Two ^iIffolK Fl^mTfDS 
 
 Francis Hindes Groome 
 
" ^.$i#* Y -'^^' ' ' r^ , '' 
 
 
 t-^. 
 
 
 i. :/.■.. , . . -->. 'i •■'.'.if;,- 
 l' ■:.■"'•' * 'ft*- „","'■ \>. !'.'■'■ 
 
 l^:.:' 'S:.';:;!: 
 
 
 »r^ U-. -S' 
 
 
 --.^1 M' 
 
 
 Tit ' 
 •: ja.' 
 
*- ,^^' ,f 
 
 I '' i 
 
 
 1 
 
 ,.r 
 
 
 •*J 
 
 

TWO SUFFOLK FRIENDS 
 
kUlilCRl' IllXDES GkUUME. 
 
Two Suffolk Friends 
 
 FRANCIS HINDES GROOME 
 
 WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS 
 
 EDINBURGH AND LONDON 
 
 MDCCCXC V 
 

TO 
 
 MOWBRAY DONNE 
 
 THE FRIEND OF THESE TWO FRIENDS 
 
PREFACE. 
 
 Published originally in ' Blackwood's Magazine ' 
 four and six years ago, and now a good deal ex- 
 tended, these two papers, I think, will be welcome 
 to many in East Anglia who knew my father, and 
 to more, the world over, who know FitzGerald's 
 letters and translations. I may say this with the 
 better grace and greater confidence, as in both there 
 is so much that is not mine, and both have already 
 brought me so many kindly letters— from Fresh- 
 water, Putney Hill, Liverpool, Cambridge, Alde- 
 burgh, Italy, the United States, India, and "other 
 nations too tedious to mention." All the illustra- 
 
viii Preface. 
 
 tions have been made in Bohemia from photographs 
 taken by my elder sister, except Nos. 6, 8, and 9, 
 the first of which is from the well-known photograph 
 of FitzGerald by Cade of Ipswich, whilst the other 
 two I owe to my friend, Mr Edward Clodd. 
 
 F. H. G. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 A SUFFOLK PARSON i 
 
 EDWARD FITZGERALD: AN AFTERMATH ... 65 
 
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. 
 
 robert hindes groome 
 
 monk soham church . . . . 
 
 monk soham rectory . . . . 
 
 "fish, fish, do your duty" . 
 
 monk soham schoolhouse and guildhall 
 
 edward fitzgerald . . . . 
 
 little grange . . . . . 
 
 the cottage, boulge . . . . 
 
 farlingay hall .... 
 
 Frontispiece 
 To face p. 6 
 
 14 
 20 
 30 
 67 
 
 91 
 Page 93 
 
 .1 95 
 
A SUFFOLK PARSON 
 
A SUFFOLK PARSON. 
 
 " I "^HE chief aim of this essay is to present to a larger 
 -*- public than the readers of a country newspaper my 
 father's Suffolk stories ; but those stories may well be pre- 
 faced by a sketch of my father's life. Such a sketch I 
 wrote shortly after his death, for the great ' Dictionary of 
 National Biography.' It runs thus : — 
 
 " Robert Hindes Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk, was 
 born at Framlingham in 1810. Of Aldeburgh ancestry, 
 he was the second son of the Rev. John Hindes Groome, 
 ex-fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and rector for 
 twenty-six years of Earl Soham and Monk Soham in Suf- 
 folk. From Norwich school he passed to Caius College, 
 Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1832, M.A. in 
 1836. In 1833 he was ordained to the Suffolk curacy of 
 Tannington-with-Brundish ; in 1835 travelled through 
 Germany as tutor to Rafael Mendizabal, the son of the 
 
4 Two Stiffolk Friends. 
 
 Spanish ambassador ; in 1839 became curate of Corfe 
 Castle, Dorsetshire; and in 1845 succeeded his father as 
 rector of Monk Soham. Here in the course of forty-four 
 years he built the rectory-house and school, restored the 
 fine old church, erected an organ, and re-hung the bells. 
 He was Archdeacon of Suffolk from 1869 till 1887, when 
 failing e3'esight forced him to resign, and when the clergy 
 of the diocese presented him with his portrait. He died 
 at Monk Soham, 19th March 1889. Archdeacon Groome 
 was a man of wide culture — a man, too, of many friends. 
 Chief among these were Edward FitzGerald, WiUiam. 
 Bodham Donne, Dr Thompson of Trinity, and Henry 
 Bradshaw, the Cambridge librarian, who said of him, * I 
 never see Groome but what I learn something new.' He 
 read much, but published little — a couple of charges, a 
 sermon and lecture or two, some hymns and hymn-tunes, 
 and a good many articles in the ' Christian Advo- 
 cate and Review,' of which he was editor from 1861 to 
 1866. His best productions are his Suffolk stories : for 
 humour and tenderness these come near to ' Rab and his 
 Friends.' " 
 
 An uneventful life, like that of most country clergymen. 
 But as Gainsborough and Constable took their subjects 
 from level East Anglia, as Gilbert White's Selborne has 
 little to distinguish it above other parishes in Hamp- 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 5 
 
 shire,^ so I believe that the story of that quiet life might, if 
 rightly told, possess no common charm. I have listened 
 to my father's talks with Edward FitzGerald, with 
 William Bodham Donne, and with two or three others 
 of his oldest friends ; such talks were like chapters out of 
 George Eliot's novels. His memory was marvellous. It 
 seems but the other day I told him I had been writing 
 about Clarendon ; and " Clarendon," he said, "was born, 
 I know, in 1608, but I forget the name of the Wiltshire 
 parish his birthplace. Look it up." I looked it up, and 
 the date was 1608 ; the parish (Dinton) was, sure enough, 
 in Wiltshire. Myself I have had again to consult an 
 encyclopaedia for both date and place-name, but he re- 
 membered the one distinctly and the other vaguely after 
 possibly thirty years. In the same way he could recall 
 the whole plot of a play which he had not seen for half a 
 century. Holcroft's ' Road to Ruin,' thus, was one that 
 he once described to me. He was a master of the art, 
 now wellnigh lost, of "capping verses"; and he had a 
 rare knowledge of the less-known Elizabethan dramatists. 
 In his first Charge occurs a quotation from an "old 
 play " ; and one of his hearers. Canon " Grundy," inquired 
 what play it might be. " Ford's," said my father, " ' 'Tis 
 
 1 I remember once walking from Alton to Petersfield, and passing unwit- 
 tingly through Selborne. 
 
6 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 pity she's no better than she should be.' " And the 
 
 good man was perfectly satisfied. But stronger than his 
 love of Wordsworth and music, of the classics and foreign 
 theology, was his love of Suffolk— its lore, its dialect, its 
 people. As a young man he had driven through it with 
 Mr D. E. Davy, the antiquary; and as archdeacon he 
 visited and revisited its three hundred churches in the 
 Norwich diocese during close on a score of years. I drove 
 with him twice on his rounds, and there was not a place 
 that did not evoke some memory. If he could himself 
 have written those memories down ! He did make the 
 attempt, but too late. This was all the result :— 
 
 " Oct. 23, 1 886. 
 " I cannot see to read, but as yet I can see to write. 
 That is, I can see the continuous grey line of writing, and 
 can mechanically write one word after another. But if I 
 leave off abruptly, I cannot always remember what was 
 the last word that I wrote, and read it generally I 
 cannot. 
 
 " I should be thankful for being able to write at all, and 
 I hope I am ; but I am not enough thankful. The failure 
 of my sight has been very gradual, but of late it has been 
 more sudden. Three months ago I could employ myself 
 in reading ; now I cannot, save with a book, such as the 
 

 ^ 
 
 
 ' '-^ 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 7 
 
 Prayer-book, with which I am well acquainted, and which 
 is of clear large type. So that as yet I can take my 
 duty. 
 
 " I was born at Framlingham on January 18, 1810, so 
 that I am now nearly seventy-seven years old. The house 
 still stands where I was born, little if at all changed. It 
 is the first house on the left-hand side of the Market Hill, 
 after ascending a short flight of steps. My father, at the 
 time of my birth, was curate to his brother-in-law, Mr 
 Wyatt, who was then rector of Framlingham. I was the 
 younger of two sons, my brother Hindes being thirteen 
 months older than I was. 
 
 "As we left Framlingham in 1813, my recollections of 
 it are very indistinct. I have an impression of being 
 taken out to see a fire ; but as I have since been told that 
 the fire happened a year before I was born, I suppose that 
 I have heard it so often spoken of that in the end I came 
 to believe that I myself had seen it. Yet one thing I can 
 surely remember, that, being sent to a dame's school to 
 keep me out of mischief, I used to stand by her side 
 pricking holes in some picture or pattern which had been 
 drawn upon a piece of paper. 
 
 " In 1813, after the death of Mr Wyatt, my father took 
 the curacy of Rendlesham, where we lived till the year 
 1815. The rector of Rendlesham at that time was Dr 
 
8 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Henley,^ who was also principal of the East India College 
 of Haileybury, so that we lived in the rectory, Dr Henley 
 rarely coming to the parish. That house remains un- 
 changed, as I shall have occasion to tell. Lois Dowsing 
 was our cook, and lived nearly forty years in my father's 
 service — one of those faithful servants who said little, but 
 cared dearly for us all. 
 
 " Of Rendlesham I have clear recollection, and things 
 that happened in it. It was there I first learnt to read. 
 My mother has told me that I could not be taught to 
 know the letter H, take all the pains she could. My 
 father, thinking that the fault lay in the teacher, under- 
 took to accomplish the task. Accordingly he drew, as 
 he thought, the picture of a hog, and wrote a capital H 
 under it. But whether it was the fault of the drawing— 
 I am inclined to think that it was— or whether it was 
 my obstinacy, but when it was shown me, I persisted in 
 calling it * papa's grey mare.' 
 
 " There was a high sandbank not far from the house, 
 through which the small roots of the bushes growing 
 protruded. My brother and I never touched these. We 
 believed that if we pulled one of them, a bell would ring 
 and the devil would appear. So we never pulled them. 
 
 1 This was the Samuel Henley, D.D., that tianslated Beckford's 'Vathek' 
 from the French. 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 9 
 
 In a ploughed field near by was a large piece of ground 
 at one end, with a pond in the middle of it, and with 
 many wild cherry-trees near it. I can remember now 
 how pretty they were with their covering of white 
 blossoms, and the grass below full of flowers — primroses, 
 cowslips, and, above all, orchises. But the pond was 
 no ordinary one. It was always called the ' S pond,' 
 being shaped hke that letter. I suspect, too, that it 
 was a pond of ill repute — perhaps connected with heathen 
 worship — for we were warned never to go near its edge, 
 lest the Mermaid should come and CYomc us in. Crome, 
 as all East Anglians know, means ' crook ' ; and in later 
 years I remember a Suffolk boy at Norwich school trans- 
 lated a passage from the ' Hecuba ' of Euripides, in which 
 the aged queen is described as ' leaning upon a crooked 
 staff,' by ' leaning upon a croine stick,' which I still think 
 was a very happy rendering. 
 
 " Not far also from the rectory was a cottage, in which 
 lived a family by the name of Catton. Close to the 
 cottage was a well, worked by buckets. When the bucket 
 was not being let down, the well was protected by a cover 
 made of two hurdles, which fell down and met in the 
 middle. These hurdles, be it noted, were old and ap- 
 parently rotten. One day I was playing near the well, 
 and nothing would, I suppose, satisfy me but I must 
 
lo Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 climb up and creep over the well. In the act of doing 
 this I was seen by Mrs Catton, who saved me, perhaps, 
 from falling down the well, and carried me home, detail- 
 ing the great escape. Well do I remember, not so much 
 the whipping, as the being shut up in a dark closet 
 behind the study. So strong was and is the impression, 
 that, on visiting Rendlesham as archdeacon, when I was 
 sixty years old, on going up to the rectory-house I asked 
 especially to see this dark closet. There it was, dark 
 and unchanged since fifty -six years ago; and at the 
 sight of it I had no comfortable recollection, nor have 
 I now. 
 
 " In the year 1814 was a great feast on the Green— a 
 rejoicing for the peace. One thing still sticks to my 
 memory, and that is the figure of Mrs Sheming, a 
 farmer's wife. She was a very large woman, and wore 
 a tight -fitting white dress, with a blue ribbon round 
 her waist, on which was printed ' Peace and Plenty.' 
 
 ** In the year 1815 we spent the summer in London, in a 
 house in Brunswick Square, which overlooked the grounds 
 of the Foundling Hospital. Three events of that year have 
 always remained impressed on my memory. The first 
 was the death of little Mary, our only sister. She must 
 have been a strangely precocious child, since at barely 
 three years old she could wellnigh read. My mother, 
 
A Suffolk Parson. ii 
 
 who died fifty-two years after in her eighty-third year, 
 on each year when Mary's death came round took out 
 her clothes, kept so long, and, after airing them, put 
 them away in their own drawer. The second event, 
 which I well remember, was being taken out to see the 
 illuminations for the battle of Waterloo. I can perfectly 
 remember the face of Somerset House, all ablaze with 
 coloured lamps. The third event was the funeral of a 
 poor girl named Elizabeth Penning." ^ 
 
 And there those childish reminiscences broke off — 
 never to be resumed. But from recollections of my 
 father's talk — and he loved to talk of the past — I will 
 attempt to write what he himself might have written ; 
 no set biography, but just the old household tales. 
 
 After the visit to London the family lived a while at 
 Wickham Market, where my father saw the long strings 
 of tumbrils, laden with Waterloo wounded, on their way 
 from Yarmouth to London. Then in 1818 they settled 
 at Earl Soham, my grandfather having become rector of 
 that parish and Monk Soham. His father, Robinson 
 
 1 She was hanged on 26th June 1S15, for attempting to poison her master's 
 family ; and her story, reprinted from ' Maga,' forms a chapter in Paget's 
 ' Paradoxes and Puzzles ' (1874). That chapter I read to my father the summer 
 before his death. It disappointed him, for he had always cherished the popular 
 belief in her innocence. 
 
12 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Groome, the sea-captain, had purchased the advowson of 
 Earl Soham from the Rev. Francis Capper (1735-1818), 
 whose long tenure^ of his two conjoint livings was 
 celebrated by the local epigrammatist : — 
 
 " Capper, they say, has bought a horse — 
 The pleasure of it bating — 
 That man may surely keep a horse 
 Who keeps a Groome in waiting." 
 
 It was in the summer-house at Earl Soham that my 
 father, a very small boy, read * Gil Bias ' to the cook, Lois 
 Dowsing, and the sweetheart she never married, a strap- 
 ping sergeant of the Guards, who had fought at Waterloo. 
 And it was climbing through the window of this summer- 
 house that he tore a big rent in his breeches (he had just 
 been promoted to them), so was packed off to bed. That 
 afternoon my grandfather and grandmother were sitting 
 in the summer-house, and she told him of the mishap and 
 its punishment. "Stupid child!" said my grandfather; 
 
 ^ I am reminded of a case, long afterwards, where a clergyman had obtained 
 a wealthy living on the condition that the retiring rector should, so long as he 
 lived, receive nearly half the tithes. An aged man at the time the bargain was 
 struck, that rector lived on and on for close upon twenty years ; and his succes- 
 sor would ever and again come over to see my father, and ask his "advice." 
 "What could I advise him?" said my father; "for we live in Suffolk, not 
 Venice, so a bravo is out of the question." 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 13 
 
 "why, I could get through there myself." He tried, and 
 he too tore his small-clothes, but he was not sent to bed. 
 
 With his elder brother, John Hindes (afterwards Rector 
 of Earl Soham), my father went to school at Norwich 
 under Valpy. The first time my grandfather drove them, 
 a forty-mile drive ; and when they came in sight of the 
 cathedral spire, he pulled up, and they all three fell 
 a -weeping. For my grandfather was a tender-hearted 
 man, moved to tears by the Waverley novels. Of Valpy 
 my father would tell how once he had flogged a day-boy, 
 whose father came the next day to complain of his severity.. 
 " Sir," said Valpy, " I flogged your son because he richly 
 deserved it. If he again deserves it, I shall again flog 
 him. And " — rising — " if you come here, sir, interfering 
 with my duty, sir, I shall flog you." The parent fled. 
 
 The following story I owe to an old schoolfellow of my 
 father's, the Rev, William Drake. "Among the lower 
 boys," he writes, " were a brother of mine, somewhat of a 
 pickle, and a classmate of his, who in after years blossomed 
 into a Ritualistic clergyman, and who was the son of a 
 gentleman, living in the Lower Close, not remarkable for 
 personal beauty. One morning, as he was coming up the 
 school, the sound of weeping reached old Valpy's ears : 
 straightway he stopped to investigate whence it proceeded. 
 ' Stand up, sir,' he cried in a voice of thunder, for he hated 
 
14 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 snivelling ; ' what is the matter with you ? ' ' Please, sir,' 
 came the answer, much interrupted by sobs and tears, 
 ' Bob Drake says I'm uglier than my father, and that my 
 father is as ugly as the Devil.' " 
 
 Another old Norwich story may come in here, of two 
 middle-aged brothers, Jeremiah and Ozias, the sons of a 
 dead composer, and themselves performers on the piano- 
 forte. At a party one evening Jeremiah had just played 
 something, when Ozias came up and asked him, " Brother 
 Jerry, what was that beastly thing you were playing?" 
 "Ozias, it was our father's," was the reproachful answer; 
 and Ozias burst into tears. 
 
 When my father went up to Cambridge, his father went 
 with him, and introduced him to divers old dons, one 
 of whom offered him this sage advice, " Stick to your 
 quadratics, young man. / got my fellowship through 
 my quadratics." Another, the mathematical lecturer at 
 Peterhouse, was a Suffolk man, and spoke broad Suffolk. 
 One day he was lecturing on mechanics, and had arranged 
 from the lecture-room ceiling a system of pulleys, which 
 he proceeded to explain, — " Yeou see, I pull this string ; 
 it will turn this small wheel, and then the next wheel, and 
 then the next, and then will raise that heavy weight at the 
 end." He pulled — nothing happened. He pulled again 
 — still no result. " At least ta should," he remarked. 
 
'•MP''??-"*'?!™. 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 15 
 
 Music engrossed, I fancy, a good deal of my father's 
 time at Cambridge. He saw much of Mrs Frere of 
 Downing, a pupil of a pupil of Handel's. Of her he has 
 written in the Preface to FitzGerald's ' Letters.' He 
 was a member of the well-known " Camus " ; and it was 
 he (so the late Sir George Paget informed my doctor- 
 brother) who settled the dispute as to precedence between 
 vocalists and instrumentalists with the apt quotation, 
 " The singers go before, the minstrels follow after." He 
 was an instrumentalist himself, his instrument the 'cello ; 
 and there was a story how he, the future Master of Trin- 
 ity, and some brother musicians were proctorised one 
 night, as they were returning from a festive meeting, each 
 man performing on his several instrument. 
 
 He was an attendant at the debates at the Cambridge 
 Union, e.g., at the one when the question debated was, 
 "Will Mr Coleridge's poem of 'The Ancient Mariner' or 
 Mr Martin's Act tend most to prevent cruelty to animals ? " 
 The voting was, for Mr Martin 5, for Mr Coleridge 47; 
 and " only two " says a note written by my father in 1877, 
 " of the seven who took part in the debate are now living 
 — Lord Houghton and the Dean of Lincoln. How many 
 still remember kind and civil Baxter, the harness-maker 
 opposite Trinity ; and how many of them ever heard him 
 sing his famous song of ' Poor Old Horse ' ? Yet for 
 
1 6 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 pathos, and, unhappily in some cases, for truth, it may 
 well rank even with ' The Ancient Mariner.' And Baxter 
 used to sing it so tenderly." 
 
