and she, being very genteel, could not brook the idea of keeping a lodger. So one day—I have heard FitzGerald tell the story—came a timid rap at the door of his sitting-room, a deep “Now, Berry, be firm,” and a mild “Yes, my dear;” and Berry appeared on the threshold. Hesitatingly he explained that “Mrs Berry, you know, sir—really extremely sorry—but not been used, sir,” &c., &c. Then from the rear, a deep “And you’ve got to tell him about Old Gooseberry, Berry,” a deprecatory “Certainly, my love;” and poor Berry stammered forth, “And I am told, sir, that you said—you said—I had long been old Berry, but now—now you should call me Old Gooseberry.” So FitzGerald had to make up his mind at last to migrate to his own house, Little Grange, which he had bought more than nine years before, and enlarged and made a very pretty place of. “I shall never live in it, but I shall die there,” he once said to a friend. Both predictions were falsified, for he did live there nearly ten years, and his death took place at Merton, in Norfolk.
I wandered through the grounds of Little Grange, hardly changed except that there were now no doves. There was the “Quarterdeck” walk, and there was the Summerhouse, to which Charles Keene used to retire with his bagpipes. I can hear FitzGerald saying to my father,
“Keene has a theory that we open our mouths too much; but whether he bottles up his wind to play the bagpipes, or whether he plays the bagpipes to get rid of his bottled-up wind, I do not know, and I don’t suppose I ever shall know.”
From Little Grange I walked two miles out to Bredfield Hall, FitzGerald’s birthplace. It is a stately old Jacobean mansion, though sadly beplastered, for surely its natural colour is red-brick, like that of the outbuildings. Among these I came upon an old, old labourer, who “remembered Mr Edward well. Why, he’d often come up, he would, and sit on that there bench by the canal, nivver sayin’ nothin’. But he took on wonnerful, that he did, if ivver they touched any of the owd trees.” Not many of them are standing now, and what there are, are all “dying atop.”
It is a short walk from Bredfield Hall to Bredfield church and vicarage. Both must be a good deal altered by restoration and enlargement since the days (1834-57) of George Crabbe, the poet’s son, about whom there is so much in the Letters, and of whom I have often heard tell. He went up to the great Exhibition of 1851; and, after his return, my father asked him what he thought of it. “Thought of it, my dear sir! When I entered that vast emporium of the world’s commerce, I lifted
up my arms and shouted for amazement.” From Bredfield a charming walk through the fields (trudged how many times by FitzGerald!) leads to the little one-storeyed cottage in Boulge Park, where he lived from 1838 till 1853. It probably is scarcely changed at all, with its low-pitched thatch roof forming eyebrows over the brown-shuttered windows. “Cold and draughty,” says the woman who was living in it, and who showed me FitzGerald’s old parlour and bedroom. The very nails were still in the walls on which he hung his big pictures. Boulge Hall, then tenantless, a large modern white-brick house, brought me soon to Boulge church,
half-hidden by trees. Fitzgerald sleeps beneath its redbrick tower. His grave is marked by a flat granite monument, carved with a cross-fleury. Pity, it seemed, that no roses grew over it. [94]
Afterwards, for auld langsyne, I took a long pull down the Deben river; and next morning I visited Farlingay Hall, the farmhouse where Carlyle stayed with FitzGerald in 1855. It is not a farmhouse now, but a goodly old-fashioned mansion, red-tiled, dormer-windowed, and all covered with roses and creepers. A charming young lady showed me some of the rooms, and pointed out a fine elm-tree in the meadow, beneath which Carlyle smoked his pipe. Finally, if any one would know more of the country round Woodbridge, let him turn up an article in the ‘Magazine of Art’ for 1885, by Professor Sidney Colvin, on “East Suffolk Memories, Inland and Home.”