Read Kingsley’s Hereward the Wake, Mr. Swinburne’s Midsummer Holiday, Charles Dickens’ description of Yarmouth and Goldsmith’s poetical description in his Deserted Village, where clearly Houghton was intended. [153]
These, and a host of other memories touch the heart of all good East Anglians, but that East Anglians do not forget the living in doing honour to the dead is indicated by this gathering to-night. We are grateful to Dr. Augustus Jessopp, to Mr. Walter Rye, to Mr. Edward Clodd, and to our guest of this evening, Mr. William Dutt, for keeping alive the folk-lore, the literary history, the historical tradition of that portion of the British Isles to which we feel the most profound attachment by ties of residence or of kinship.
VI. DR. JOHNSON’S ANCESTRY
A paper read before the members of the Johnson Club of London at Simpson’s Restaurant in the Strand.
There is, I believe, a definite understanding among our members that we, the Brethren of the Johnson Club, have each and all of us read every line about Dr. Johnson that is in print, to say nothing of his works. It is particularly accepted that the thirteen volumes in which our late brother, Dr. Birkbeck Hill, enshrined his own appreciation of our Great Man, are as familiar to us all as are the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. For my part, with a deep sense of the responsibility that must belong to any one who has rashly undertaken to read a paper before the Club, I admit to having supplemented these thirteen volumes by a reperusal of the little book entitled Johnson Club Papers, by Various Hands, issued in 1899 by Brother Fisher Unwin. I feel as I reread these addresses that there were indeed giants in those days,