 Meanwhile, of the Earl Soham life — a life not unlike 
 that of " Raveloe " — my father had much to tell. There 
 was the Book Club, with its meetings at the " Falcon," 
 where, in the words of a local diarist, '* a dozen honest 
 gentlemen dined merrily." There were the heavy dinner- 
 parties at my grandfather's, the regulation allowance of 
 port a bottle per man, but more ad libitum. And there 
 was the yearly " Soham Fair," on July 12, when my 
 grandfather kept open house for the parsons or other 
 gentry and their womankind, who flocked in from miles 
 around. On one such occasion my father had to squire 
 a new-comer about the fair. The wife of a retired City 
 alderman, she was enormously stout, and had chosen to 
 appear in a low dress. (" Hillo, bor ! what are yeou a- 
 dewin' with the Fat Woman ? " — one can imagine the 
 delicate raillery.) 
 
 A well-known Earl-Sohamite was old Mr P , who 
 
 stuttered and was certainly eccentric. In summer-time 
 he loved to catch small " freshers " (young frogs), and 
 let them hop down his throat, when he would stroke his 
 stomach, observing, " B-b-b-b-eautifully cool." He was 
 a staunch believer in the claims of the " Princess Olive." 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 17 
 
 She used to stay with him, and he always addressed her 
 as " Your Royal Highness." Then, there was Dr 
 Belman. He was playing whist one evening with a 
 maiden lady for partner. She trumped his best card, 
 and, at the end of the hand, he asked her the reason 
 why. " Oh, Dr Belman " (smilingly), " I judged it 
 judicious." ''Judicious I Judicious!! JUDICIOUS!!! 
 You old fool I " She never again touched a card. Was 
 it the same maiden lady who was the strong believer in 
 homoeopathy, and who one day took five globules of 
 aconite in mistake for three ? Frightened, she sent off 
 for her homoeopathic adviser — he was from home. So, 
 for want of a better, she called in old Dr Belman. He 
 came, looked grave, shook his head, said if people would 
 meddle with dangerous drugs they must take the con- 
 sequences. " But, madam," he added, '' I will die 
 with you ; " and, lifting the bottle of the fatal globules, 
 swallowed its whole contents.^ 
 
 To the days of my father's first curacy belongs the 
 story of the old woman at Tannington, who fell ill one 
 
 ^ A writer in the ' AthenKum' (I could make a shrewd guess at his name), 
 after quoting the whist story, goes on : " Dr Belman was the country doctor 
 who, on being asked what he thought of Phrenolog}', answered with equal 
 promptitude and gravity, ' I never keep it and never use it. But I have heard 
 that, given every three hours in large doses, it has been very efficacious in 
 certain cases of gout.' " 
 
 B 
 
1 8 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 winter when the snow was on the ground. She got 
 worse and worse, and sent for Dr Mayhew, who ques- 
 tioned her as to the cause of her illness. Something 
 she said made him think that the fault must lie with 
 either her kettle or her tea-pot, as she seemed, by her 
 account, to get worse every time she drank any tea. So 
 he examined the kettle, turned it upside down, and then, 
 in old Betty's own words, " Out drop a big toad. He 
 tarned the kittle up, and out ta fell flop." Some days 
 before she had " deeved " her kettle into the snow instead 
 of filling it at the pump, and had then got the toad in it, 
 which had thus been slowly simmering into toad-broth. 
 At Tannington also they came to my father to ask him 
 to let them have the church Bible and the church key. 
 The key was to be spun round on the Bible, and if it 
 had pointed at a certain old woman who was suspected 
 of being a witch, they would have certainly ducked her. 
 
 A score of old faded letters, close-written and crossed, 
 are lying before me : my father wrote them in 1835 ^o 
 his father, mother, and brother from Brussels, Mainz, 
 Leipzig, Dresden, Prague, Munich, &c. At Frankfurt he 
 dined with the Rothschilds, and sat next the baroness, 
 " who in face and figure was very like Mrs Cook, and 
 who spoke little English, but that little much to the 
 purpose. For one dish I must cat because * dis is 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 19 
 
 Germany,' and another because ' dis is England,' plac- 
 ing at the word a large slice of roast-beef on my plate. 
 The dinner began at half- past two, and lasted three 
 mortal hours, during the first of which I ate because I 
 was hungry, during the second out of politeness, and 
 during the third out of sheer desperation." Then there 
 is a descent into a silver -mine with the present Lord 
 Wemyss (better known as Lord Elcho), a gruesome ex- 
 ecution of three murderers, and a good deal besides of 
 some interest, — but the interest is not of Suffolk. 
 
 During his six years' Dorset curacy my father was 
 elected mayor of the little borough of Corfe Castle ; and 
 it was in Dorset, on ist February 1843, that he married 
 my mother, Mary Jackson (1815 - 93), the youngest 
 daughter of the Rev. James Leonard Jackson, rector of 
 Swanage, and of Louisa Decima Hyde Wollaston. Her 
 father, my grandfather, was a great taker of snuff; and 
 one blustery day he was walking upon the cliffs when his 
 hat blew off. He chased it and chased it over two or 
 three fields until at last he got it in the angle of two stone 
 walls. " Aha ! my friend, I think I have you now," said 
 my grandfather, and proceeded to take a leisurely pinch 
 of snuff, when a puff of wind came and blew the hat far 
 out to sea. There are many more Dorsetshire stories 
 that recur to my memory ; but neither here is the interest 
 
20 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 of Suffolk. So to Suffolk we will come back, like my 
 father in 1845, in which year he succeeded his father as 
 rector of Monk Soham, 
 
 Monk Soham is a straggling parish of 1600 acres and 
 400 inhabitants.^ It lies remote to-day, as it lay remote in 
 pre-Reformation times, when it was a cell of St Edmunds- 
 bury, whither refractory monks were sent for rustication. 
 Hence its name (the " south village of the monks ") ; and 
 hence, too, the fish-ponds for Lenten fare, in the rectory 
 gardens. Three of them enclose the orchard, which is 
 planted quincunx-wise, with yew hedge and grass-walk all 
 round it. The "Archdeacon's Walk" that grass-walk 
 should be named, for my father paced it morning after 
 morning. The pike and roach would plash among the 
 reeds and water-lilies ; and " Fish, fish, do your duty," 
 my father would say to them. Whereupon, he main- 
 tained, the fish always put out their noses and answered, 
 ^'\iyou do your duty, wc do our duty," — words fully as 
 applicable to parson as to sultan. 
 
 The parish has no history, unless that a former rector, 
 Thomas Rogerson, was sequestrated as a royalist in 1642, 
 and next year his wife and children were turned out of 
 doors by the Puritans. " After which," Walker tells us, 
 
 ' In 1881 the population was exactly 400. Ten years before it had been 
 470, ten years later had sunk to 315. 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 21 
 
 " Mr Rogerson lived with a Country-man in a very mean 
 Cottage upon a Heath, for some years, and in a very low 
 and miserable Condition." But if Monk Soham has no 
 history, its church, St Peter's, is striking even among 
 Suffolk churches, for the size of the chancel, the great 
 traceried east window, and the font sculptured with the 
 Seven Sacraments. The churchyard is pretty with trees 
 and shrubs — those four yews by the gates a present from 
 FitzGerald; and the rectory, half a mile off, is almost 
 hidden by oaks, elms, beeches, and limes, all of my 
 father's and grandfather's planting. Else the parish 
 soon will be treeless. It was not so when my father first 
 came to it. Where now there is one huge field, there 
 then would be five or six, not a few of them meadows, 
 and each with pleasant hedgerows. There were two 
 "Greens" then — one has many years since been en- 
 closed ; and there was not a " made " road in the entire 
 parish — only grassy lanes, with gates at intervals. "High 
 farming" has wrought great changes, not always to the 
 profit of our farmers, whose moated homesteads here- 
 abouts bear old-world names — Woodcroft Hall, Blood 
 Hall, Flemings Hall, Crows Hall, Windwhistle Hall, and 
 suchlike. " High farming," moreover, has swallowed up 
 most of the smaller holdings. Fifty years ago there were 
 ten or a dozen farms in Monk Soham, each farm with its 
 
22 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 resident tenant ; now the number is reduced to less than 
 half. It seems a pity, for a twofold reason : first, because 
 the farm-labourer thus loses all chance of advancement ; 
 and secondly, because the English yeoman will be soon 
 as extinct as the bustard. 
 
 Tom Pepper was the last of our Monk Soham yeomen 
 — a man, said my father, of the stuff that furnished 
 Cromwell with his Ironsides. He was a strong Dis- 
 senter ; but they were none the worse friends for that, 
 not even though Tom, holding forth in his Little Bethel, 
 might sometimes denounce the corruptions of the Estab- 
 lishment. " The clargy," he once declared, " they're 
 here, and they ain't here ; they're like pigs in the garden, 
 and yeou can't git 'em out." On which an old woman, 
 a member of the flock, sprang up and cried, "That's 
 right, Brother Pepper, kitch 'em by the fifth button- 
 hole ! "^ Tom went once to hear Gavazzi lecture at De- 
 benham, and next day my father asked him how he 
 liked it. " Well," he said, " I thowt I should ha' beared 
 that chap they call Jerry Baldry, but I din't. Howsom- 
 diver, this one that spook fare to laa it into th' owd Pope 
 good tidily." Another time my father said something to 
 
 1 I don't think it was Tom who employed tliat truly Suffolk simile — " I look 
 upon this here chapel as the bilcr, yeou togither as the dumplins, and I'm the 
 spoon that stars yeou up." 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 23 
 
 him about the Emperor of Russia. " Rooshur," said 
 Tom; "what's that him yeou call Prooshur ? " And 
 yet again, when a concrete wall was built on to a 
 neighbouring farm-building, Tom remarked contempt- 
 uously that he " din't think much of them consecrated 
 walls." Withal, what an honest, sensible soul it was ! 
 
 Midway between the rectory and Tom Pepper's is the 
 " Guildhall," an ancient house, though probably far less 
 ancient than its name. It is parish property, and for 
 years has served as an almshouse for ten or a dozen old 
 people. My father used to read the Bible to them, and 
 there was a black cat once which would jump on to his 
 knees, so at last it was shut up in a cupboard. The top 
 of this cupboard, however, above the door, was separated 
 from the room only by a piece of pasted paper ; and 
 through this paper the cat's head suddenly emerged. 
 " Cat, you bitch ! " said old Mrs Wilding, and my father 
 could read no more. Nay, his father (then in his last 
 illness) laughed too when he heard the story. 
 
 The average age of those old Guildhall people must 
 have been much over sixty, and some of them were 
 nearly centenarians — Charity Herring, who was always 
 setting fire to her bed with a worn-out warming-pan, and 
 James Burrows, of whom my father made this jotting in 
 one of his note-books : " In the year 1853 I buried James 
 
24 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Burrows of this parish at the reputed age of one hundred 
 years. Probably he was nearly, if not altogether that age. 
 Talking with him a few years before his death, I asked if 
 his father had lived to be an old man, and he said that he 
 had. I asked him then about his grandfather, and his 
 answer was that he had lived to be a ' wonnerful owd man.' 
 ' Do you remember your grandfather ? ' ' Right well : I 
 was a big bor when he died.' ' Did he use to tell you 
 of things which he remembered ? ' ' Yes, he was wery 
 fond of talking about 'em : he used to say he could 
 remember the Dutch king coming over.' James Burrows 
 could not read or write, nor his father probably before 
 him : so that this statement must have been based on 
 purely traditional grounds. Assume he was born in 1755 
 he would have been a ' big bor,' fifteen years old, in 1770 ; 
 and assume that his grandfather died in 1770 aged ninety- 
 six, this would make him to have been born in 1675, 
 fourteen or fifteen years before William of Orange 
 landed." 
 
 Then there were Tom and Susan Kemp. He came 
 from somewhere in Norfolk, the scene, I remember, of 
 the ' Babes in the Wood,' and he wore the only smock- 
 frock in the parish, where the ruling fashion was 
 " thunder - and - lightning " sleeve - waistcoats, Susan's 
 Sunday dress was a clean lilac print gown, made very 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 25 
 
 short, so as to show white stockings and boots with 
 cloth tops. Over the dress was pinned a little black 
 shawl, and her bonnet was unusually large, of black 
 velvet or silk, with a great white frill inside it. She 
 was troubled at times with a mysterious complaint called 
 "the wind," which she thus described, her finger tracing 
 the course it followed within her : " That fare to go round 
 and round, and then out ta come a-raspin' and a-roarin'." 
 Another of her ailments was swelled ankles. "Oh, Mr 
 Groome ! " she would say, " if yeou could but see my 
 poare legs, yeou'd niver forget 'em ; " and then, if not 
 stopped, she would proceed to pull up her short gown 
 and show them. If my father had been out visiting 
 more than to her seemed wise, she would, when he 
 told her where he had been to, say: "Ah! there yeou 
 go a-rattakin' about, and when yeou dew come home 
 yeou've a cowd, I'll be bound," which often enough was 
 the case. Susan's contempt was great for poor folks 
 dressing up their children smartly; and she would say 
 with withering scorn, "What do har child want with 
 all them wandykes ? " — t^aw^j'^es being lace trimmings 
 of any sort. Was it of spoilt children that she spoke 
 as " hectorin' and bullockin' about " ? — certainly it was of 
 one of us, a late riser, that she said, " I'd soon out-of- 
 bed har if I lived there." 
 
26 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Susan's treatment of Harry Collins, a crazy man sub- 
 ject to fits, was wise and kind. Till Harry came to live 
 with the Kemps, he had been kept in bed to save trouble. 
 Susan would have no more of bed for him than for ordin- 
 ary folks, but sent him on many errands and kept him in 
 excellent order. Her commands to him usually began 
 with, " Co', Henry, be stirrin' ; " and he stood in whole- 
 some awe of her, and obeyed her like a child. His fits 
 were curious, for " one minute he'd be cussin' and swearin', 
 and the next fall a-prayin'." Once, too, he " leapt out of 
 the winder like a roebuck." Blind James Seaman, the 
 other occupant of Susan's back-room, came of good old 
 yeoman ancestry. He wore a long blue coat with brass 
 buttons ; and his favourite seat was the sunny bank near 
 our front gate. 
 
 In the room over Susan Kemp's lived Will Ruffles and 
 his wife, a very faithful old couple. The wife failed first. 
 She had hurt herself a good deal with a fall down the 
 rickety stairs. Will saw to her to the last, and watched 
 carefully over her. The schoolmistress then, a Miss 
 Hindmarsh, took a great liking for the old man ; and 
 a friend of hers, a widow lady in London, though she had 
 never seen him, made him a regular weekly allowance to 
 the end of his life — two shillings, half-a-crown, and some- 
 times more. This gave Will many little comforts. Once 
 
A Suffolk Parson. ' 27 
 
 when my sister took him his allowance, he told her how, 
 when he was a young man, a Gipsy woman told hmi he 
 should be better off at the end of his Hfe than at the 
 beginning; and "she spook truth," he said, "but how 
 she knew it I coon't saa." Will suffered at times from 
 rheumatism, and had great faith in some particular green 
 herb pills, which were to be bought only at one particular 
 shop in Ipswich. My sister was once deputed to buy him 
 a box of these pills, and he told her afterwards, " Them 
 there pills did me a lot of good, and that show what 
 fooks saa about rheumatics bein' in the boones ain't trew, 
 for how could them there pills 'a got into the boones ? " 
 He was very fond of my father, whom he liked to joke 
 with him. "Mr Groome," he once said, "dew mob 
 
 me so." 
 
 Will, like many other old people in the parish, believed 
 in witchcraft,— was himself, indeed, a " wise man " of a 
 kind. My father once told him about a woman who had 
 fits. "Ah!" old Will said, " she've fallen into bad 
 hands." " What do you mean ? " asked my father ; and 
 then Will said that years before in Monk Soham there 
 was a woman took bad just like this one, and "there 
 wern't but me and John Abbott in the place could git 
 her right." " What did you do ? " said my father. " We 
 two, John and I, sat by a clear fire; and we had to bile 
 
28 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 some of the clippins of the woman's nails and some of her 
 hair; and when ta biled " — he paused. "What hap- 
 pened?" asked my father; "did you hear anything?" 
 " Hear anything ! I should think we did. When ta 
 biled, we h'ard a loud shrike a-roarin' up the chimley ; 
 and yeou may depind upon it, she warn't niver bad no 
 more." 
 
 Once my father showed Will a silhoueUe of his father, 
 old Mr Groome of Earl Soham, a portly gentleman, 
 dressed in the old-fashioned style. " Ruffles, who is 
 this ? " he asked, knowing that Will had known his 
 father well, and thinking he would recognise it. After 
 looking at it carefully for some time. Will said, " That's 
 yar son, the sailor." My eldest brother at that time 
 might be something over twenty, and bore not the 
 faintest resemblance to our grandfather ; still. Will knew 
 that he had been much abroad, and fancied a tropical sun 
 might have blackened him. 
 
 By his own accounts. Will's feats of strength as a 
 younger man, in the way of reaping, mowing, cS:c., were 
 remarkable; and there was one great story, with much 
 in it about "goolden guineas," of the wonderful sale of 
 corn that he effected for one of his masters. At the 
 rectory gatherings on Christmas night Will was one of 
 the principal singers, his chef-d'oeuvre "Oh! silver [query 
 
A Suffolk Parso7t. 29 
 
 Sylvia] is a charming thing," and "The Helmingham 
 Wolunteers." That famous corps was raised by Lord 
 Dysart to repel " Bony's " threatened invasion ; its 
 drummer was John Noble, afterwards the wheelwright 
 in Monk Soham. Once after drill Lord Dysart said to 
 him: "You played that very well, John Noble;" and 
 " I know't, my lord, I know't," was John's answer — an 
 answer that has passed into a Suffolk proverb, " I know't, 
 my lord, I know't, as said John Noble." 
 
 Mrs Curtis was quite a character— a Httle woman, with 
 sharp brown eyes that took in everything. Her tongue 
 was smooth, her words were soft, and yet she could say 
 bitter things. She had had a large family, who married 
 and settled in different parts. One son had gone to 
 New Zealand— "a country, Dr Fletcher tell me, dear 
 Miss, as is outside the frame of the earth, and where the 
 sun go round t'other way." It was for one of her sons, 
 when he was ill, that my mother sent a dose of castor- 
 oil ; and next day the boy sent to ask for "some more 
 of Madam Groome's nice gravy." Another boy, Ephraim, 
 once behaved so badly in church that my father had to 
 stop in his sermon and tell Mrs Curtis to take her son 
 out. This she did; and from the pulpit my father saw 
 her driving the unfortunate Ephraim before her with 
 her umbrella, banging him with it first on one side and 
 
30 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 then on the other. Mrs Curtis it was who prescribed 
 the honey-plaster for a sore throat. "Put on a honey- 
 plaster, neighbour dear; that will draw the misery out 
 of you," And Mrs Curtis it was who, having quarrelled 
 with another neighbour, came to my father to relate 
 her wrongs : " Me a poor lone widow woman, and she 
 ha' got a father to protect her." The said father was 
 old James Burrows, already spoken of, who was over 
 ninety, and had long been bedridden. 
 . Mrs Mullinger was a strange old woman. People said 
 she had an evil eye ; and if she took a dislike to any 
 one and looked evilly at their pigs, then the pigs would 
 fall ill and die. Also, when she lived next door to 
 another cottage, with only a wall dividing the two 
 chimneys, if old Mrs Mullinger sat by her chimney in 
 a bad temper, no one on the other side could light a 
 fire, try as they might. 
 
 Phoebe Smith and her husband Sam lived in one of the 
 downstair rooms. At one time of her life Phoebe kept a 
 little dame's school on the Green. One class of her chil- 
 dren, who were reading the Miracles, were called " Little 
 Miracles"; and whenever my father went in, "Little 
 Miracles" were called up by that name to read to him. 
 Old Phoebe had intelligence above the common ; she read 
 her Bible much, and thought over it. She was fond, too. 
 
