my recollection of the chairing I saw that time, I am more inclined to admire the activity of Wilberforce, of whom we read, when elected for Hull, ‘When the procession reached his mother’s house, he sprang from the chair, and, presenting himself with surprising quickness at a projecting window—it was that of the nursery in which his childhood had been passed—he addressed the populace with such complete effect that he was afterwards able to decide the election of its successor.’ At Norwich the Hon. Mr. Scarlett did well in not attempting a similar display of agility. Perhaps, however, it is quite as well that we have got rid of the chairing and the humour—Heaven help us!—to which it gave rise on the part of an English mob.
There was a delightful flavour of antiquity about the Norwich of that day—its old fusty chapels and churches, its old bridges and narrow streets. All the people with whom I came into contact on that festival seemed to me well stricken in years. It was not so very long since, old Hornbutton Jack had been seen threading his way along its ancient streets. With a countenance much resembling the portraits of Erasmus, with gray hair hanging about his shoulders, with his hat drawn over his eyes and his hands behind him, as if in deep meditation;
John Fransham, the Norwich metaphysician and mathematician, might well excite the curiosity of the casual observer, especially when I add that he was bandy-legged, that he was short of stature, that he wore a green jacket, a broad hat, large shoes, and short worsted stockings. A Norwich weaver had helped to make Fransham a philosopher. Wright said Fransham could discourse well on the nature and fitness of things. He possessed a purely philosophical spirit and a soul well purified from vulgar errors. Fransham made himself famous in his day. There is every reason to believe that he had been for some time tutor to Mr. Windham. He is once recorded to have spent a day with Dr. Parr. Many of his pupils became professional men; with one of them, Dr. Leeds, the reader of Foote’s comedies, if such a one exists, may be acquainted. The tutor and his pupil, as Johnny Macpherson and Dr. Last, were actually exhibited on the stage. But to return to Norwich antiquities. I have a dim memory of some old place where the Dutch and Huguenot refugees were permitted to meet for worship, and even now I can recognise there the possibility of another Sir Thomas Browne—unless the Norwich of my boyhood has undergone the destructive process we
love to call improvement—not even disturbed in his quiet study by the storm of civil war, inditing his thoughts as follows: ‘That crystal is nothing else but ice strongly congealed; that a diamond is softened or broken by the blood of a goat; that bays preserve from the mischief of lightning and thunder; that the horse hath no gall; that a kingfisher hanged by the bill showeth where the wind lay; that the flesh of peacocks corrupteth not;’ and so on—questions, it may be, as pertinent as those learnedly discussed in half-crown magazines at the present day.
As a boy, I was chiefly familiar with Norwich crapes and bombazines and Norwich shawls, which at that time were making quite a sensation in the fashionable world. It was at a later time that I came to hear of Old Crome and the Norwich school. Of him writes Mr. Wedmore, that ‘he died in a substantial square-built house, in what was a good street then, in the parish of St. George, Colegate, having begun as a workman, and ended as a bourgeois. He was a simple man, of genial company. To the end of his life he used to go of an evening to the public-house as to an informal club. In the privileged bar-parlour, behind the taps and glasses, he sat with his friends and the shopkeepers,
talking of local things. But it is not to be supposed that because his life was from end to end a humble one, though prosperous even outwardly after its kind, Crome was deprived of the companionship most fitted to his genius, the stimulus that he most needed. The very existence of the Norwich Society of Artists settles that question. The local men hung on his words; he knew that he was not only making pictures, but a school. And in the quietness of a provincial city a coterie had been formed of men bent on the pursuit of an honest and homely art, and of these he was the chief.’ Dying, his last words were, ‘Hobbema, oh, Hobbema, how I loved thee!’ In my young days Mr. John Sell Cotman chiefly represented Norwich, although in later times he became connected with King’s College, London. A lady writes to me: ‘I think it was in the summer of 1842 Mr. Cotman came down to Norwich to visit his son John, who at that time was occupying a house on St. Bennet’s Road. He visited us at Thorpe several times, and was unusually well and in good spirits, with sketchbook or folio always in hand. His father and sisters, too, were then living in a small house at Thorpe, and from the balcony of their house, which looked over the valley of the Wensum, he made
one of his last interesting sketches, twelve of which, after his death, the following year, were selected by his sons for publication.’
Evelyn gives us a pleasant picture of Norwich when he went there ‘to see that famous scholar and physitian, Dr. T. Browne, author of the “Religio Medici” and “Vulgar Errors,” etc., now lately knighted.’ Evelyn continues: ‘Next morning I went to see Sir Thomas Browne, with whom I had corresponded by letter, though I had never seen him before, his whole house and garden being a Paradise and cabinet of rarities, and that of the best collection, especially medals, books, plants and natural things. Amongst other curiosities, Sir Thomas has a collection of all the eggs of all the foule and birds he could procure; that country, especially the promonotary of Norfolck, being frequented, as he said, by severall kinds, which seldom or never go further into the land, as cranes, storkes, eagles, and a variety of water-foule. He led me to see all the remarkable places of this ancient citty, being one of the largest and certainly, after London, one of the noblest of England, for its venerable cathedrall, number of stately churches, cleannesse of the streetes and building of flints so exquisitely headed and squared, as I was much
astonished at; but he told me they had lost the art of squaring the flints, in which at one time they so much excelled, and of which the churches, best houses, and walls are built.’ Further, Evelyn tells us: ‘The suburbs are large, the prospect sweete with other amenities, not omitting the flower-gardens, in which all the inhabitants excel. The fabric of stuffs brings a vast trade to this populous towne.’
Long has Norwich rejoiced in clever people. In the life of William Taylor, one of her most distinguished sons, we have a formidable array of illustrious Norwich personages, in whom, alas! at the present time the world takes no interest. Sir James Edward Smith, founder and first President of the Linnæan Society, ought not to be forgotten. Of Taylor himself Mackintosh wrote: ‘I can still trace William Taylor by his Armenian dress, gliding through the crowd in Annual Reviews, Monthly Magazines, Athenæums, etc., rousing the stupid public by paradox, or correcting it by useful and seasonable truth. It is true that he does not speak the Armenian or any other tongue but the Taylorian, but I am so fond of his vigour and originality, that for his sake I have studied and learned the language. As the Hebrew is studied by one book, so is the Taylorian by me for another.