enthusiastic cheering, at Ipswich, intimated that it was quite as well the sun and moon were placed high up in the heavens, else
‘Some reforming ass
Would soon propose to pluck them down
And light the world with gas.’
One of the oddest, most attractive, and most original women of the last century was Elizabeth Simpson, a Suffolk girl, who ran away from her home, where she was never taught anything, at the age of sixteen, to make her fortune, and to win fame. In both cases she succeeded, though not so soon as she could have wished. Failing to touch the hard heart of the manager of the Norwich Theatre, a Welshman of the name of Griffiths, she packed up her things in a bandbox, and, good-looking and audacious, landed herself on the Holborn pavement. ‘By the time you receive this,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘I shall leave Standingfield perhaps for ever. You are surprised, but be not uneasy; believe the step I have undertaken is indiscreet, but by no means criminal, unless I sin by not acquainting you with it. I now endure every pang, am not lost to every feeling, on thus quitting the tenderest and best of parents, I would say most beloved, too, but cannot prove my affection,
yet time may. To that I must submit my hope of retaining your regard. The censures of the world I despise, as the most worthy incur the reproaches of that. Should I ever think you will wish to hear from me I will write.’ A pretty, unprotected, unknown girl of sixteen, in London, had, we can well believe, no easy time of it. Strangers followed her in the street, people insulted her in the theatre, suspicious landladies looked her up. Happily, a brother-in-law met her in a penniless state and took her home. Unhappily, at his house she met Inchbald, an indifferent and badly-paid actor. They were immediately married, and the girl rejoiced to think that she was an actress, and about to realize the ambition of her youth. It was no small part which the Suffolk girl felt herself qualified to fill. On the 4th of September, 1772, she made her début as Cordelia to her husband’s Lear. In 1821 Mrs. Inchbald, famed for her ‘simple story,’ which took the town by storm, was buried in Kensington Churchyard. But before she got there she had to endure much. At that time theatrical performers were much worse paid than they are now, when, as Mr. Irving tells us, any decent-looking young man, with a good suit of clothes, can command his five
or six pounds a week. Mrs. Inchbald and her husband had to drink of the cup of poverty, and its consequent degradation, to the dregs. On one occasion they took it into their heads to go to France, believing that they could make money—he by painting, she by writing. The scheme, as was to be expected, did not answer, and they were landed on their return somewhere near Brighton, in the September of 1776, literally without a crust of bread. On one occasion it was stated that they dined off raw turnips, stolen from a field as they wandered past. Next year, however, the world began to mend so far as they were concerned.
At Manchester they met the Siddonses and J. P. Kemble, and one result of that meeting was peace and prosperity. At this time also the lady’s husband died, and that was no great loss, as the lady was far too independent for a wife. Yet, if the great Kemble had proposed to her, as she used to tell Fanny Kemble, she would have jumped at him. To the last her habits of life were most penurious. She spent nothing on dress, she was indifferent in the matter of eating and drinking, and when she was making as much as from £500 to £900 by a new play, in order to save a trifle she would sit in the depth of
winter without a fire. Only fancy any of our later lady-novelists thus ascetic and self-denying. The idea is absurd. She was to the last what Godwin described her, a mixture of lady and milkmaid. And yet the lady had ambition. She had an idea that she might be Lady Bunbury. However, she marred her chance, at the same time missing a rich Mr. Glover, who offered a marriage settlement of £500 a year. Mrs. Inchbald, however, well knew how to take care of herself. No one better. She had learned the art in rather a hard school, and, besides, she knew how to take care of her poor relations. None of her sisters seem to have done well, and she had to aid them all.
Sudbury was the birthplace of that William Enfield, whose ‘Speaker’ was the terror and delight of more than one generation of England’s ingenuous youth. Lord Chancellor Thurlow, of the rugged eyebrows and the savage look, and fellow-clerk with the poet Cowper, was born at Ashfield, an obscure village not far off. Robert Bloomfield, who wrote the ‘Farmer’s Boy,’ came from Honington, where his mother kept a village school, and where he became a shoemaker. Capel Loft, an amiable gentleman of literary sympathies and pursuits, and Bloomfield’s warmest friend,
resided at Troston Hall, in the immediate neighbourhood of Honington. At one time there was no writer better known than John Lydgate, called the Monk of Bury, born at the village of Lydgate, in 1380. ‘His language,’ writes a learned critic, ‘is much less obsolete than Chaucer’s, and a great deal more harmonious.’ Stephen Gardener, Bishop of Winchester, and an enemy to the Reformation, was born at Bury. At Trinity St. Martin lived Thomas Cavendish, the second Englishman who sailed round the globe. Admiral Broke, memorable for his capture of the Chesapeake, when we were at war with America, was born at Nacton. The great non-juring Archbishop Sancroft was born at Fressingfield, where he retired to die, and where he is buried under a handsome monument. The great scholar, Robert Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln, was born at Stradbrook. Of him Roger Bacon wrote that he was the only man living who was in possession of all the sciences. Wycliff, on innumerable occasions, refers to him with respect. Arthur Young, the celebrated agriculturist, some of whose sentences are preserved as golden ones—especially that which says, ‘Give a man the secure possession of a rock, and he will make a garden of it’—and whose valuable works, I am glad to see,
are republished, was born and lived near Bury St. Edmunds. Echard, the historian, was born at Barsham, in 1671. Porson was a Norfolk lad.