-"Mill 
 
 X 
 
 D 
 O 
 
 Q 
 
 < 
 
 o 
 
 o 
 o 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 31 
 
 of having my sister read hymns to her, and would often 
 Hft her hands in admiration at any passage she partic- 
 ularly liked. She commended a cotton dress my sister 
 had on one day when she went to see her — a blue Oxford 
 shirting, trimmed with a darker shade. " It is a nice 
 solemn dress," she said, as she lifted a piece to examine 
 it more closely ; " there's nothing flummocky about it." 
 
 Among the other Guildhall people were old Mrs 
 "Ratty" Kemp, widow of the Rat-catcher;^ old one- 
 eyed Mrs Bond, and her deaf son John ; old Mrs Wright, 
 a great smoker ; and Mrs Burrows, a soldier's widow, our 
 only Irishwoman, from whom Monk Soham conceived no 
 favourable opinion of the Sister Isle. Of people outside 
 the Guildhall I will mention but one, James Wilding, 
 a splendid type of the Suffolk labourer. He was a big 
 strong man, whose strength served him one very ill turn. 
 He was out one day after a hare, and a farm-bailiff, meet- 
 ing him, tried to take his gun ; James resisted, and snapped 
 the man's arm. For this he got a year in Ipswich jail, 
 where, however, he learnt to read, and formed a strong 
 attachment for the chaplain, Mr Daniel. Afterwards, 
 whenever any of us were driving over to Ipswich, and 
 James met us, he would always say, " If yeou see Mr 
 
 1 Nicknames are very common — "Wedgy," " Shadder," "Stumpy," "Bus- 
 kins," "Colly," &c. 
 
32 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Daniel, dew yeou give him my love." Finally, an emi- 
 gration agent got hold of James, and induced him to 
 emigrate, with his wife, his large family, and his old one- 
 legged mother, to somewhere near New Orleans. " How 
 are you going, Wilding ? " asked my father a few days 
 before they started. " I don't fare to know rightly," was 
 the answer ; " but we're goin' to sleep the fust night at 
 Debenham" (a village four miles off), "and that'll kinder 
 break the jarney." They went, but the Southern States 
 and the negroes were not at all to their liking, and the 
 last thing heard of them was they had moved to Canada. 
 
 So James Wilding is gone, and the others are all of 
 them dead ; but some stories still remain to be cleared 
 off. There was the old farmer at the tithe dinner, who, 
 on having some bread-sauce handed to him, extracted a 
 great " dollop " on the top of his knife, tasted it, and said, 
 " Don't chuse none." There was the other who remarked 
 of a particular pudding, that he "could rise in the night- 
 time and eat it " ; and there was the third, who, sup- 
 posing he should get but one plate, shovelled his fish- 
 bones under the table. There was the boy in Monk 
 Soham school who, asked to define an earthquake, said, 
 "It is when the 'arth shug itself, and swallow up the 
 'arth " ; and there was his schoolmate, who said that 
 " America was discovered by British Columbia." There 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 33 
 
 was old Mullinger of Earl Soham, who thought it "wrong 
 of fooks to go up in a ballune, as that fare ^ so bumptious 
 to the Almighty." There was the actual balloon, which 
 had gone up somewhere in the West of England, and 
 which came down in (I think) the neighbouring parish of 
 Bedfield. As it floated over Monk Soham, the aeronaut 
 shouted, " Where am I ? " to some harvesters, who, stand- 
 ing in a row, their forefingers pointed at him, shouted 
 back, " Yeou're in a ballune, bor." There was old X., 
 who, whenever my father visited him, would grumble, 
 talk scandal, and abuse all his neighbours, always, how- 
 ever, winding up piously with " But 'tis well." There 
 was the boy whom my father put in the stocks, but who 
 escaped by unlacing his " high-lows," and so withdrawing 
 his feet. There was the clergyman, preaching in a strange 
 church, who asked to have a glass of water in the pulpit, 
 and who, after the sermon, remarked to the clerk in the 
 vestry, "That might have been gin-and-water, John, for 
 all the people could tell." And, taking the duty again 
 there next Sunday, he found to his horror it was gin-and- 
 water : "I took the hint, sir — I took the hint," quoth 
 John, from the clerk's desk below. There was the Monk 
 Soham woman who, when she got a letter from her son in 
 Hull, told the curate that "that did give me a tarn at fust, 
 
 ^ Seemed. 
 C 
 
34 " Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 for I thought that come from the hot place." There was 
 another Monk Soham woman who told my sister one 
 day that she had been reading in the Bible "about 
 that there gal Haggar," and who, after discussing the 
 story of Hagar, went on, " When that gal grew up she 
 went and preached to some fooks in a city that were 
 livin' bad lives." My sister did not know about this, so 
 inquired where she had found it, and she turned to the 
 Book of the Prophet Haggai — Hagar and Haggai to her 
 were one and the same. There was the manufacturer 
 of artificial manures who set up a carriage and crest; 
 and a friend asked my father what the motto would 
 be. " Mente et manu res," was the ready answer. 
 There was the concert at Ipswich, where the chair- 
 man, a very precise young clergyman, announced that 
 " the Rev. Robert Groome will sing (ahem !) ' Thomas 
 Bowling.' " The song was a failure ; my father each time 
 was so sorely tempted to adopt the new version. There 
 was the old woman whom my father heard warning 
 her daughter, about to travel for the first time by rail, 
 " Whativer yeou do, my dear, mind yeou don't sit nigh 
 the biler." There was the old maiden lady, who every 
 morning after breakfast read an Ode of Horace ; and 
 the other maiden lady, a kinswoman of my father's, who 
 practised her scales regularly long after she was sixty. 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 35 
 
 She, if you crushed her in an argument, in turn crushed 
 you with, " Well, there it is." There was much besides, 
 but memory fails, and space. 
 
 From country clergyman to country archdeacon may 
 seem no startling transition ; yet it meant a great change 
 in my father's tranquil life. For one thing it took him 
 twice a-year up to London, to Convocation ; and in 
 London he met with many old friends and new. Then 
 there were frequent outings to Norwich, and the annual 
 visitations and the Charge. On the first day of his first 
 visitation, at Eye, there was the usual luncheon, and the 
 usual very small modicum of wine. Lunch over, the 
 Rev. Richard Cobbold, the author of ' Margaret Catch- 
 pole,' proposed my father's health in a fervid oration, 
 which wound up thus : " Gentlemen, I call upon you to 
 drink the health of our new archdeacon, — to drink it, 
 gentlemen, in flowing bumpers." It sounded glorious, but 
 the decanters were empty ; and my father had to order 
 (and pay for) two dozen of sherry. At an Ipswich visita- 
 tion there was the customary roll-call of the clergy, among 
 whom was a new-comer, a Scotchman, Mr Colquhoun. 
 " Mr — , Mr — ," faltered the apparitor, coming unexpectedly 
 on this uncouth name ; suddenly he rose a-tiptoe and to 
 the emergency, — " Mr Cockahoon." 
 
 In one of the deaneries my father found a churchyard 
 
36 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 partly sown with wheat. " Really, Mr Z ," he said 
 
 to the incumbent, " I must say I don't like to see this." 
 And the old churchwarden chimed in, ''That's what I 
 saa tew, Mr Archdeacon ; I saa to our parson, ' Yeou 
 go whatin' it and whatin' it, why don't yeou tater it ? ' " 
 This found its way into ' Punch,' with a capital drawing 
 by Charles Keene, whom my father met often at Fitz- 
 Gerald's. But there is another unrecorded story of an 
 Irish clergyman, the Rev. "Lucius O'Grady." He had 
 quarrelled with one of his churchwardens, whose name I 
 forget ; the other's was Waller. So my father went over 
 to arbitrate between the disputants, and Mr "O'Grady" 
 concluded an impassioned statement of his wrongs with 
 "Voila tout, Mr Archdeacon, voila tout." "Waller 
 tew," quoth churchwarden No. i; "what ha' he to dew 
 with it? " And there was the visit to that woful church, 
 damp, rotten, ruinous. The inspection over, the rector 
 said to my father, "Now, Mr Archdeacon, that we've 
 done the old church, you must come and see my new 
 stables." "Sir," said my father, "when your church 
 is in decent order, I shall be happy to see your new 
 stables." And "the next time," he told me, "I really 
 could ask to see them." 
 
 Two London reminiscences, and I have done. A 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 37 
 
 former Monk Soham schoolmistress had married the 
 usher of the Marlborough Street police court. My father 
 went to see them, and as he was coming away, an 
 officious Irishman opened the cab-door for him, with 
 "Good luck to your Rivirince, and did they let you 
 off aizy?" And once my father was waiting on one' 
 of the many platforms of Clapham Junction, when 
 suddenly a fashionably dressed lady dropped on her 
 knees before him, exclaiming, "Your blessing, holy 
 Father." "God bless me!" cried my father, — then 
 added quietly, "and you too, my dear lady." 
 
 So at last I come to my father's own Suffolk stories. 
 In 1877-78 I made my first venture in letters as editor 
 for the 'Ipswich Journal' of a series of "Suffolk Notes 
 and Queries." They ran through fifty-four numbers, 
 my own set of which is, I fancy, almost unique. I had 
 a goodly list of contributors— all friends of my father's— 
 as Mr FitzGerald, Mr Donne, Captain Brooke of Ufford, 
 Mr Chappell, Mr Aldis Wright, Bishop Ryle, and Pro- 
 fessors Earle, Cowell, and Skeat. Of them I was duly 
 proud; still, my father and I wrote, between us, two- 
 thirds of the whole. He was the " Habitans in Alto " 
 {High Suffolk, forsooth), alia^ "Rector," alias " Phil- 
 ologus," "Hippicus," &c. — how we used to laugh at 
 
38 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 those aliases. Among his contributions were three papers 
 on the rare old library of Helmingham Hall (Lord Tolle- 
 mache's), four on Samuel Ward, the Puritan preacher 
 of Ipswich, three on Suffolk minstrelsy, and these 
 sketches written in the Suffolk dialect. Of that dialect 
 my father was a past-master; once and once only did 
 I know him nonplussed by a Suffolk phrase. This was 
 in the school at Monk Soham, where a small boy one 
 day had been put in the corner. "What for?" asked 
 my father; and a chorus of voices answered, "He ha' 
 bin tittymatauterin," which meant, it seems, playing at 
 see-saw. I retain, of course, my father's own spelling ; 
 but he always himself maintained that to reproduce the 
 dialect phonetically is next to impossible — that, for 
 instance, there is a delicate nuance in the Suffolk pro- 
 nunciation of dog, only faintly suggested by dawg. 
 
 I. 
 
 OLD TIMES. 
 
 Fooks alluz siia as they git old, 
 That things look wusser evry day ; 
 
 They alluz sed so, I consate ; 
 
 Leastwise I've h'ard my mother siia. 
 
A Suffolk Parson, 39 
 
 When she was growed up, a big gal, 
 
 And went to sarvice at the Hall, 
 She han't but one stuff gownd to wear, 
 
 And not the lissest mite of shawl. 
 
 But now yeou caan't tell whue is whue ; 
 
 Which is the missus, which the maid. 
 There ain't no tellin' ; for a gal, 
 
 Arter she's got her wages paid. 
 
 Will put 'em all upon her back, 
 
 And look as grand as grand can be ; 
 
 My poor old mother would be stamm'd ^ 
 Her gal should iver look like she. 
 
 And 'taint the lissest bit o' use 
 
 To tell 'em anything at all ; 
 They'll only laff, or else begin 
 
 All manner o' hard names to call. 
 
 Praps arter all it 'tain't the truth. 
 
 That one time's wusser than the t'other ; 
 
 Praps Fm a-gittin' old myself, 
 
 And fare to talk like my old mother. 
 
 1 Amazed. 
 
40 Two S7iffolk Friends. 
 
 I shaan't dew nowt by talkin' so, 
 I'd better try the good old plan, 
 
 Of spakin' sparing of most folks. 
 And dewin' all the good I can. 
 
 J. D. 
 
 II. 
 
 My father used to repeat one stanza of an old song ; I 
 wonder whether the remainder still exists in any living 
 memory. That one stanza ran : — 
 
 " The roaring boys of Pakefield, 
 Oh, how they all do thrive ! 
 They had but one poor parson. 
 And him they buried alive." 
 
 Whether the prosperity of Pakefield was to be dated or 
 derived from the fact of their burying their " one poor 
 parson " is a matter of dangerous speculation, and had 
 better be left in safe obscurity ; else other places might 
 be tempted to make trial of the successful plan. But 
 can any one send a copy of the whole song ? 
 
 From the same authority I give a stanza of another 
 song : — 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 4-1 
 
 " The cackling old hen she began to collogue, 
 Says she unto the fox, ' You're a stinking old rogue ; 
 Your scent it is so strong, I do wish you'd keep away ; ' 
 The cackling old hen she began for to say." 
 
 The tune, as I still remember it, is as fine as the words— 
 for fine they certainly are, as an honest expression of opin- 
 ion, capable of a large application to other than foxes. 
 
 I cannot vouch for a like antiquity for the following 
 sea-verses ; but they are so good that I venture to append 
 them to their more ancient brethren : — 
 
 " And now we haul to the ' Dog and Bell,' 
 Where there's good hquor for to sell ; 
 In come old Archer with a smile, 
 Saying, ' Drink, my lads, 'tis worth your while.' 
 
 Ah ! but when our money's all gone and spent, 
 And none to be borrowed nor none to be lent ; 
 In comes old Archer with a frown. 
 Saying, ' Get up, Jack, let John sit down.' " 
 
 Alas, poor Jack ! and John Countryman too, when the 
 like result arrives. J- ^' 
 
 Fifteen years after my father had penned this note, and 
 more than two years after his death, I received from a 
 
42 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 West Indian reader of ' Maga,' who had heard it sung by 
 a naval officer (since deceased), the following version of the 
 second sea-song : — 
 
 " Cruising in the Channel with the wind North-east, 
 Our ship she sails nine knots at least ; 
 Our thundering guns we will let fly, 
 We will let fly over the twinkling sky — 
 Huzza ! we are homeward bound, 
 Huzza ! we are homeward bound. 
 
 And when we arrive at the Plymouth Dock, 
 
 The girls they will around us flock, 
 
 Saying, ' Welcome, Jack, with your three years' pay, 
 
 For we see you are homeward bound to-day ' — 
 
 Huzza ! we are homeward bound, 
 
 Huzza ! we are homeward bound. 
 
 And when we come to the ^ Bar, 
 
 Or any other port in so far. 
 
 Old Okey meets us with a smile. 
 
 Saying, ' Drink, my lads, 'tis worth your while' — 
 
 Huzza ! we are homeward bound. 
 
 Huzza ! we are homeward bound. 
 
 Ah ! but when our money's all gone and spent. 
 And none to be borrowed, nor none to be lent, 
 Old Okey meets us with a frown. 
 Saying, ' Get up. Jack, let John sit down, 
 
 For I see you are outward bound ; ' 
 
 For, see, we are outward bound." 
 
 1 Word forgotten. 
 
A Suffolk Parson, 43 
 
 III. 
 
 ONE OF JOHN DUTFEN'S "QUEERIES." 
 
 I am werry much obligated to yeou, Mr Editer, for 
 printin' my lines. I hain't got no more at spresent, 
 so I'll send yeou a queery instead. I axed our skule- 
 master, " What's a queery ? " and he saa, " Suffen ^ 
 queer," so I think I can sute yeou here. 
 
 When I was a good big chap, I lived along with Mr 
 Cooper, of Thraanson.' He was a big man; but, lawk ! 
 he was wonnerful paad over with rheumatics, that he 
 was. I lived in the house, and arter I had done up my 
 bosses, and looked arter my stock, I alluz went to bed 
 arly. One night I h'ard ^ my missus halloin' at the bot- 
 tom of the stairs. "John," sez she, "yeou must git up 
 di-rectly, and go for the doctor ; yar master's took werry 
 bad." So I hulled * on my clothes, put the saddle on owd 
 Boxer, and warn't long gittin to the doctor's, for the owd 
 boss stromed along stammingly,^ he did. When the 
 doctor come, he saa to master, " Yeou ha' got the lump- 
 ague in yar lines ; ^ yeou must hiv a hot baath." " What's 
 that?" sez master. "Oh!" sez the doctor, "yeou must 
 hiv yar biggest tub full o' hot water, and laa in it ten 
 
 ^ Something. - Thrandeston. ^ Heard. 
 
 ■* Flung. ^ Amazingly. ^ Loins. 
 
44 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 minnits." Sune as he was gone, missus saa, " Dew yeou 
 go and call Sam Driver, and I'll hit^ the copper." When 
 we cum back, she saa, " Dew yeou tew- take the mashin'- 
 tub up-stairs, and when the water biles yeou cum for it." 
 So, byne by we filled the tub, and missus saa, "John, 
 dew yeou take yar master's hid ; ^ and Sam, yeou take his 
 feet, and drop 'im in." We had a rare job to lift him, 
 I warrant ; but we dropt him in, and, O lawk ! how he 
 did screech ! — yeou might ha' h'ard 'im a mile off. He 
 splounced out o' the tub flop upon the floor, and dew all 
 we could we coon't 'tice him in agin. "Yeou willans," 
 sez he, "yeou've kilt me." But arter a bit we got him 
 to bed, and he laa kind o' easy, till the doctor cum next 
 mornin'. Then he towd the doctor how bad he was. 
 The doctor axed me what we'd done. So I towd him, 
 and he saa, " Was the water warm ? " " Warm ! " sez 
 I, " 'twould ommost ha' scalt a hog." Oh, how he did 
 laff! "Why, John bor," sez he, "yeou must ha' meant 
 to bile yar master alive." Howsomdiver, master lost the 
 himp - ague and nivver sed nothin' about the tub, 'cept 
 when he saa to me sometimes kind o' joky, "John bor, 
 dew yeou alluz kip "* out o' hot water." 
 
 John Dutfen.'* 
 
 ^ Heat. 2 j)q yQu t^Q :! iie^^i 
 
 '' Do you always keep. ^ Dittfoii, Ijiidlc in cart harness. 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 45 
 
 This story has a sequel. My father told it once at the 
 dinner-table of one of the canons in Norwich. Every one 
 laughed more or less, all but one, the Rev. " Hervey Du 
 Bois," a rural dean from the Fens. He alone made no 
 sign. But he was staying in the house ; and that night 
 the Canoness was aroused from her sleep by a strange 
 gurgling sound proceeding from his room. She listened 
 and listened, till, convinced that their guest must be in 
 a fit, she at last arose, and listened outside his door. A 
 fit he was in — sure enough — of laughter. He was sitting 
 up in bed, rocking backwards and forwards, and ever and 
 again ejaculating, " Why, John bor, yeou must ha' meant 
 to bile yar master alive." And then he went off into 
 another roar. 
 
 IV. 
 
 CAPTAIN WARD. 
 
 ' ' That piece of song, 
 That old and antique song we heard last night." 
 
 —'Twelfth Night,' II. iv. 
 
 This old song was lately taken down from the lips of an 
 old Suffolk (Monk Soham) labourer, who has known it 
 and sung it since he was a boy. The song is of much 
 
46 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 repute in the parish where he Hves, and may possibly be 
 already in print. At all events it is a genuine " old and 
 antique " song, whose hero may have been one of the sea 
 captains or rovers who continued their privateering in the 
 Spanish Main and elsewhere, and upon all comers, long 
 after all licence from the Crown had ceased. The Rain- 
 bow was the name of one of the ships which formed the 
 English fleet when they defeated the Spanish Armada in 
 1588, and she was re-commissioned, apparently about 1618. 
 The two verses in brackets are from the version of another 
 labourer in my parish, who also furnished some minor 
 vavicB lectiones, as "robber" for "rover," "Blake" for 
 "Wake," &c. Rector. 
 
