It was in that old town Fanny Burney, the friend of Mrs. Thrale and Dr. Johnson, the author of novels like ‘Evelina,’ which people even read nowadays, was born on the 13th of June, 1752. She grew up low of stature, of a brown complexion. One of her friends called her the dove, which she thought was from the colour of her eyes—a greenish-gray; her last editor thinks it must have
been from their kind expression. She was very short-sighted, like her father. In her portrait, taken at the age of thirty, merriment seems latent behind a demure look. At any rate, her countenance was what might be called a speaking one. ‘Poor Fanny!’ said her father, ‘her face tells what she thinks, whether she will or no. I long to see her honest face once more.’ ‘Poor Fanny’ lived to a good old age, and her gossiping diary is a mine of wealth as regards the Royal Family, and Johnson, and Mrs. Thrale, and the cleverest men and women of her time.
Thomas Bilney, one of our Protestant martyrs, was a Norfolk man. It was a Norfolk knight, Sir Thomas Erpingham, who gave signal for the archers at Agincourt. Shakespeare refers to him in his ‘King Henry V.’ as follows:
‘King.—Good-morrow, old Sir Thomas Erpingham;
A good soft pillow for that good white head
Were better than a churlish turf of France.‘Erp.—Not so, my liege; this lodging likes me better,
Since I may say, now lie I like a king.’
Many East Anglians helped to win the battle of Agincourt. The Earl of Kimberley still bears Agincourt on his shield.
Let us now pass over into Suffolk. It is worth
asking how Suffolk came to earn the nickname of Silly Suffolk. ‘Silly,’ say the learned, is derived from the German selig, meaning ‘holy or blessed,’ and is said to have been applied to Suffolk on account of the number of beautiful churches it contains; Suffolk, at any rate, is silly no longer. In the present day it shows to advantage, if we may judge by the enterprise and public spirit of such a town as Ipswich, for instance. Not long since, as I landed on the docks at Hamburg, I had the pleasure of seeing some dozen or more steam ploughs and agricultural implements waiting to be transported into the interior. The ploughs and implements bore well-known Suffolk names, such as Garrett and Sons or Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies, and were open manifestations of Suffolk skill and energy, and ability to hold its own against all comers. Amongst the women of the present generation, where are to be met the superiors of Mrs. Garrett Anderson or of Mrs. Fawcett, widow of the distinguished statesman, and mother of a sweet girl-graduate who has beaten all the men at her University? I was the other day at Haverhill, where Mr. D. Gurteen still lives to enjoy, at the ripe old age of eighty-three, the fruits of an energy on his part which has raised
Haverhill from a village of paupers into a flourishing community, whose manufactures are to be met with all over the land. One day, as I was walking along Gray’s Inn Road, a fine, well-built man stopped me to ask me if I remembered him. When he mentioned his name I did directly. He was of the poorest of the poor in his home at Wrentham. He had done well in London. ‘You know, sir,’ he said, ‘how poor our family was. Well, I had enough of poverty, and I made up my mind to come to London and be either a man or a mouse.’
In the London of to-day the heads of some of our greatest establishments are Suffolk men. We all know the stately pile in Holborn, once Meekings’, now Wallis’s, where all the world and his wife go to buy. Mr. Wallis hails from Stowmarket, and the man who fits up London shops in the most tasty style, Mr. Sage, of Gray’s Inn Road, was a Suffolk carpenter, who, when out of work, with his last guinea got some cards printed, one of which got him a job, which ultimately led on to fame and fortune.
No, Suffolk has long ceased to be silly. It must have deserved the title in the days which I can remember when a Conservative M.P., amidst