 Come, all ye valiant soldiers 
 That march to follow the drum, 
 
 Let us go meet with Captain Ward 
 When on the sea he come. 
 
 He is as big a rover 
 
 As ever you did hear, 
 Yeou hain't h'ard of such a rover 
 
 For many a hundred year. 
 
A Suffolk Parson, 47 
 
 There was three ships come saihng 
 
 From the Indies to the West, 
 Well loaded with silks and satins 
 
 And welwets of the best. 
 
 Who should they meet but Captain Ward, 
 
 It being a bad meeting, 
 He robbed them of all their wealth. 
 
 Bid them go tell the King. 
 
 [*' Go ye home, go ye home," says Captain Ward, 
 
 " And tell your King from me. 
 If he reign King of the countrie, 
 
 I will be King at Sea."] 
 
 Away went these three gallant ships, 
 
 Sailing down of the main. 
 Telling to the King the news 
 
 That Ward at sea would reign. 
 
 The King he did prepare a ship, 
 
 A ship of gallant fame. 
 She's called the gallant Rainbow — 
 
 Din't yeou niver hear her name ? 
 
48 Tzvo Suffolk Friends. 
 
 She was as well purwided 
 
 As e'er a ship could be, 
 She had three hundred men on board 
 
 To bear her company. 
 
 Oh then the gallant Rainbow 
 Sailed where the rover laid ; 
 
 " Where is the captain of your ship ? " 
 The gallant Rainbow said. 
 
 " Here am I," says Captain Ward, 
 
 " My name I never deny ; 
 But if you be the King's good ship, 
 
 You're welcome to pass by." 
 
 "Yes, I am one of the King's good ships, 
 That I am to your great grief, 
 
 Whilst here I understand you lay 
 Playing the rogue and thief." 
 
 " Oh ! here am I," says Captain Ward ; 
 
 " I value you not one pin ; 
 If you are bright brass without, 
 
 I am true steel within." 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 49 
 
 At four o'clock o' the morning 
 
 They did begin to fight, 
 And so they did continue 
 
 Till nine or ten at night. 
 
 [Says Captain Ward unto his men, 
 
 " My boys, what shall we do ? 
 We have not got one shot on board. 
 
 We shall get overthrow.] 
 
 " Fight you on, fight you on," says Captain Ward, 
 
 " Your sport will pleasure be. 
 And if you fight for a month or more 
 
 Your master I will be." 
 
 Oh ! then the gallant Rainbow 
 
 Went raging down of the main, 
 Saying, " There lay proud Ward at sea, 
 
 And there he must remain." 
 
 " Captain Wake and Captain Drake, 
 
 And good Lord Henerie, 
 If I had one of them alive, 
 
 They'd bring proud Ward to me." 
 D 
 
50 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Appended was this editorial note: "The date of 
 Captain Ward is approximately established by Andrew 
 Barker's ' Report of the two famous Pirates, Captain 
 Ward, and Danseker ' (Lond. i6og, 4to), and by Richard 
 Daburn's ' A Christian turn'd Turke, or the tragical Lives 
 and Deaths of the two famous Pyrates, Ward and Dansi- 
 ker. As it hath beene publickly acted ' (Lond. 1612, 
 4to). 
 
 And the next week there was the following answer : — 
 
 " Having found that in Chappell's ' Popular Music of the 
 Olden Time ' there was mention made of a tune called ' Cap- 
 tain Ward,' I wrote to Mr Chappell himself. He says about 
 the ballad : ' For " A famous sea-fight between Captain Ward 
 and the Rainbow" see Roxburghe Collection, v. 3, fol. 56, 
 printed for F, Coles, and another with printer's name cut off 
 in the same volume, fol. 654; an edition in the Pepys Col- 
 lection, V. 4, fol. 202, by Clarke Thackeray and Passinger ; 
 two in the Bayford, ""-^^ and ^^a.j^o^ ^j^^^^ ^^^ ^y ^y^ 
 Onbey, and the second in white letter. Further, two Aldermary 
 Church Yard editions in Rox. v. 3, folios 652 and 861. The 
 ballad has an Elizabethan cut about it, beginning, "Strike up, 
 you lusty Gallants." If I remember rightly. Ward was a famous 
 pirate of Elizabeth's reign, about the same time as Uansekar the 
 Dutchman.' 
 
 "I went down myself to Magdalene, and saw the copy in 
 the Pepysian Library there. It is entirely different from that 
 in the ' Suffolk N. and Q.,' though at the same time there are 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 51 
 
 slight resemblances in expression. As ballads they are quite 
 distinct. I suppose the other copies to which Mr Chappell 
 refers are like the Pepysian, which begins as he says, ' Strike 
 up, ye lusty Gallants.' 
 
 "W. Aldis Wright. 
 "Cambridge." 
 
 V. 
 
 A SOVEREIGN REMEDY. 
 
 Not many years since, not far from Ipswich, some 
 practical agriculturists met — as, for all I know, they may 
 meet now — at a Farmers' Club to discuss such questions 
 as bear practically upon their business and interests. 
 One evening the subject for discussion was, " How to 
 cure hot yards," i.e., yards where the manure has become 
 so heated as to be hurtful to the cattle's feet. Many 
 remedies were suggested, some no doubt well worth 
 trying, others dealing too much maybe in small-talk of 
 acids and alkalis. None of the party was satisfied 
 that a cure had been found which stood the test of 
 general experience. Then they asked an elderly farmer, 
 who had preserved a profound silence through all the 
 discussion, what he would recommend. His answer was 
 very true and to the point. " Gentlemen," he said, 
 "yeou shu'nt have let it got so." Hippicus. 
 
52 Two Sttffolk Friends. 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE ONLY DARTER. 
 A SUFFOLK clergyman's REMINISCENCE.^ 
 
 Our young parson said to me t'other daa, "John," sez 
 he, " din't yeou nivver hev a darter?" " Sar," sez I, 
 " I had one once, but she ha' been dead close on thatty 
 years." And then I towd him about my poor mor.^ 
 
 " I lost my fust wife thatty-three years ago. She left 
 me with six bors and Susan. She was the owdest of 
 them all, tarned sixteen when her mother died. She was 
 a fine jolly gal, with lots of sperit. I coon't be alluz at 
 home, and tho' I'd nivver a wadd^ to saa aginst Susan, 
 yet I thowt I wanted some one to look arter her and the 
 bors. Gals want a mother more than bors. So arter a 
 year I married my second wife, and a rale good wife she 
 ha' bin to me. But Susan coon't git on with her. She'd 
 dew* what she was towd, but 'twarn't done pleasant, and 
 
 1 This story is less unknown than its fellows, for in 1878 Mr FitzGerald got 
 some copies of it reprinted at Woodhridge to give to his friends. I may well, 
 however, republish it, for since the appearance of FitzGerald's ^Letters,' in 
 which it is referred to (pp. 427, 428), I have had many requests for copies, — 
 requests with which I was unable to comply, myself having only one copy. 
 2 Mawther, girl. '-^ Word. •* Do. 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 53 
 
 when she spook she spook so short. My wife was werry 
 patient with her ; but dew all she could, she nivver could 
 git on with Susan. 
 
 " I'd a married sister in London, whue cum down to 
 see us at Whissuntide. She see how things fared, and 
 she saa to me, * John,' sez she, ' dew yeou let Susan go 
 back with me, and I'll git her a good place and see arter 
 her.' So 'twas sattled. Susan was all for goin', and when 
 she went she kiss't me and all the bors, but she nivver sed 
 nawthin' to my wife, 'cept just ' Good-bye.' She fared to 
 git a nice quite ^ place ; but then my sister left London, 
 and Susan's missus died, and so she had to git a place 
 where she could. So she got a place where they took in 
 lodgers, and Susan and her missus did all the cookin' and 
 waitin' between 'em. Susan sed arterwards that 'twarn't 
 what she had to dew, but the runnin' up-stairs ; that's what 
 killt her. There was one owd gentleman, who lived at the 
 top of the house. He'd ring his bell, and if she din't go 
 di-reckly, he'd ring and ring agen, fit to bring the house 
 down. One daa he rung three times, but Susan was set 
 fast, and coon't go ; and when she did, he spook so sharp, 
 that it wholly upset her, and she dropt down o' the floor 
 all in a faint. He hollered out at the top o' the stairs ; 
 and sum o' the fooks cum runnin' up to see what was the 
 
 Quiet. 
 
54 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 matter. Arter a bit she cum round, and they got her to 
 bed ; but she was so bad that they had to send for the 
 doctor. The owd gentleman was so wexed, he sed 
 he'd paa for the doctor as long as he could ; but 
 when the doctor sed she was breedin' a faver, nawthing 
 would satisfy her missus but to send her to the horspital, 
 while she could go. 
 
 " So she went into the horspital, and laa five weeks and 
 din't know nobody. Last she begun to mend, and she sed 
 that the fooks there were werry kind. She had a bed to 
 herself in a big room with nigh twenty others. Ivry daa 
 the doctor cum round, and spook to 'em all in tarn. He 
 was an owdish gentleman, and sum young uns cum round 
 with him. One mornin' he saa to Susan, ' Well, my dear,' 
 sez he, ' how do yeou feel to-day ? ' She saa, ' Kind o' 
 middlin', sir.' She towd me that one o' the young gentle- 
 men sort o' laffed when he h'ard her, and stopped behind 
 and saa to her, ' Do yeou cum out o' Suffolk ? ' She saa, 
 ' Yes ; what, do yeou know me ? ' She was so pleased ! 
 He axed her where she cum from, and when she towd 
 him, he saa, ' I know the clargyman of the parish.' He'd 
 a rose in his button-hole, and he took it out and gov it 
 her, and he saa, ' Yeou'll like to hev it, for that cum up 
 from Suffolk this mornin'.' Poor mor, she was so pleased ! 
 Well, arter a bit she got better, and the doctor saa, ' My 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 55 
 
 dear, yeou must go and git nussed at home. That'll dew 
 more for yeou than all the doctors' stuff here.' 
 
 " She han't no money left to paa for her jarney. But 
 the young gentleman made a gatherin' for her, and when 
 the nuss went with her to the station, he holp her mto 
 the cab, and gov her the money. Whue he was she din't 
 know, and I don't now, but I alluz saa, ' God bless him 
 for it.' 
 
 " One mornin' the owd parson — he was yar father — sent 
 for me, and he saa, 'John,' sez he, ' I ha' had a letter to 
 say that Susan ha' been in the horspital, but she is better 
 now, and is cummin' home to-morrow. So yeou must 
 meet her at Halser,^ and yeou may hiv my cart.' Susan 
 coon't write, so we'd nivver h'ard, sin' her aunt went 
 away. Yeou may s'pose how I felt ! Well, I went and 
 met her. O lawk, a lawk ! how bad she did look ! I got 
 her home about five, and my wife had got a good fire, and 
 ivrything nice for her, but, poor mor ! she was wholly 
 beat. She coon't eat nawthin'. Arter a bit, she tuk off 
 her bonnet, and then I see she han't no hair, 'cept a werry 
 little. That wholly beat me, she used to hev such nice 
 hair. Well, we got her to bed, and for a whole week she 
 coon't howd up at all. Then she fare to git better, and cum 
 down-stairs, and sot by the fire, and begun to pick a little. 
 
 1 Halesworth. 
 
56 Tivo Suffolk Friends. 
 
 And so she went on, when the summer cum, sometimes 
 better and sometimes wuss. But she spook werry Httle, 
 and din't seem to git on no better with my wife. Yar 
 father used to cum and see her and read to her. He was 
 werry fond of her, for he had knowed her ivver sin' she 
 was born. But she got waker and waker, and at last she 
 coon't howd up no longer, but took wholly to her bed. 
 How my wife did wait upon her ! She'd try and 'tice 
 her to ate suffen,^ when yar father sent her a bit o' pudden. 
 I once saa to him, ' What do yeou think o' the poor mor?' 
 'John,' sez he, 'she's werry bad.' 'But,' sez I, 'dew she 
 know it ? ' ' Yes,' sez he, ' she dew ; but she een't one to 
 saa much.' But I alluz noticed, she seem werry glad to 
 see yar father. 
 
 "One day I'd cum home arly ; I'd made one jarney.^ 
 So I went up to see Susan. There I see my wife laad 
 outside the bed close to Susan ; Susan was kind o' 
 strokin' her face, and I h'ard her saa, ' Kiss me, mother 
 dear; yeou're a good mother to me.' They din't see 
 me, so I crep' down - stairs, but it made me werry 
 comforble. 
 
 " Susan's bed laa close to the wall, so that she could 
 alluz make us know at night if she wanted anything by 
 
 ^ Something. 
 
 - Vv. Joitrnce, one day's work wilhout halt, ending about 3 V.n. 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 57 
 
 jest knockip'. One night we h'ard her sing a hymn. 
 She used to sing at charch when she was a httle gal, 
 but I nivver h'ard her sing so sweetsome as she did 
 then. Arter she'd finished, she knockt sharp, and we 
 went di-reckly. There she laa — I can see her now— as 
 white as the sheets she laa in. 'Father,' sez she, 'am 
 I dyin' ? ' I coon't spake, but my wife sed, ' Yeou're 
 a-dyin', dear.' ' Well, then,' sez she, ' 'tis bewtiful.' And 
 she lookt hard at me, hard at both of us ; and then lookt 
 up smilin', as if she see Some One. 
 
 " She was the only darter I ivver had." 
 
 John Dutfen. 
 
 Is it extravagant to believe that this simple story, told 
 by a country parson, is worth whole pages of learned 
 arguments against Disestablishment ? ^ Anyhow, to sup- 
 port such arguments, I will here cite an ancient ditty 
 of my father's. He had got it from " a true East Anglian, 
 of Norfolk lineage and breeding," but the exegesis is 
 wholly my father's own. 
 
 1 Query, would not the burning of ' Pickwick ' and ' Bleak House ' by the 
 common hangman do more to appease Nonconformist susceptibility than even 
 Disestablishment ? ' Salem Chapel,' again, and ' Adam Bede.' Fancy ' Adam 
 Bede ' without Mr Irwine, who yet is not held up for a model parson. 
 
58 Two Stiffolk Friends. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Robin Cook's wife ^ she had an old mare,^ 
 
 Humpf, humpf, hididdle, humpf ! 
 And if you'd but seen her, Lord ! how you'd have 
 stared,^ 
 
 Singing, " Folderol diddledol, hidum humpf." 
 
 This old mare she had a sore back,'* 
 
 Humpf, &c. 
 And on her sore back there was Imllt an old sack,^ 
 
 Singing, &c. 
 
 ^ "Robin Cook's wife" evidently refers to some well-known cliaracter, and 
 is doubtless intended to personify "England." 
 
 ^ The " old mare " is some old institution, and probably embodies the " Estab- 
 lished Church." 
 
 3 The mare was not perfect. What institution is, that has its alloy of 
 humanity? Lookers-on see these failings and stare. 
 
 ■* But the "sore back"! . It evidently alludes to some special ailment, one 
 which would make it difficult for any one to ride her. 
 
 ® So an "old sack" was thrown over her. Some such measures have from 
 earliest times been found necessary to enable each occupant of the different sees 
 to keep his seat and maintain order. In older times " Canons " were made ; of 
 late other measures have been taken — e.g., "An Act for the Regulation of 
 Divine Service." The sack was then "hullt on," — thrown on, — but roughly, 
 not gently. This is noteworthy. 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 59 
 
 Give the old mare some corn in the sieve/ 
 
 Humpf, &c. 
 And 'tis hoping God's husband (sk) the old mare may hve, 
 
 Singing, &c. 
 
 This old mare she chanced for to die,^ 
 
 Humpf, «&c. 
 And dead as a nit in the roadway she lie,^ 
 
 Singing, &c. 
 
 All the dogs in the town ^pMi for a bone,^ 
 
 Humpf, &c. 
 All but the Parson's dog,^ he went wi' none. 
 Singing, "Folderol diddledol, hidum humpf." 
 
 X .'cl I the sieve" evidently refers to some more palataUe measure than 
 the " old sack." " Give her some oats, do not give her the sack only. Ter- 
 ;:; the Ecclesiastical Commissioners may represent the ^^l^;^^. 
 
 I But all in vain, whether to enable the rulers to mount n th s e bac^, 
 or for prolonging her life. '< She chanced for to d.e. TUe Chunk d^s 
 
 established, 
 
 > And lies in the liigliroad, a prize for all comers. 
 
 .But by -aead as a nit " evidently is mean, more than d.es,amkei ; .. 
 means also .«»*-. Else, what of " all the dogs in the town, eaeh c^ 
 Tng and clamouring for his bone> It was so three hundred years ago. Each 
 dog " spook for a bone," and got it. i , hit of the 
 
 '..All bat the Papon's dog." The „oor vicars never go. ach a b t of 1. 
 impropriate tithes ; the seats of learning got comparat.ve y 1. le^ Tl = <lo^ 
 about town" got most. Then, in the last touchmg words, the Pars™ s dog 
 went wi- none," yet st.ll singing, " Folderol diddledol, h.dum humpf. 
 
6o Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 "MASTER CHARLEY." 
 A SUFFOLK labourer's STORY. 
 
 The Owd Master at the Hall had two children — Mr 
 James and Miss Mary. Mr James was ivver so much 
 owder than Miss Mary. She come kind o' unexpected 
 like, and she warn't but a little thing when she lost her 
 mother. When she got owd enough Owd Master sent her 
 to a young ladies' skule. She was there a soot o' years, 
 and when she come to staa at home, she was such a pretty 
 young lady, that she was. She was werry fond of cum- 
 pany, but there warn't the lissest bit wrong about her. 
 There was a young gentleman, from the sheres, who lived 
 at a farm in the next parish, where he was come to larn 
 farmin'. He was werry fond of her, and though his own 
 folks din't like it, it was all sattled that he was soon to 
 marry her. Then he hear'd suffen about her, which 
 warn't a bit true, and he went awaa, and was persuaded 
 to marry somebody else. Miss Mary took on bad about it, 
 but that warn't the wust of it. She had a baby before 
 long, and he was the father on't. 
 
 O lawk, a lawk ! how the Owd Master did break out 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 6i 
 
 when he hear'd of it ! My mother Hved close by, and 
 nussed poor Miss Mary, so I've h'ard all about it. He 
 woun't let the child stop in the house, but sent it awaa to 
 a house three miles off, where the woman had lost her 
 child. But when Miss Mary got about, the woman used 
 to bring the baby — he was "Master Charley"— to my 
 mother's. One daa, when she went down, my mother 
 towd her that he warn't well ; so off she went to see him. 
 When she got home she was late, and the owd man was 
 kep' waitin' for his dinner. As soon as he see her, he 
 roared out, " What ! hev yeou bin to see yar bastard ? " 
 "O father," says she, "yeou shoun't saa so." " Shoun't 
 saa so," said he, " shoun't I ? I can saa wuss than that." 
 And then he called her a bad name. She got up, nivver 
 said a wadd, but walked straight out of the front door. 
 They din't take much notiz at fust, but when she din't 
 come back, they got scared, and looked for her all about ; 
 and at last they found her in the moot, at the bottom of 
 the orchard. 
 
 O lawk, a lawk ! 
 
 The Owd Master nivver could howd up arter that. 
 'Fore that, if he was put out, yeou could hear 'im all over 
 the farm, a-cussin' and swearin'. He werry seldom spook 
 to anybody now, but he was alluz about arly and late ; 
 nothin' seemed to tire him. 'Fore that he nivver went to 
 
62 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 charch ; now he went reg'ler. But he wud saa sumtimes, 
 comin' out, " Parson's a fule." But if anybody was ill, 
 he bod 'em go up to the Hall and ax for suffen.^ There 
 was young Farmer Whoo's wife was werry bad, and the 
 doctor saa that what she wanted was London poort. So 
 he sent my father to the marchant at Ipswich, to bring 
 back four dozen. Arter dark he was to lave it at the 
 house, but not to knock. They nivver knew where ta 
 come from till arter he died. But he fare to get waker, 
 and to stupe more ivry year. 
 
 Yeou ax me about " Master Charley." Well, he growed 
 up such a pretty bor. He lived along with my mother 
 for the most part, and Mr James was so fond of him. 
 He'd come down, and plaa and talk to him the hour 
 togither, and Master Charley would foller 'im about like 
 a little dawg. 
 
 One daa they was togither, and Owd Master met 'em. 
 "James," said he, "what bor is that alluz follerin' yeou 
 about?" He said, "It's Mary's child." The owd man 
 tarned round as if he'd bin shot, and went home all 
 himpin' along. Folks beared him saa, " Mary's child ! 
 Lord ! Lord ! " When he got in, he sot down, and nivver 
 spook a wadd, 'cept now and then, " Mary's child ! Lord ! 
 Lord ! " He coun't ate no dinner ; but he towd 'em to 
 
 ^ Somelhinfr. 
 
A Suffolk Parson. 63 
 
 go for my mother; and when she come, he saa to her, 
 -Missus, yeou must git me to bed." And there he laa 
 all night, nivver slapin' a bit, but goin' on saain, " Mary's 
 child! Lord! Lord.r' quite solemn like. Sumtimes he'd 
 saa, " I've bin a bad un in my time, I hev." 
 
 Next mornin' Mr James sent for the doctor. But when 
 he come, Owd Master said, " Yeou can do nothin' for 
 me ; I oon't take none o' yar stuff." No more he would. 
 Then Mr James saa, "Would yeou like to see the par- 
 son ? " He din't saa nothin' for some time, then he said, 
 "Yeou may send for him." When the parson come— 
 and he was a nice quite ^ owd gentleman, we were werry 
 fond of him— he went up and staa'd some time ; but he 
 nivver said nothin' when he come down. Howsomdiver, 
 Owd Master laa more quiter arter that, and when they 
 axed him to take his med'cin he took it. Then he slep' 
 for some hours, and when he woke up he called out quite 
 clear, "James." And when Mr James come, he saa to 
 him,'" James," sez he, "I ha' left ivrything to yeou; do 
 yeou see that Mary hev her share." You notiz, he din't 
 saa, " Mary's child," but " Mary hev her share." Arter 
 a little while he said, "James, I should Uke to see the 
 little chap." He warn't far off, and my mother made 
 him tidy, and brushed his hair and parted it. Then she 
 
 1 Quiet. 
 
64 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 took him up, and put him close to the bed. Owd Master 
 bod 'em put the curtain back, and he laa and looked at 
 Master Charley. And then he said, quite slow and ten- 
 dersome, " Yeou're a'most as pritty as your mother was, 
 my dear." 
 
 Them was the last words he ivver spook. 
 
 Mr James nivver married, and when he died he left 
 ivrything to Master Charley. 
 
EDWARD FITZGERALD 
 
 AN AFTERMATH 
 

 EDWARD IITZGERALD. 
 
EDWARD FITZGERALD 
 
 AN AFTERMATH. 
 
 M 
 
 Y earliest recollections of FitzGerald go back to 
 thirty -six years. He and my father were old 
 friends and neighbours-in East Suffolk, where neighbours 
 are few, and fourteen miles counts for nothing. They 
 never were great correspondents, for what they had to say 
 to one another they said mostly by word of mouth. So 
 there were notes, but no letters; and the notes have 
 nearly all perished. In the summer of 1859 we were 
 staying at Aldeburgh, a favourite place with my father, 
 as the home of his forefathers. They were sea-folk ; and 
 Robinson Groome, my great-grandfather, was owner of 
 the Unity lugger, on which the poet Crabbe went up to 
 London. When his son, my grandfather, was about to 
 take orders, he expressed a timid hope that the bishop 
 
68 Two Suffolk Fyiends. 
 
 would deem him a proper candidate. " And who the 
 devil in hell," cried Robinson Groome, " should he ordain 
 if he doesn't ordain you, my dear ? " ^ This I have heard 
 my father tell FitzGerald, as also of his " Aunt Peggy and 
 Aunt D." {i.e., Deborah), who, if ever Crabbe was men- 
 tioned in their hearing, always smoothed their black 
 mittens and remarked — " ^Yc never thought much of Mr 
 Crabbe." 
 
 Our house was Clare Cottage, where FitzGerald him- 
 self lodged long afterwards. " Two little rooms, enough 
 for me ; a poor civil woman pleased to have me in them." 
 It fronts the sea, and is (or was) a small two-storeyed 
 house, with a patch of grass before it, a summer-house, 
 and a big white figurehead, belike of the shipwrecked 
 Clare. So over the garden -gate FitzGerald leant one 
 June morning, and asked me, a boy of eight, was my 
 father at home. I remember him dimly then as a tall 
 sea-browned man, who took us boys out for several sails, 
 on the first of which I and a brother were both of us woe- 
 fully sea-sick. Afterwards I remember picnics down the 
 Deben river, and visits to him at Woodbridge, first in his 
 
 ^ A copy of his will lies before me ; it opens : — " In the name of God, Amen, 
 I, Robinson Groome, of Aldeburgh, Sufiolk, mariner, being of sound mind 
 and disposing disposition, and considering the perils and dangers of the seas 
 and other uncertainties of this transitory world, do, for the sake of avoiding 
 controversies after my decease, make this my Will," i&c. 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 69 
 
 lodgings on the Market Hill over Berry the gunsmith's, 
 and then at his own house, Little Grange. The last was 
 in May 1883. My father and I had been spending a few 
 days with Captain Brooke of Ufford, the possessor of one 
 of the finest private libraries in England.^ From Ufford 
 we drove on to Woodbridge, and passed some pleasant 
 hours with FitzGerald. We walked down to the river- 
 side, and sat on a bench at the foot of the lime-tree walk. 
 There was a small boy, I remember, wading among the 
 ooze ; and FitzGerald, calling him to him, said—" Little 
 boy, did you never hear tell of the fate of the Master of 
 Ravenswood?" And then he told him the story. At 
 dinner there was much talk, as always, of many things, 
 old and new, but chiefly old ; and at nine we started on 
 our homeward drive. Within a month I heard that Fitz- 
 Gerald was dead. 
 
 From my own recollections, then, of FitzGerald himself, 
 but still more of my father's frequent talk of him, from 
 some notes and fragments that have escaped hebdomadal 
 burnings, from a visit that I paid to Woodbridge in the 
 summer of 1889, and from reminiscences and unpublished 
 
 1 Years before, FitzGerald and my father called together at Ufford. The 
 drawing-room there had been newly refurnished, and FitzGerald sat himself 
 down on an amber satin couch. Presently a black stream was seen trickling 
 over it. It came from a penny bottle of ink, which FitzGerald had bought in 
 Woodbridge and put in a tail-pocket. 
 
70 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 letters furnished by friends of FitzGerald, I purpose to 
 weave a patchwork article, which shall in some ways 
 supplement Mr Aldis Wright's edition of his Letters.^ 
 Those letters surely will take a high place in literature, 
 on their own merits, quite apart from the interest that 
 attaches to the translator of Omar Khayyam, to the friend 
 of Thackeray, Tennyson, and Carlyle. Here and there I 
 may cite them ; but whoso will know FitzGerald must go 
 to the fountain-head. And yet that the letters by them- 
 selves may convey a false impression of the man is evident 
 from several articles on them — the best and worst Mr 
 Gosse's in the ' Fortnightly ' (July 1889). Mr Gosse sums 
 him up in the statement that " his time, when the roses 
 were not being pruned, and when he was not making 
 discreet journeys in uneventful directions, was divided 
 between music, which greatly occupied his younger 
 thought, and literature, which slowly, but more and more 
 exclusively, engaged his attention." There is truth in the 
 statement ; still this pruner of roses, who of rose-pruning 
 
 ' Letters and Literary Remains of Edward FitzGerald. (3 vols. Macmillan, 
 1889 ; 2d ed. of Letters, 2 vols. 1894.) Reference may also be made to Mr 
 Wright's article in the 'Dictionary of National Biography'; to another, of 
 special charm and interest, by Professor Cowell, in the new edition of Cham- 
 bers's Encyclopedia ; to Sir Frederick Pollock's Personal Reminiscences ; to 
 the Life of Lord Houghton ; to an article by Edward Clodd in the ' English 
 Illustrated Magazine' (1894); to the 'Edinburgh Review' (1895); ^""^^ ^o 
 FitzGerald's Letters to Fanny Kcmble in ' Temple Bar ' (1S95). 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 71 
 
 knew absolutely nothing, was one who best loved the sea 
 when the sea was rough, who always put into port of a 
 Sunday that his men might " get their hot dinner." He 
 was one who would give his friend of the best-oysters, 
 maybe, and audit ale, which '' dear old Thompson " used 
 to send him from Trinity-and himself the while would 
 pace up and down the room, munching apple or turnip, 
 and drinking long draughts of milk. He was a man of 
 marvellous simplicity of life and matchless chanty : hereon 
 I will quote a letter of Professor Cowell's, who did, if any 
 one, know FitzGerald well :— 
 
 "He was no Sybarite. There was a vein of strong scorn of 
 all self-indulgence in him, which was very different. He was, 
 of course, very much of a recluse, with a vein of misanthropy 
 towards men in the abstract, joined to a tender-hearted sympathy 
 for the actual men and women around him. He was the very re- 
 verse of Carlyle's description of the sentimental philanthropist 
 who loves man in the abstract, but is intolerant of 'Jack and 
 Tom, who have wills of their own.' " 
 
 FitzGerald's charities are probably forgotten, unless by 
 the recipients ; and how many of them must be dead, old 
 soldiers as they mostly were, and suchlike! But this I 
 have heard, that one man borrowed £200 of him. Three 
 times he regularly paid the interest, and the third time 
 FitzGerald put his note of hand in the fire, just saying he 
 thought that would do. His simplicity dated from very 
 
72 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 early times. For when he was at Trinity, his mother 
 called on him in her coach-and-four, and sent a gyp to ask 
 him to step down to the college-gate, but he could not 
 come — his only pair of shoes was at the cobbler's. And 
 down to the last he was always perfectly careless as to 
 dress. I can see him now, walking down into Wood- 
 bridge, with an old Inverness cape, double-breasted, 
 flowered satin waistcoat, slippers on feet, and a handker- 
 chief, very likely, tied over his hat. Yet one always 
 recognised in him the Hidalgo. Never was there a more 
 perfect gentleman. His courtesy came out even in his 
 rebukes. A lady one day was sitting in a Woodbridge 
 shop, gossiping to a friend about the eccentricities of 
 the Squire of Boulge, when a gentleman, who was sit- 
 ting with his back to them, turned round, and, gravely 
 bowing, gravely said, " Madam, he is my brother." 
 They were eccentric, certainly, the FitzGeralds. Fitz- 
 Gerald himself remarked of the family : " We are all 
 mad, but with this difference — / know that I am." And 
 of that same brother he once wrote to my father : — 
 
 Lowestoft : Dec. 2/66. 
 My dear Groome, — " At least for what I know " (as 
 old Isaac Clarke used to say), I shall be at home next 
 week as well as this. How could you expect my Brother 
 
Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath. 73 
 
 3 times ? You, as well as others, should really (for his 
 Benefit, as well as your own) either leave it all to Chance, 
 or appoint one Day, and then decline any further Negotia- 
 tion. This would really spare poor John an immense 
 deal of (in sober Truth) " Taking the Lord's Name in 
 vain." I mean his eternal D.F., which, translated, only 
 means, -If / happen to be in the Humour." You must 
 know that the feeling of being hound to an Engagement 
 is the very thing that makes him wish to break it. 
 Spedding once told me this was rather my case. I 
 believe it, and am therefore shy of ever making an 
 engagement. O si sic omnia .'-Youvs truly, 
 
 E. F. G. 
 
 Of another brother, Peter, the Catholic brother, as 
 John was the Protestant one, he wrote :— 
 
 Lowestoft, Tuesday, Feb. i6, 1875. 
 
 You may have heard that my Brother Peter is dead, 
 of Bronchitis, at Bournemouth. He was taken seriously 
 ill on Thursday last, and died on Saturday without pam ; 
 and I am told that his last murmured words were my 
 name-thrice repeated. A more amiable Gentleman did 
 not live, with something hdplcs about him - what the 
 Irish call an - Innocent man "-which mixed up Compas- 
 sion with Regard, and made it perhaps stronger. . . . 
 
74 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Many odd tales were current in Woodbridge about 
 Fit^Gerald himself. How once, for example, he sailed 
 over to Holland, meaning to look upon Paul Potter's 
 *' Bull," but how, on arriving there, he found a favour- 
 able homeward breeze, and so sailed home. How, too, 
 he took a ticket for Edinburgh, but at Newcastle found 
 a train on the point of starting for London, and, think- 
 ing it a pity to lose the chance, returned thereby. Both 
 stories must be myths, for we learn from his letters that 
 in 1861 he really did spend two days in Holland, and in 
 1874 other two in Scotland. Still, I fancy both stories 
 emanated from FitzGerald, for all Woodbridge united 
 could not have hit upon Paul Potter's " Bull." 
 
 Except in February 1867, when he was strongly 
 opposed to Lord Rendlesham's election, he took no 
 active part in politics. " %^ Don't write politics — 
 I agree with you beforehand," is a postscript (1852) 
 to Frederic Tennyson ; and in a letter from Mr William 
 Bodham Donne to my father occurs this passage : " E. 
 F. G. informs me that he gave his landlord instructions 
 in case any one called about his vote to say that Mr F. 
 would not vote, advised every one to do the same, and 
 let the rotten matter bust itself." So it certainly stands 
 in the letter, which bears date 29th October 1868 ; but, 
 according to Mr Mowbray Donne, " the phrase was 
 
Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath. 75 
 
 rather : ' Let the rotten old ship go to pieces of itself.' 
 At least," he adds, "so I have always heard it; and this 
 suggests that once there was a galleon worth preserving, 
 but that he would not patch up the old craft. He may 
 have said both, of course." Anyhow, rightly or wrongly, 
 FitzGerald was sorrowfully convinced that England's 
 best day was over, and that he, that any one, was power- 
 less to arrest the inevitable doom. " I am quite assured 
 that this Country is dying, as other Countries die, as 
 Trees die, atop first. The lower limbs are making all 
 haste to follow." He wrote thus in 1861, when the 
 local squirearchy refused to interest itself in the ^' man- 
 uring and skrimmaging'' of the newly established rifle 
 corps. And here are some more vaticinations of 
 evil : — 
 
 " I have long felt about England as you do, and even made up 
 my mind to it, so as to sit comparatively, if ignobly, easy on that 
 score Sometimes I envy those who are so old that the Curtam 
 will probably fall on them before it does on their Country. If 
 one could save the Race, what a Cause it would be! not for 
 one's own glory as a member of it, nor even for its glory as a 
 Nation : but because it is the only spot in Europe where Free- 
 dom keeps her place. Had I Alfred's voice, I would not have 
 mumbled for years over In Memoriam and The Princess, but 
 sung such strains as would have revived the Mapa^covo/xaxo-^ 
 ^vSpas to guard the territory they had won." 
 
76 Two Siiffolk Friends. 
 
 The curtain has fallen twelve years now on FitzGerald, 
 — it is fifty-four years since he wrote those words : God 
 send their dark forebodings may prove false ! But they 
 clouded his life, and were partly the cause why, Ajax-like, 
 he loitered in his tent. 
 
 His thoughts on religion he kept to himself. A letter 
 of June 1885 from the late Master of Trinity to my father 
 opens thus : — 
 
 " My dear Archdeacon, — I ought to have thanked you 
 ere this for your letter, and the enclosed hymn, which we much 
 admire, and cannot but be touched by.^ The more perhaps as 
 our dear dead friend seems to have felt its pathos. I have more 
 to repent of than he had. Two of the purest-living men among 
 my intimates, FitzGerald and Spedding, were prisoners in Doubt- 
 ing Castle all their lives, or at least the last half of them. This 
 is to me a great problem, — not to be solved by the ordinary 
 expedients, nor on this side the Veil, I think." 
 
 A former rector of Woodbridge, now many years dead, 
 once called on FitzGerald to express his regret that he 
 never saw him at church. " Sir," said FitzGerald, "you 
 might have conceived that a man has not come to my 
 years of life without thinking much of these things. I 
 believe I may say that I have reflected on them fully as 
 much as yourself. You need not repeat this visit." Cer- 
 
 ^ This was the hymn — its words, like the music, by my father — that is 
 printed at the end of this volume. 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 77 
 
 tain it is that FitzGerald's was a most reverent mind, 
 and I know that the text on his grave was of his own 
 choosing— "It is He that hath made us, and not we 
 ourselves." I know, too, that sometimes he would sit 
 and listen in a church porch while service was going 
 on, and slip away unperceived before the people came 
 out. Still, it seems to me beyond question that his 
 version of the ' Rubaiyat ' is an utterance of his soul's 
 deepest doubts, and that hereafter it will come to be 
 recognised as the highest expression of Agnosticism :— 
 
 " With them the seed of Wisdom did I sow, 
 And with mine own hand wrought to make it grow ; 
 
 And this was all the Harvest that I reap'd— 
 ' I came like Water, and hke Wind I go.' 
 
 Into this Universe, and Why not knowing 
 Nor Whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing; 
 And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, 
 I know not Whither, willy-nilly blowing. 
 
 We are no other than a moving row 
 
 Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go 
 
 Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held 
 In Midnight by the Master of the Show ; 
 
78 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays 
 Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days; 
 
 Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays. 
 And one by one back in the Closet lays." 
 
 Yet to how many critics this has seemed but a poem 
 of the wine-cup and roses ! 
 
 FitzGerald proved a most kindly contributor to the 
 series of " Suffolk Notes and Queries " that I edited for 
 the ' Ipswich Journal ' in 1877-78. The following were 
 some of his notes, all signed "Effigy" — a play on his 
 initials : — 
 
 "Major Moor, David Hume, and the Royal George. — In a 
 review of Burton's Life of Hume, p. 354 of the ' Gentle- 
 man's Magazine,' April 1849, is the following quotation 
 from the book, and the following note upon it : 
 
 " ' Page 452. " Major M , with whom I dined 
 
 yesterday, said that he had frequently met David Hume 
 at their military mess in Scotland, and in other parties. 
 That he was very polite and pleasant, though thoughtful 
 in company, generally reclining his head upon his hand, 
 as if in study ; from which he would suddenly recover," 
 &c. [Note by the Editor, John Mitford of BenhalL] We 
 
 merely add that Major M was Major Moor, author of 
 
 the Hindoo Pantheon, a very learned and amiable person.' 
 
Edward Fits Gerald : An Aftennath. 79 
 
 " A very odd blunder for one distinguished Suffolk man 
 to make of another, and so near a neighbour. F'or David 
 Hume died in 1776, when Major Moor was about seven 
 years old ; by this token that (as he has told me) he saw 
 the masts of the Royal George slope under water as 
 she went down in 1782, while he was on board the trans- 
 port that was to carry him to India, a cadet of thirteen 
 years old. 
 
 " Nearly sixty years after this. Major Moor (as I also 
 heard him relate) was among the usual company going 
 over one of the Royal Palaces — Windsor, I think — when 
 the cicerone pointed out a fragment of the Royal George's 
 mast, whereupon one elderly gentleman of the party told 
 them that he had witnessed the disaster ; after which 
 Major Moor capped the general amazement by informing 
 the little party that they had two surviving witnesses of 
 it among them that day. 
 
 " Suffolk Minstrelsy. — These fragments of a Suffolk 
 Harvest - Home Song, remembered by an old Suffolk 
 Divine, offer room for historical and lyrical conjecture. I 
 think the song must consist of tew several fragments. 
 
 " ' Row tu me, row tu me,' says He-ne-ry Burgin, 
 
 ' Row tu me, row tu me, I prah ; 
 For I ha' tarn'd a Scotch robber across the salt seas, 
 
 Tu ma-i-nt'n my tew brothers and me.' " 
 
8o Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 " The Count de Grasse he stood amaz'd, 
 
 And frigh-te-ned he were, 
 For to see these bold Bri-tons 
 So active in war." 
 
 "Limb. — I find this word, whose derivation has troubled 
 Suffolk vocabularies, quoted in its Suffolk sense from Tate 
 Wilkinson, in ' Temple Bar Magazine ' for January 1S76. 
 Mrs White — an actress somewhere in the Shires, — she 
 may have derived from Suffolk, however — addresses her 
 daughter, Mrs Burden, in these words : ' I'll tell you 
 what, Maam, if you contradict me, I'll fell you at my feet, 
 and trample over your corse, Maam, for you're a limb, 
 Maam, your father on his deathbed told me you were a 
 Iwib.' {N.B. — Perhaps Mr White it was who derived 
 from lis.) And again when poor Mrs Burden asks what is 
 meant by a parenthesis, her mother exclaims, ' Oh, what an 
 infernal limb of an actress you'll make, not to know the 
 meaning of prentice, plural of apprentices ! ' Such is Tate's 
 story if correctly quoted by 'Temple Bar.' Not long ago 
 I heard at Aldbro', ' My mother is a limb for salt pork.' " 
 
 The Suffolk dialect was ever a pet hobby of Fitz- 
 Gerald's. For years he was meditating a new edition of 
 Major Moor's ' Suffolk Words,' but the question never 
 was settled whether words of his own collecting were to 
 be incorporated in the body of the work or relegated to 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 8i 
 
 an appendix. So the notion remained a notion. Much 
 to our loss, for myself I prefer his * Sea-Words and 
 Phrases along the Suffolk Coast ' (in the scarce ' East 
 Anglian,' i868-6g ^) to half his translations. For this 
 " poor old Lowestoft sea-slang," as FitzGerald slightingly 
 calls it, illustrates both his strong love of the sea and his 
 own quaint lovable self. One turns over its pages idly, 
 and lights on dozens of entries such as these : — 
 
 " Bark.—* The surf havh from the Nor'ard ; ' or, as was 
 otherwise said to me, ' The sea aint lost his woice from 
 the Nor'ard yet,' — a sign, by the way, that the wind is 
 to come from that quarter. A poetical word such as 
 those whose business is with the sea are apt to use. 
 Listening one night to the sea some way inland, a 
 sailor said to me, ' Yes, sir, the sea roar for the loss 
 of the wind ; ' which a landsman properly interpreted 
 as meaning only that the sea made itself heard when 
 the wind had subsided." 
 
 " Brustle. — A compound of Bustle and Rustic, I sup- 
 pose. ' Why, the old girl hnistle along like a Hedge- 
 sparrow ! ' — said of a round - bowed vessel spuffling 
 through the water. I am told that, comparing little 
 with great, the figure is not out of the way. Other- 
 
 1 Reprinted in vol. ii. of the American edition of FitzGerald's Works. 
 
 F 
 
82 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 wise, what should these ignorant seamen know of 
 Hedge - sparrows ? Some of them do, however ; fond 
 of birds, as of other pets — Children, cats, small dogs — 
 anything in short considerably under the size of — a 
 Bullock — and accustomed to birds - nesting over your 
 cliff and about your lanes from childhood. A little 
 while ago a party of Beechmen must needs have a 
 day's frolic at the old sport ; marched bodily into a 
 neighbouring farmer's domain, ransacked the hedges, 
 climbed the trees, coming down pretty figures, I was told, 
 (in plainer language) with guernsey and breeches torn fore 
 and aft ; the farmer after them in a tearing rage, call- 
 ing for his gun — ' They were Pirates — They were the 
 Press-gang ! ' and the boys in Blue going on with their 
 game laughing. When they had got their fill of it, 
 they adjourned to Oulton Boar for ' Half a pint ' ; by- 
 and-by in came the raging farmer for a like purpose ; at 
 first growling aloof; then warming towards the good 
 fellows, till — he joined their company, and — insisted 
 on paying their shot." 
 
 "Cards. — Though often carried on board to pass 
 away the time at All - fours, Don, or Sir -wiser {q.v.), 
 nevertheless regarded with some suspicion when busi- 
 ness does not go right. A friend of mine vowed that, 
 if his ill-luck continued, over the cards should go ; and 
 
Edward FitsGerald: An AfterniatJi. 83 
 
 over they went. Opinions differ as to swearing. One 
 Captain strictly forbade it on board his lugger; but 
 he, also continuing to get no fish, called out, ' Swear 
 away, lads, and see what that'll do.' Perhaps he only 
 meant as Menage's French Bishop did; who going one 
 day to Court, his carriage stuck fast in a slough. The 
 Coachman swore ; the Bishop, putting his head out of 
 the window, bid him not do that ; the Coachman declared 
 that unless he did, his horses would never get the car- 
 riage out of the mud. 'Well then, says the Bishop, just 
 for this once then.'" 
 
 " Egg-bound. — Probably an inland word ; but it was 
 
 only from one of the beach I heard it. He had a pair 
 
 of— what does the reader think? — Turtle-doves in his 
 
 net-loft, looking down so drolly — the delicate creatures 
 
 — from their wicker cage on the rough work below, that 
 
 I wondered what business they had there. But this 
 
 truculent Salwager assured me seriously that he had 
 
 ' doated on them,' and promised me the first pair they 
 
 should hatch. For a long while they had no family, 
 
 so long ' neiLtral ' indeed as to cause grave doubts whether 
 
 they were a pair at all. But at last one of them began 
 
 to show signs of cradle-making, picking at some hay 
 
 stuffed into the wicker-bars to encourage them ; and I 
 
 was told that she was manifestly ' egg-hound.' " 
 
84 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 " New Moon. — When first seen, be sure to turn your 
 money over in your pocket by way of making it grow 
 there ; provided always that you see her face to face, 
 not through a glass (window) — for, in that case, the 
 charm works the wrong way. ' I see the little dear 
 this evening, and give my money a twister ; there 
 wasn't much, but I roused her about.' Where */j^r' 
 means the Money, not the Moon. Every one knows of 
 what gender all that is amiable becomes in the Sailor's 
 eyes : his Ship, of course— the ' Old Dear ' — the ' Old 
 Girl'— the 'Old Beauty,' &c. I don't think the Sea is 
 so familiarly addrest ; s/jc is almost too strong-minded, 
 capricious, and terrible a Virago, and — he is wedded to 
 her for better or worse. Yet I have heard the Weather 
 (to whose instigation so much of that Sea's ill-humours 
 are due) spoken of by one coming up the hatchway, 
 ' Let's see how she, look now.' The Moon is, of course, 
 a Woman too ; and as with the German, and, I believe, 
 the ancient Oriental people, * the blessed Sun himself a 
 fair hot Wench in a flame-colour'd taffeta,' and so s/z^ 
 rises, she sets, and she crosses the Line. So the Time- 
 piece that measures the hours of day and night. A 
 Friend's Watch going wrong of late, I advised Regulat- 
 ing ; but was gravely answer'd that ' She was a foreigner, 
 and he did not like meddling with her.' The same poor 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 85 
 
 ignorant was looking with me one evening at your fine 
 old church [Lowestoft] which sadly wanted regulating 
 too : lying all along indeed like a huge stranded Ship, 
 with one whole side battered open to the ribs, through 
 which * the Sea- wind sang shrill, chill ' ; and he ' did 
 not like seeing her so distress'd ' ; remembering boyish 
 days, and her good old Vicar (of course I mean the 
 former one : pious, charitable, venerable Francis Cunning- 
 ham), and looking to lie under her walls, among his own 
 people — ' if not,' as he said, * somewhere else.'' Some 
 months after, seeing the Church with her southern side 
 restored to the sun, the same speaker cried, ' Well done. 
 Old Girl ! Up, and crow again ! ' " 
 
 FitzGerald's hesitancy about Major Moor's book was 
 typical of the man. I am assured by Mr John Loder 
 of Woodbridge, who knew him well, that it was in- 
 ordinately difficult to get him to do anything. First 
 he would be delighted with the idea, and next he would 
 raise up a hundred objections ; then, maybe, he would 
 again, and finally he wouldn't. The wonder then is, 
 not that he published so little, but that he published 
 so much ; and to whom the credit thereof was largely 
 due is indicated in this passage from a letter of Mr W. 
 B. Donne's, of date 25th March 1876. 
 
86 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 " I am so delighted at the glory E. F. G. has gained by his 
 translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The ' Con- 
 temporary Review ' and the ' Spectator ' newspaper ! It is full 
 time that Fitz should be disinterred, and exhibited to the world 
 as one of the most gifted of Britons. And Bernard Quaritch 
 deserves a piece of plate or a statue for the way he has thrust 
 the Rubaiyat to the front." 
 
 There is no understanding FitzGerald till one fully 
 realises that vulgar ambition had absolutely no place in 
 his nature. Your ass in the lion's skin nowadays is the 
 ass who fain would be lionised ; and the modern version 
 of the parable of the talents is too often the man who, 
 untalented, tries to palm off Brummagem counterfeits. 
 FitzGerald's fear was not that he would write worse 
 than half his compeers, but that he might write as ill. 
 " This visionary inactivity," he tells John Allen, " is 
 better than the mischievous activity of so many I see 
 about me." He applied Malthus's teaching to literature; 
 he was content so long as he pleased the Tenn3^sons, 
 some half-dozen other friends, and himself, than whom 
 no critic ever was more fastidious. And when one thinks 
 of all the " great poems " that were published during his 
 lifetime, and read and praised (more praised than read 
 perhaps), and then forgotten, one wonders if, after all, 
 he was so wholly wrong in that he read for profit and 
 scribbled for amusement, — that he communed with his 
 
Edward FifzGerald : An Aftcnnath. 87 
 
 own heart and was still. Besides, had he not "awful 
 examples " ? There was the Suffolk parson, his con- 
 temporary, who announced at nineteen that he had read 
 all Shakespeare and Milton, and did not see why he 
 should not at any rate equal them. So he fell to work 
 — his poems were a joy to FitzGerald. Then there was 
 Bernard Barton. FitzGerald glances at his passion for 
 publishing, his belief that "there could not be too much 
 poetry abroad." And lastly there was Carlyle, half 
 scornful of FitzGerald's " ultra modesty and innocent 
 far-nicnte life," his own superhuman activity regarded 
 meanwhile by FitzGerald with a gentle half - pitying 
 wonder, of which one catches a premonitory echo in 
 this extract from a long letter ^ of Sir Frederick Pollock's 
 to W. H. Thompson. It bears date 14th February 1840, 
 two years before Carlyle and FitzGerald met : — 
 
 " Carlyle's ' Chartism ' has been much read. It has fine things 
 in it, but nothing new. He is eminently a man of one idea, but 
 then neither he nor any one else knows exactly what that one 
 is. So that by dint of shifting it about to and fro, and, as you 
 
 ^ That letter is one item in the printed and manuscript, prose and verse, con- 
 tents of four big Commonplace Books, formed by the late Master of Trinity, 
 and given at his death by Mrs Thompson to my father. They included a good 
 many unpublished poems by Lord Tennyson, Frederic Tennyson, Archbishop 
 Trench, Thackeray, Sir F. Doyle, &c. My father gave up the Tennysoniarm 
 to Lord Tennyson. 
 
88 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 observe, clothing his remarks in the safe obscurity of a foreign 
 language, he manages to produce a great impression. Truly he 
 is a trumpet that gives an uncertain sound, an instrument of no 
 base metal, but played without book, whose compass is not as- 
 certained, and continually failing from straining at too high a 
 note. Spedding has not yet found him out ; FitzGerald has, and 
 we lamentably rejoice at our melancholy discovery. Never was 
 there such a waste of Faith as in that man. He is ever preach- 
 ing Faith. Very well, but in what ? Why, again says he, ' Faith ' 
 — that is, Faith in Faith. Objectless, purposeless, unmeaning, 
 disappearing, and eluding all grasp when any occasion for action 
 arises, when anything is to be done, as sufficiently appears from 
 the miserable unpracticability of the latter chapters of the ' Chart- 
 ism,' where he comes forward to give directions for what is to 
 be done." 
 
 FitzGerald's wide, albeit eclectic reading, is sufficiently 
 illustrated on every page of his published Letters. When, 
 fourteen years before his death, his eyesight began to fail 
 him, he employed boy-readers, one of whom read him the 
 whole of the Tichborne trial. One summer night in 1889 
 I sat and smoked with this boy, a pleasant young man, in 
 the bar-parlour of the Bull Hotel. He told me how Mr 
 FitzGerald always gave him plenty of plum-cake, and how 
 they used to play piquet together. Only sometimes a 
 tame mouse would come out and sit on the table, and 
 then not a card must be dropped. A pretty picture! 
 In the bar -parlour sat an oldish man, who presently 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 89 
 
 joined in our conversation. He had made the lead coi^n 
 for "the old Major" (FitzGerald's father), and another 
 for Mr John ; and he seemed half to resent that he had 
 not performed the same office for Mr Edward himself, 
 for whom, however, he once built a boat. He told me, 
 moreover, how years before Mr FitzGerald had congrat- 
 ulated him on some symptoms of heart disease, had said 
 he had it himself, and was glad of it, for "when he came 
 to die, he didn't want to have a lot of women messing 
 about him." 
 
 Next day I went and called on FitzGerald's old house- 
 keeper, Mrs Howe, and her husband. She the " Fairy 
 Godmother," as FitzGerald delighted to call her, was 
 blithe and chirpy as ever, with pleasant talk of " our 
 gentleman": "So kind he was, not never one to make 
 no obstacles. Such a joky gentleman he was, too. Why, 
 once he says to me, ' Mrs Howe, I didn't know we had 
 express trains here.' And I said, ' Whatever do you mean, 
 
 sir ? ' and he says, ' Why, look at Mrs 's dress there.' 
 
 And, sure enough, she had a long train to it, you know." 
 Her husband ("the King of Clubs") was eighty-four, but 
 the same cheery, simple soul he always was. Mr Spald- 
 ing, one broiling day, saw him standing bare-headed, and 
 peering intently for good five minutes into the pond at 
 Little Grange. " What is it, Howe ? " he asked him ; and 
 
90 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 the old man presently answered, " How fond them ducks 
 dew seem of water, to be sure." Which, for some cause 
 or other, greatly tickled FitzGerald. 
 
 I was staying in Woodbridge at the " Bull," kept 
 whilom by "good John Grout," from whom FitzGerald 
 procured the Scotch ale which he would set to the fire 
 till it "just had a smile on it," and who every Christmas 
 sent him a present of mince-pies and a jug of punch. An 
 excellent man, and a mighty horse-dealer, better versed in 
 horse-flesh than in literature. After a visit from Lord 
 Tennyson, FitzGerald told Grout that Woodbridge should 
 feel itself honoured. John had not quite understood, so 
 presently took a chance of asking my father who that 
 gentleman was Mr FitzGerald had been talking of. " Mr 
 Tennyson," said my father, "the poet-laureate." " Dis- 
 say,"^ said John, warily; "anyhow he didn't fare to 
 know much about bosses when I showed him over my 
 stables." 
 
 From my bedroom window I could see FitzGerald's old 
 lodgings over Berry's, where he sojourned from i860 till 
 1873. The cause of his leaving them is only half told in 
 Mr Aldis Wright's edition of the Letters (p. 365, foot- 
 note). Mr Berr}', a small man, had taken to himself a 
 second wife, a buxom widow weighing fourteen stone ; 
 
 ^ Suffolk for " I daresay." 
 
Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath. 91 
 
 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. Hesi- 
 tatingly 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 Goose- 
 berry." 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 ^vere 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. 
 
92 Two Suffolk Fyiends. 
 
 " 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 Bred- 
 field 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 "re- 
 membered 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 da3's (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 
 
Edward FitzGeraU: An Aftermath. 93 
 
 up my arms and shouted for amazement." From Bred- 
 aeld a charming walk through the fields (trudged how 
 many times by FitzGerald ! ) leads to the little one- 
 storeyed cottage in Boulge Park, where he hved from 
 1838 till 1853. It probably is scarcely changed at all, 
 with its low-pitched thatch roof forming eyebrows over 
 
 The Cottage, Boulge. 
 
 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 h.s b.g 
 pictures. Boulge Hall, then tenantless, a large modern 
 white-brick house, brought me soon to Boulge church. 
 
94 T^'^o Suffolk Friends. 
 
 half-hidden b}^ trees. Fitzgerald sleeps beneath its red- 
 brick tower. His grave is marked by a flat granite mon- 
 ument, carved with a cross-fleury. Pity, it seemed, that 
 no roses grew over it.^ 
 
 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." 
 
 But, besides this, I saw a good deal of Mr John Loder, 
 third in a line of Woodbridge booksellers, who knew 
 FitzGerald for many years, and has much to tell of him 
 which were well worth preserving. From him I received 
 
 ^ So I wrote six years since ; and now a rose-tree does grow over it, a rose- 
 tree raised in Kew Gardens from hips brouglit by William Simpson, the veteran 
 artist-traveller, from Omar's grave at Naishdpur, and planted here by my 
 brother-members of the Omar Khayyam Club on 7th October 1893 (' Concern- 
 ing a Pilgrimage to the Grave of Edward FitzGerald.' By Edward Clodd. 
 Privately printed, 1894). 
 

96 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 a loan of Mr Elihu Vedder's splendid illustrations to the 
 ' Rubaiyat,' and a couple of presents. The first is a 
 pencil-drawing of FitzGerald's yachj ; the second, a book, 
 "made up," like so many others, by FitzGerald, and 
 comprising this one, three French plays, a privately 
 printed article on Moore, and the first edition of *A 
 Little Dinner at Timmins's.' Then with Mr Barrett, 
 the Ipswich bookseller, who likewise knew FitzGerald, 
 I had two chance meetings ; and last but not least, I 
 spent a most pleasant day at Colchester with Mr Fred- 
 erick Spalding, curator now of the museum there. 
 
 Sitting in his alcove, hewn out of the massy wall of the 
 Norman keep, he poured forth story after story of Fitz- 
 Gerald, and showed me his memorials of their friendship. 
 This was a copy of Miss Edgeworth's ' Frank,' in German 
 and English, given to FitzGerald at Edgeworthstown {cf. 
 * Letters,' p. 74) ; and that, FitzGerald's own school copy 
 of Boswell's ' Johnson,' which he gave Mr Spalding, first 
 writing on the fly-leaf — " He was pleased to say to me 
 one morning when we were alone in his study, ' Boswell, 
 I am almost easier with you than with anybody ' (vol. v. 
 p. 75)-" Here, again, was a scrap-book, containing, inter 
 alia, a long and interesting unpublished letter from Car- 
 lyle to FitzGerald about the projected Naseby monument, 
 and a fragment of a letter from Frederic Tennyson, criti- 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 97 
 
 cising the Laureate's "Welcome to Alexandra." Not 
 being a short-hand reporter or American interviewer, I 
 am not going to try to reproduce Mr Spalding's discourse 
 (he must do that himself some day) ; but a letter of his 
 in the ' East Anglian ' of 8th July 1889 I will reprint : — 
 
 The fishing Lugger built at Lowestoft was named the " Meum 
 and Tuum," commonly called by the fishermen there the " Mum 
 and Tum," much to Mr FitzGerald's amusement ; and the ship 
 alluded to by Mr Gosse was the pretty schooner of 15 tons, 
 built by Harvey, of Wyvenhoe, and named the " Scandal," after 
 "the main staple of Woodbridge." My friend, T. N., the 
 skipper, gave a different account of the origin of the name. I 
 was standing with him on the Lowestoft Fish Market, close to 
 which the litde "Scandal" was moored, after an early dive from 
 her deck, when Tom was addressed by one of two ladies : " Pray, 
 my man, can you tell me who owns that very pretty yacht?" 
 "Mr Edward FitzGerald of Woodbridge, ma'am," said Tom, 
 touching his cap. "And can you tell us her name?" The 
 'Scandal,' ma'am." "Dear me 1 how came he to select such a 
 very peculiar name ? " " Well, ma'am, the fact is, all the other 
 names were taken up, so that we were forced to have either that 
 or none." The ladies at once moved on. 
 
 Mr Spalding, further, has placed in my hands a bundle 
 of seventy letters, written to himself by FitzGerald 
 between 1862 and 1882. Some of them relate to mere 
 business matters (such as the building of Little Grange), 
 and some to private affairs ; but the following extracts 
 
 G 
 
98 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 have a high and exceptional value, as illustrating a feature 
 in FitzGerald's life that is little touched on in the published 
 Letters — his strong love of the sea and of sailors : — 
 
 "Geldestone Hai.l, Beccles, Feb. 5, 1S62. 
 [' Letters,' p. 284.]^ 
 
 " . . .1 have been twice to old Wright, who has built a 
 Boat of about 14 feet on speculation : and has laid down 
 the keel of a new wherry, on speculation also. But he has 
 as yet no Orders, and thinks his Business is like to be very 
 slack. Indeed the Rail now begins to creep over the 
 Marsh, and even to come pretty close to the River, over 
 which it is to cross into Beccles. But you, I think, sur- 
 mise that this Rail will not hurt Wright so much as he 
 fears it will. Poor old Boy — I found him well and hearty 
 on Sunday ; but on Sunday night and Monday he was 
 seized with such Rheumatism (I think Rheumatic Gout) 
 in one leg as has given him no rest or sleep since. It is, 
 he says, 'as if somethin' was a-tearin' the Flesh off his 
 Bones.' I showed him two of the guilty Screws which had 
 almost let my Leaden Keel part from the wooden one : he 
 says he had desired the Smith not to make too large heads, 
 and the Smith accordingly made them too small ; and 
 
 ' ^ I append throughout the page of the pubhshcd letters that comes nearest 
 in date. 
 
Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath. 99 
 
 some Apprentice had, he supposes, fixed them in without 
 further inspection. There is such honesty and cheerful- 
 ness in Wright's Saxon Eyes and Countenance when he 
 faces such a charge as disarms all one's wrath." 
 
 "II Marine Terrace, Lowestoft, Jtdy 17, '65. 
 ['Letters,' p. 301.] 
 
 "... Yes, I sent Newson and Cooper home to the 
 Shipwreck Dinner at Woodbridge, and supposing they 
 would be maudlin on Saturday, gave them Sunday to 
 repent on, and so have lost the only fine Days we have yet 
 had for sailing. To-day is a dead Calm. * These are my 
 Trials ! ' as a fine Gentleman said to Wesley, when his 
 Servant put rather too many Coals on the Fire. 
 
 "... Somehow, I always feel at home here,— partly 
 that the place itself is very suited to me : I have known 
 it these 40 years, particularly connected with my Sister 
 Kerrich, whose Death has left a sort of sad interest shed 
 over it. It was a mere Toss-up in i860 whether I was to 
 stay at Woodbridge, or come to reside here, when my 
 residing would have been of some use to her then, and her 
 Children now. 
 
 "Now then I am expecting my 'Merry Men' from 
 Woodbridge, to get out my Billyboy, and get into what 
 Sailors call the Doldrums. ..." 
 
loo Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 " 3 SiON Hill, Ramsgate, August 25/65. 
 ['Letters,' p. 301.] 
 
 " I got here all right and very quick from our Harbour 
 on Monday Morn^. And here I shall be till Monday; 
 then shall probably go with my Brother [Peter] to Dover 
 and Calais : and so hope to be home by the middle or 
 later part of next week. . . . To-day is going on a 
 Regatta before the windows where I write : shall I never 
 have done with these tiresome Regattas ? And to-night 
 the Harbour is to be captured after an obstinate defence 
 by 36-pounders in a sham fight, so we shall go deaf to 
 Bed. We had really a famous sail from Felixtow Ferry ; 
 getting out of it at 7 a.m., and being off Broadstairs (3 
 miles from here) as the clock on the shore struck twelve. 
 After that we were an hour getting into this very Port, 
 because of a strong Tide against us. . . ." 
 
 " II Marine Terrace, Lowestoft, MmxIi 28, 1866. 
 [' Letters,' p. 303.] 
 
 "... The change has been of some use, I think, in 
 brightening me. My long solitary habit of Life now 
 begins to tell upon me, and I am got past the very cure 
 which only could counteract it : Company or Society : of 
 which I have lost the Taste too long to endure again. 
 So, as I have made my Bed, I must lie in it — and die in 
 it. . . ." 
 
Edward Fit zGerald : An Aftennath. loi 
 
 " Lowestoft, y^/r?'/ 2, '66. [lb.] 
 "... I am going to be here another week : as I think 
 it really has freshened me up a bit. Especially going out 
 in a Boat with my good Fletcher, though I get perished 
 with the N.E. wind. I believe I never shall do unless 
 in a Lodging, as I have lived these 40 years. It is too 
 late, I doubt, to reform in a House of one's own. . . . 
 Dove,^ unlike Noah's Dove, brings no report of a green 
 leaf when I ask him about the Grass seed. . . ." 
 
 "Lowestoft, Ap7-il 3, '66. [lb.] 
 "... Looking over the Tombstones of the old Church- 
 yard this morning, I observed how very many announced 
 the Lease of Life expired at about the same date which 
 I entered upon last Saturday [fifty-seven]. I know it 
 is time to set one's House in order — when Mr Dove 
 has done his part." 
 
 "CowES, Isle of Wight, Friday, June 30, 1S66. 
 [' Letters,' p. 305.] 
 
 " We got here very well on Tuesday evens. Wednes- 
 day I sent Newson and Crew over to Portsmouth, where 
 they didn't see the one thing I sent them for, namely, 
 Nelson's Ship, the ' Victory,' but where they bought 
 two Pair of Trousers, which they call * Dungaree.' 
 
 1 Mr Dove was the builder of Little Grange. 
 
I02 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Yesterday we went to Poole — a place I had long a 
 very slight Desire to see ; and which was not worth 
 the seeing. To-day we came back here : I regretting 
 rather we had not run further along the Coast to Wey- 
 mouth and Teignmouth, where I should have seen my 
 Friend Mansfield the Shipwright. It was a little weak- 
 ness of mine, in not changing orders, but, having talked 
 of going only to Poole, I left it as it was. The weather 
 has been only too fine : the sea too calm. Here we are 
 in front of this pretty place, with many Yachts at anchor 
 and sailing about us : nearly all Schooners, little and 
 great, of all which I think we are the ' Pitman ' (see 
 Moor's 'Words'). I must say I am very tired of seeing 
 only Schooners. Newson was beaten horribly yesterday 
 by a Ryde open Boat of about 7 or 8 tons, which stood 
 right into the wind, but he soon afterwards completely 
 distanced a Billy-boy, which put us in Spirits again. 
 I am very contented (in my way) pottering about here 
 alone, or with my Crew of two, and I believe c'^ bundle 
 on for a Month in such a way. But I shall soon be 
 home. I have thought of you To-day when your Sale 
 is going on, at the same time as my Sail. Pretty 
 Wit! . . ." 
 
 The next letter refers to an accident that befell the 
 
Edward Fit 2 Gerald : An Aftermath. 103 
 
 Scandal. She was lying at Lowestoft, in the Fishmarket 
 basin, when a huge Continental steamer came drifting 
 down on her. *' Mr FitzGerald," so Mr Spalding tells me, 
 "just said in his slow melodious voice,^ 'My poor little 
 ship will be cracked like a nutshell ; ' and he took my 
 arm to force me ashore. But I refused to go unless he 
 went too, and just then the cable held on the weather- 
 side of the steamer towering up above us ; still, our ' chan- 
 nel-boards,' over which the shrouds are tautened, were 
 crushed up flat to the yacht's side, and perhaps some 
 stanchions were injured too." 
 
 "Scandal, Sept. 19, '66. [lb.] 
 "... Mr Manby is wrong about our getting no com- 
 pensation for the Damage (so far as it c'^ be ^een) inflicted 
 on us by the steamer. Whether we could claim it or not, 
 the Steamer Captain granted it : being (as Newson says) 
 quite a Gentleman, &c. So we have had the Carpenters 
 for two Days, who have restored the broken Stanchions, 
 
 ^ His voice was unforgetable. Mr Mowbray Donne quotes in a letter this 
 passage from FitzGerald's published Letters : " What bothered me in London 
 was — all the Clever People going wrong with such clever Reasons for so doing 
 which I couldn't confute." And he adds: "How good that is. I can hear 
 him saying ' which I couldn't confute ' with a break on his tone of voice at the 
 end of ' couldn't.' You remember how he used to speak — like a cricket-ball, 
 with a break on it, or like his own favourite image of the wave falling over. A 
 Suffolk wave— that was a point." 
 
I04 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 &c. What mischief the Shock may have done to the 
 Body of the Ship remains to be proved : * Anyhow, it 
 can't have done her any good,' says Job's Comforter, 
 Capt"- Newson. The Steamer's Captain admitted that 
 he had expected us to be cracked Hke a Walnut. 
 
 " Now, I want you to tell me of this. You know of 
 Newson's lending Fo^h ^ money. I have advised that, 
 beside an I.O.U. from Posh, he should give security 
 upon some of his Effects : Boats, Nets, or other Gear. 
 Tell me how this should be done, if you can : the Form 
 of Writing required : and perhaps what Interest Newson 
 should have on his Money. 
 
 " Last night at the ' Suffolk ' I was where Newson, 
 Posh, & Co. were at their Ale : a little of which got into 
 Newson's head : who began to touch up Posh about such 
 an Apparatus of Rockets, Mortars, etc., for the Rescue 
 of those two stranded Vessels, when he declares that he 
 and one or two Felixstowe Men would have pushed off 
 a Boat through the pauses of the Surf, and done all that 
 was wanted. He had seen, and been on, the Shipwash 
 scores of times when the jump of the Ship pitched him 
 on his Back, and sent the Topmast flying. So had Posh 
 
 ^ Posh was the nickname of a favourite sailor, the kigger's skipper, as Bassey 
 was Newson's. Posser, mentioned presently, was, Mr Spalding thinks, Posh's 
 brother, at any rate a fisherman and boatman, with whom Mr FitzGerald used 
 to sail in Posli's absence. 
 
Edward FitsGerald : An After7iiath. 105 
 
 on the Home-sand here, he said; his Sand was just as 
 bad as Tom's, he knew ; and the Lowestoft Men just 
 as good as the Felixstowe, &c. I tomented the Quarrel 
 gently :— no QuavYd, or I should not : all Newson meant 
 (which I believe is very true) there are so many men 
 here, and no one Man to command, that they are worse 
 off with all their Men and Boats than at the Ferry 
 [Bawdsey], where Newson or Percival are Spokesmen 
 and Masters. This I have explained to Posh To-day, 
 as he was sitting, like Abraham, in his Tent— like an 
 Apostle, mending his nets. ' Posh, your Frill was out 
 last night?' * No— no— only I didn't like to hear the 
 Lowestoft Chaps weren't as good, etc., especially before 
 the Stranger Men from Harwich, etc' " 
 
 "Lowestoft, October'], '66. [lb.] 
 " . . . ' Posh ' went off in his new, old Lugger,^ which 
 I call ' The Porpoise,' on Thursday : came in yesterday 
 with a Last and a half of Herrings: and is just put to 
 Sea again, Sunday though it be. It is reported to be an 
 extraordinary Herring Year, along shore : and now he goes 
 into deeper Water. I am amused to see Newson's de- 
 votion to his younger Friend: he won't leave him a 
 moment if possible, was the first to see him come in 
 
 1 A second-hand boat that Posh bought at Southwold before the building of 
 the " Meum and Tuum." 
 
io6 Two Suffolk Prieitds. 
 
 yesterday, and has just watched him out of sight. He 
 dedined having any Bill of Sale on Posh's Goods for 
 Money lent ; old as he is (enough to distrust all Mankind) 
 — has perfect reliance on his Honour, Industry, Skill, and 
 Luck. This is a pretty Sight to me. I tell Newson he 
 has at last found his Master, and become possessed of that 
 troublesome thing : an anxious Regard for some one. 
 
 " I was noticing for several Days how many Robins were 
 singing along the ' London Road ' here ; and (without my 
 speaking of it) Lusia Kerrich told me they had almost 
 a Plague of Robins at Gelson [Geldestone] : 3 or 4 coming 
 into the Breakfast room every morning; getting under 
 Kerrich's Legs, &c. And yesterday Posh told me that 
 three came to his Lugger out at Sea ; also another very 
 pretty Bird, whose name he didn't know, but which he 
 caught and caged in the Binnacle, where it was found 
 dead in due time. . . . 
 
 " P.S. — Posh (as Cooper, whom I question, tells me) 
 was over 12 miles from Land when the four Robins came 
 aboard : a Bird which he nor Cooper had ever seen to 
 visit a Ship before. The Bird he shut up in the Binnacle 
 he describes as of 'all sorts of Colours' — perhaps a 
 Tomtit ! — and I fear it was roasted in the Binnacle, when 
 Posh lighted up at night, forgetting his Guest. * Poor 
 little fallow ! '" 
 
Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath. 107 
 
 "Lowestoft, Dec. 4, 1866. [lb.] 
 " I am sorry you can't come, but have no doubt that 
 you are right in not coming. You may imagine what I 
 do with myself here : somehow, I do beheve the Seaside 
 is more of my Element than elsewhere, and the old 
 Lodging Life suits me best. That, however, I have at 
 Woodbridge; and can be better treated nowhere than 
 
 there. 
 
 "I have just seen Posh, who had been shooting his 
 Lines in the Morning : had fallen asleep after his Sunday 
 Dinner, and rose up like a Giant refreshed when I went 
 into his house. His little Wife, however, told him he 
 must go and tidy his Hair, which he was preparing to 
 obey. Oh! these are the People who somehow interest 
 me ; and if I were not now too far advanced on the Road 
 to Forgetfulness, I should be sad that my own Life had 
 been such a wretched Concern in comparison. But it is 
 too late, even to lament, now. . . . 
 
 "There is a Wedding-party next door: at No. 11 ; I 
 being in 12 ; B&cky having charge of both houses. There 
 is incessant vulgar Giggling and Tittering, and 5 meals a 
 Day, Becky says. Oh ! these are not such Gentlefolks as 
 my Friends on the Beach, who have not 5 meals a Day. 
 I wonder how soon I shall quarrel with them, however— 
 I don't mean the Wedding Party. ... At Eight or half- 
 
io8 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 past I go to have a Pipe at Posh's, if he isn't half-drunk 
 with his Friends." 
 
 "Lowestoft, Jan. 5/67. ['Letters,' p. 306,] 
 
 " I really was to have gone home To-day, but made a 
 little Business with Posh an excuse for waiting over Sunday. 
 This very Day he signs an Agreement for a new Herring- 
 lugger, of which he is to be Captain, and to which he will 
 contribute some Nets and Gear. I daresay I had better 
 have left all this alone : but, if moderately lucky, the 
 Vessel will pay something, at any rate : and in the mean- 
 while it really does me some good, I believe, to set up 
 this little Interest here : and even if I lose money, I get 
 some Fun for it. So now I shall be very glad to drop 
 Esquire, and be addressed as ^Herring-merchant,'' for the 
 future. 
 
 " Posh has been doing well this week with Cod-fishing, 
 as only one other Boat has been out (owing to the others 
 not having a Set-net to catch bait with). His fish have 
 fetched a good price, even from the old Jew, Levi.^ I 
 
 ^ This Levi it was, the proprietor of a fish-shop at Lowestoft, that used 
 always to ask FitzGerald of the welfare of his brother John : "And how is the 
 General, bless him ? " 
 
 " How many times, Mr Levi, must I tell you my brother is no General, and 
 never was in the army ? " 
 
 "Ah, well, it is my mistake, no doubt. But anyhow, bless him." 
 
Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath. 109 
 
 believe I have smoked my Pipe every evening but one 
 with Posh at his house, which his quiet Httle Wife 
 keeps tidy and pleasant. The Man is, I do think, of 
 a Royal Nature. I have told him he is liable to one 
 Danger (the Hare with many Friends)— so many want- 
 ing him to drinh. He says, it's quite true, and that he 
 is often obliged to run away : as I believe he does : for 
 his House shows all Temperance and Order. This 
 little Lecture I give him— to go the way, I suppose, of 
 all such Advice. . . ." 
 
 "12 Marine Terrace, Lowestoft, Feb. 8, '67. 
 ['Letters,' p. 308.] 
 
 "Posh shall be at the Train for his Hare. When 
 I went to look for him last Night, he was in his Shod, 
 by the light of a Candle examining a Petman Pig [Suffolk 
 for *the smallest pig in a litter'], about the size of 
 Newson's Watch, and swell'd out * as taut as a Drum,' 
 Posh said. A Friend had given him this Production 
 of Nature: it hadn't grown a bit (except swelling up) 
 for 3 weeks, in spite of Posh's Medicines last Sunday: 
 so as he is ' a'most minded to make away with it, poor 
 little thing.' He almost let it drop when I suddenly 
 appeared, in a theatrical Style, at the Door. 
 
 " You seem to think there is no hurry about a Gardener 
 
no Two Suffolk Friends, 
 
 [at Little Grange] just yet. Mr Berry still thinks that 
 
 Miss 's man would do well : as it is, he goes out 
 
 for work, as Miss has not full Employment for 
 
 him. He and his Wife are very respectable too, I 
 hear. So in spite of my Fear of Unprotected Females, 
 &c., he might do. Perhaps you might see him one day 
 as you pass the Unprotected one's Grounds, and hear. 
 I have hardly work enough for one Whole Man, as is 
 the case with my Neighbour, who yet is a Female. . . ." 
 
 " ' Becky's,' Saturday, May i8, '67. [lb.] 
 
 ". . . Posh is very busy with his Lugger [the * Meum 
 and Tuum '], which will be decked by the middle of next 
 Week. I have just left him : having caught him with a 
 Pot of white paint (some of which was on his Face), and 
 having made him dine on cold Beef in the Suffolk Hotel 
 Bowling-green, washing all down with two Tankards of 
 Bullard's Ale. He was not displeased to dine abroad ; as 
 this is Saturday, when he says there are apt to be 
 'Squalls' at home, because of washing, &c. His little 
 Boy is on the mending hand: safe, indeed, I hope, 
 and beheve, unless they let him into Draughts of Air: 
 which I have warned them against. 
 
 " Yesterday wc went to Yarmouth, and bought a Boat 
 for the Lugger, and paraded the Town, and dined at the 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 1 1 1 
 
 Star Tavern {Beefsteak for one), and looked into the Great 
 Church : where when Posh pulled off his Cap, and stood 
 erect but not irreverent, I thought he looked as good an 
 Image of the Mould that Man was originally cast in, as 
 you may chance to see in the Temple of The Maker in 
 these Days. 
 
 " The Artillery were blazing away on the Denes ; and 
 the little Band-master, who played with his Troop here 
 last summer, joined us as we were walking, and told Posh 
 not to lag behind, for he was not at all ashamed to be seen 
 walking with him. The little well-meaning Ass ! . . ." 
 
 " Lowestoft, Longest Day, '67. 
 [' Letters,' p. 309.] 
 
 "... As to talking over Posh, etc., with me, there is 
 plenty of time for that ; indeed, as yet we cannot come to 
 a final estimate of the Property, since all is not yet 
 bought : sails, cables, warps. Ballast, &c. As to his 
 services hitherto, I yesterday gave him -£20, telling him 
 that / couldn't compute how much he had done for 
 me : nor could he, he said, and would be contented 
 with anything. 
 
 " No cloven Hoof as yet ! It was his Birthday (yester- 
 day), and we all had a walk to the new Lugger, and then 
 to Mutford, where we had a fresh -water Sail on the 
 
1 1 2 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Broad : Ale at the Inn, and Punch in the ' Suffolk ' 
 Bowling - green at night. Oh ! 'tis a pleasant Time. 
 But it passes, passes. I have not been out to Sea once 
 since we've been here ; only loitering about on shore. 
 
 " Lowestoft, April ii^ld'i. 
 [' Letters,' p, 316.] 
 
 "... Meanwhile the Crews loiter about the Town: A. 
 Percival, Frost, and Jack in his Kingfisher Guernsey : to 
 whom Posh does the honours of the place. He is still 
 busy with his Gear : his hands of a fine Mahogany, from 
 Stockholm tar, but I see he has some return of hoseness. 
 I believe that he and I shall now sign the Mortgage Papers 
 that make him owner of Half Meum and Tuum. I only 
 get out of him that he can't say he sees anything much 
 amiss in the Deed. He is delightful with his Babe, whose 
 name is Clara — ' Hallo, Clara ! ' etc. . . ." 
 
 "Lowestoft, Tuesday, Jitne 16, 1S68. [lb.] 
 "... Thank you for the Books, which were all right : 
 except in so far that they were anointed by the oozings of 
 some Rhubarb Jam which Mrs Berry very kindly intro- 
 duced among them. I am at my Don Quixote again ; 
 and really only sorry that I can read it so much more 
 easily this year than last that I shall be all the sooner 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 113 
 
 done with it. Mackerel still come in very slow, sometimes 
 none at all : the dead-calm nights play the deuce with the 
 Fishing, and I see no prospect of change in the weather 
 till the Mackerel shall be changing their Quarters. I am 
 vexed to see the Lugger come in Day after day so poorly 
 stored after all the Labour and Time and Anxiety given to 
 the work by her Crew ; but I can do no more, and at any- 
 rate take my own share of the Loss very lightly. I can 
 afford it better than they can. I have told Newson to set 
 sail and run home any Day, Hour, or Minute, when he 
 wishes to see his Wife and Family. But at present he 
 seems contented to eat Fish here : whether some of the 
 few * Stulh ' ^ which Posh brings in, or what his now in- 
 numerable friends the Trawlers are always offering. In 
 fact, I think Newson looks to Lowestoft as a Summer 
 Pasture, and is in no hurry to leave it. He lives here 
 well for nothing, except Bread, Cheese, and Tea and 
 Sugar. He has now taken to Cocoa, however, which he 
 calls ' Cuckoo ' to my hearing ; having become enamoured 
 of that Beverage in the Lugger, where it is the order of 
 
 the day. . . ." 
 
 "Lowestoft, Monday, July 13, '68. [lb.] 
 
 "... Posh made up and paid off on Saturday. I have 
 not yet asked him, but I suppose he has just paid his way : 
 
 1 An extra large mackerel.— Sea Words and Phrases. 
 H 
 
1 1 4 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 I mean, so far as Grub goes. The Brother of one of his 
 Crew was killed the night we got here, in a Lugger next 
 to Posh's, by a Barque running into her, and knocking 
 him — or, I doubt, crushing him — overboard. 
 
 "... When are we to have rain ? Last night it light- 
 ened to the South, as we sat in the Suffolk Gardens — I, 
 and Posh, and Mrs Posh, and Sparks; Newson and Jack 
 being with some other friends in another Department. 
 Posh and I had been sauntering in the Churchyard, and 
 reading the Epitaphs : looking at his own little boy's 
 Grave — ' Poor little Fellow ! He wouldn't let his Mother 
 go near him — I can't think why — but kept his little Fingers 
 twisted in my Hair, and wouldn't let me go ; and when 
 Death strook him, as I may say, halloo'd out ' Daddy! '" 
 
 " Lowestoft, Simday, Aug. 30, '69. 
 ['Letters,' p. 31S.] 
 
 "... You will see by the enclosed that Posh has had 
 a little better luck than hitherto. One reason for my not 
 going to Woodbridge is, that I think it possible this N.E. 
 wind may blow him hither to tan his nets. Only please 
 God it don't tan him and his people first. . . . 
 
 " Lord and Lady Hatherley were here last week — no, 
 this week : and I met them on the pier one day, as un- 
 affected as ever. He is obliged, I believe, to carry the 
 
Edward Fit z Gerald : An Aftermath. 115 
 
 Great Seal about with him ; I told him I wondered how 
 he could submit to be so bored ; on which my lady put in 
 about " Sense of Duty," etcetera-rorum. But I (having 
 no Great Seal to carry) went off to Southwold on Wed- 
 nesday, and lay off there in the calm nights till yester- 
 day : going to Dunwich, which seemed to me rather 
 delightful. 
 
 " Newson brought in another Moth some days ago ; 
 brownish, with a red rump. I dare say very common, 
 but I have taken enormous pains to murder it : buying 
 a lump of some poison at Southwold which the Chemist 
 warned me to throw overboard directly the Moth was done 
 for: for fear of Jack and Newson being found dead in 
 their rugs. The Moth is now pinned down in a lucifer 
 match box, awaiting your inspection. You know I shall 
 be glad to see you at any time. ..." 
 
 "Lowestoft, Sept. 4, '69. [lb.] 
 " I wish you were coming here this Evening, as I have 
 several things to talk over. 
 
 " I would not meddle with the Regatta— to Newson's 
 sorrow, who certainly must have carried off the second 
 £10 prize. And the Day ended by vexing me more than 
 it did him. Posh drove in here the day before to tan his 
 nets: could not help making one with some old friends 
 
ii6 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 in a Boat-race on the Monday, and getting very fuddled 
 with them on the Suffolk Green (where I was) at night. 
 After all the pains I have taken, and all the real anxiety 
 I have had. And worst of all, after the repeated promises 
 he had made ! I said, there must now be an end of 
 Confidence between us, so far as that was concerned, and 
 I would so far trouble myself about him no more. But 
 when I came to reflect that this was but an outbreak 
 among old friends on an old occasion, after (I do believe) 
 months of sobriety ; that there was no concealment about 
 it ; and that though obstinate at first as to how little 
 drunk, &c., he was very repentant afterwards — I cannot 
 let this one flaw weigh against the general good of the 
 man. I cannot if I would : what then is the use of 
 trying ? But my confidence in that respect must be so 
 far shaken, and it vexes me to think that I can never be 
 sure of his not being overtaken so. I declare that it 
 makes me feel ashamed very much to play the Judge on 
 one who stands immeasurably above me in the scale, 
 whose faults are better than so many virtues. Was 
 not this very outbreak that of a great genial Boy among 
 his old Fellows ? True, a Promise was broken. Yes : 
 but if the Whole Man be of the Royal Blood of Humanity, 
 and do Justice in the Main, what arc the people to say ? 
 He thought, if he thought at all, that he kept his promise 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An AftermatJi. 1 1 7 
 
 in the main. But there is no use talking : unless I part 
 company wholly, I suppose I must take the evil with the 
 good. 
 
 " Well, Winter will soon be here, and no more ' Suffolk ' 
 Bowling-greens. Once more I want you to help in finding 
 me a lad, or boy, or lout, who will help me to get through 
 the long Winter nights — whether by cards or reading — 
 now that my eyes are not so up to their work as they 
 were. I think they are a little better : which I attribute 
 to the wearing of these hideous Goggles, which keep out 
 Sun, Sea, Sand, &c. But I must not, if I could, tax 
 them as I have done overbooks by lamplight till Midnight. 
 Do pray consider this for me, and look about. I thought 
 of a sharp lad — that son of the Broker — if he could read 
 a little decently he would do. Really one has lived quite 
 long enough. 
 
 " will be very glad to show you his place at any 
 
 time. His Wife is really a very nice Lady, and his Boy 
 one of the nicest I have seen these 30 years. He himself 
 sees wonderful things : he saw 2 sharks (supposed by 
 Newson to be Sweet Williams) making love together out 
 of the water at Covehithe ; and a shoal of Porpoises toss- 
 ing up a Halibut into the Air and catching it again. You 
 may imagine Newson's demure face listening to all this, 
 and his comments afterwards. . . ." 
 
1 1 8 • Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 " Suffolk Hotel, Lowestoft, Sept 21, '69. [lb.] 
 
 "Thank you much for your Letter, which I got last 
 night when I went for my usual dose of Grog and Pipe. 
 
 " Posh came up with his Lugger last Friday, with a lot 
 of torn nets, and went off again on Sunday. / thought he 
 was wrong to come up, and not to transmit his nets by 
 Rail, as is often done at 6d. a net. But I did not say so 
 to him, — it is no unamiable point in him to love home : 
 but I think he won't make a fortune by it. However, I 
 may be very wrong in thinking he had better not have 
 come. He has made about the average fishing, I believe : 
 about ;£'25o. Some boats have £600, I hear ; and some 
 few not enough to pay their way. 
 
 "He came up with a very bad cold and hoarseness; 
 and so went off, poor fellow : he never will be long well, I 
 do think. I was foolish to forget G. Crabbe's homoeo- 
 pathic Aconite: but I sent off some pills of it to Grimsby 
 last night. . . ." 
 
 "Lowestoft, March 2/70. ['Letters,' p. 324.] 
 
 "... Posh has, I believe, gone off to Southwold in 
 hope to bring his Lugger home. I advised him last night 
 to ascertain first by Letter whether she were ready for his 
 hands ; but you know he will go his own way, and that 
 generally is as good as anybody's. He now works all day 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath, 119 
 
 in his Net-loft ; and I wonder how he keeps as well as he 
 .is, shut up there from fresh Air, and among frowzy Nets. 
 But he is in good Spirits; and that goes some way to 
 keep the Body well, you know. I think he has mistaken 
 in not sending the Meum and Tuum to the West this 
 Spring, not because the Weather seems to promise in all 
 ways so much better than last (for that no one could an- 
 ticipate), but on account of the high Price of Fish of any 
 sort; which has been an evident fact for the last six 
 months. But I have not meddled, nor indeed is it my 
 Business to meddle now. . . ." 
 
 " Lowestoft, Wednesday, Sept. 8, '70. 
 [' Letters,' p. 323.] 
 
 "... Indeed, I only write now because I am shut up 
 in my ship by rain, and so write letters. 
 
 " I had a letter from Posh yesterday, telling me he was 
 sorry we had not 'parted Friends.' That he had been 
 indeed ' a little the worse for Drink '—which means being 
 at a Public-house half the Day, and having to sleep it off 
 the remainder : having been duly warned by his Father at 
 Noon that all had been ready for sailing 2 hours before, 
 and all the other Luggers gone. As Posh could walk, I 
 suppose he only acknowledges a little Drink ; but, judging 
 by what followed on that little Drink, I wish he had sim- 
 ply acknowledged his Fault. He begs me to write : if I 
 
I20 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 do so, I must speak very plainly to him : that, with all his 
 noble Qualities, I doubt that I can never again have Con- . 
 fidence in his Promise to break this one bad Habit, seeing 
 that he has broken it so soon, when there was no occasion 
 or excuse : unless it were the thought of leaving his Wife 
 so ill at home. The Man is so beyond others, as I think, 
 that I have come to feel that I must not condemn him by 
 general rule ; nevertheless, if he ask me, I can refer him 
 to no other. I must send him back his own written 
 Promise of Sobriety, signed only a month before he broke 
 it so needlessly : and I must even tell him that I know 
 not yet if he can be left with the Mortgage as we settled 
 it in May. . . . 
 
 " P.S. — I enclose Posh's letter, and the answer I pro- 
 pose to give to it. I am sure it makes me sad and 
 ashamed to be setting up for Judge on a much nobler 
 Creature than myself. But I must consider this a case in 
 which the outbreak was worse than needless, and such as 
 must almost destroy any Confidence I can feel for the 
 future. I can only excuse it as a sort of Desperation at 
 his Wife's Illness — strange way as he took of improving 
 the occasion. You see it was not old Friends not seen 
 for some time, but one or two of the Crew he is always 
 with. 
 
 " I had thought of returning him his written Promise as 
 
Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath. 121 
 
 worthless : desiring back my Direction to my Heirs that 
 he should keep on the lugger in case of my Death. But I 
 will wait for what you say about all this. I am really 
 sorry to trouble you over and over again with the matter. 
 But I am so fearful of blundering, where a Blunder may 
 do so much harm. I think that Posh ought to be made 
 to feel this severely : and, as his Wife is better, I do not 
 mind making him feel it, if I can. On the other hand, I 
 do not wish to drive him, by Despair, into the very fault 
 which I have so tried to cure him of. Pray do consider, 
 and write to me of this, returning me the two Papers. 
 
 " His mother did not try to excuse him at all : his 
 Father would not even see him go off. She merely told 
 me parenthetically, ' I tell him he seem to do it when 
 the Governor is here.' " ^ 
 
 "Lowestoft, Saturday, Feb. 25, 1871. 
 ['Letters,' p, 331.] 
 
 "... The two Hens travelled so comfortably, that, 
 when let out of the basket, they fed, and then fought to- 
 gether. Your Hen was pronounced a Beauty by Posh & 
 Co. As for mine, she stood up and crew like a Cock 
 three times right on end, as Posh reports : a command of 
 
 1 An odd contrast all this to the calmness with which your ordinary Christian 
 discharges (his duty and) a drunken servant, or shakes off a disreputable friend. 
 
122 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Voice in a Hen reputed so unlucky^ that Mr and Mrs 
 Fletcher, Senior, who had known of sad results from such 
 unnatural exhibitions, recommended her being slain and 
 stewed down forthwith. Posh, however, resolves to abide 
 the upshot. . . . Posh and his Father are very busy 
 getting the Meum and Tuum ready for the West ; Jemmy, 
 who goes Captain, is just now in France with a Cavg^oc of 
 salt Herrings. I suppose the Lugger will start in a fort- 
 night or so. My Eyes refuse reading here, so I sit look- 
 ing at the sea (with shut eyes), or gossiping with the 
 women in the Net-loft. All-fours at night. Thank you 
 for the speckled Hen ; Posh expressed himself much 
 
 obliged for his. . . ." 
 
 "Lowestoft, Sunday, Sept. 29/72. 
 ['Letters,'?. 345.] 
 
 "... Posh — after no fish caught for 3 weeks — has 
 had his boat come home with nearly all her fleet of nets 
 torn to pieces in last week's winds. On Wednesday he 
 had to go 8 miles on the other side of Halesworth after a 
 runaway — came home, drenched from top to toe, with a 
 great Bulrush in his hand, which he could not help ad- 
 miring as he went along : and went with me to the 
 Theatre afterwards, where he admired the ' Gays,' as he 
 
 ' Compare the old folk rhyme — 
 
 "A whistling woman and a crowing hen 
 Are hateful alike to God and men." 
 
Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath. 123 
 
 called the Scenes; but fell asleep before Shylock had 
 whetted his knife in the Merchant of Venice. . . ." 
 
 "Lowestoft, Friday, Jan. 9, 1S74. 
 ['Letters, p. 366.] 
 
 "... No doubt Berry thinks that his Month's Notice, 
 which was up last Monday, was enough. Against that I 
 have to say, that, after giving that Notice, he told George 
 Moor that I might stay while I pleased ; and he drove me 
 away for a week by having no one but his own blind Aunt 
 to wait on me. What miserable little things ! They do 
 not at all irritate, but only hoYC me. I have seen no more 
 of Fletcher since I wrote, though he called once when I 
 was out. I have left word at his house, that, if he wishes 
 to see me before I go, here am I to be found at tea-time. 
 I only hope he has taken no desperate step. I hope so 
 for his Family's sake, including Father and Mother. 
 People here have asked me if he is not going to give 
 up the Business, &c. Yet there is Greatness about the 
 Man : I beheve his want of Conscience in some particulars 
 is to be referred to his Salwaging Ethics ; and your Crom- 
 wells, Cffisars, and Napoleons have not been more scrupu- 
 lous. But I shall part Company with him if I can do so 
 without Injury to his Family. If not, I must let him go 
 on under some 'Surveillance' : he must wish to get rid 
 
124 T^'^0 Suffolk Friends. 
 
 of me also, and (I believe, though he says not) of the 
 Boat, if he could better himself." 
 
 "Lowestoft, Sunday, Feb. 28, 1875. 
 [' Letters,' p. 370.] 
 
 "... I believe I wrote you that Fletcher's Babe, 10 
 months old, died of Croup — to be buried to-morrow. I 
 spoke of this in a letter to Anna Biddell, who has written 
 me such a brave, pious word in return that I keep to show 
 you. She thinks I should speak to Fletcher, and hold out 
 a hand to him, and bid him take this opportunity to re- 
 gain his Self-respect ; but I cannot suppose that I could 
 make any lasting impression upon him. She does not 
 know all.'" 
 
 "WooDBRiDGE, Dec. 23/76. 
 [' Letters,' p. 396.] 
 
 " . . . I do not think there is anything to be told of 
 Woodbridge News : anyhow, / know of none : sometimes 
 not going into the Street for Days together. I have a 
 new Reader — Son of Fox the Binder — who is intelligent, 
 enjoys something of what he reads, can laugh heartily, 
 and does not mind being told not to read through his 
 Nose : which I think is a common way in Woodbridge, 
 perhaps in Suffolk." 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 125 
 
 "WOODBRIDGE, March 31/79. 
 ['Letters, p. 435.] 
 
 " . . .A month ago Ellen Churchyard told me — what 
 she was much scolded for telling — that for some three 
 weeks previous Mrs Howe had been suffering so from 
 Rheumatism that she had been kept awake in pain, and 
 could scarce move about by da}^, though she did the house 
 work as usual, and would not tell me. I sent for Mr 
 Jones at once, and got Mrs Cooper in, and now Mrs H. 
 is better, she ^ays. But as I tell her, she only gives a 
 great deal more of the trouble she wishes to save one by 
 such obstinacy. We are now reading the fine ' Legend of 
 Montrose ' till g ; then, after ten minutes' refreshment, 
 the curtain rises on Dickens's Copperfield, by way of 
 Farce after the Play ; both admirable. I have been busy 
 in a small way preparing a little vol. of ' Readings in 
 Crabbe's Tales of the Hall ' for some few who will not 
 encounter the original Book. I do not yet know if it 
 will be published, but I shall have done a little work I 
 long wished to do, and I can give it away to some who 
 will like it. I will send you a copy if you please when it 
 is completed." 
 
 "II Marine Terrace, Lowestoft, Wednesday. 
 
 " Dear Spalding, — Please to spend a Sovereign for 
 your Children or among them, as you and they see good. 
 
126 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 I have lost the Faculty of choosing Presents, you still 
 enjoy it : so do this little Office for me. All good and 
 kind wishes to Wife and Family : a happy Xmas is still 
 no idle word to you." 
 
 "WOODBRIDGE, Jan. 12, '82. 
 [' Letters,' p. 477.] 
 
 "... The Aconite, which Mr Churchyard used to call 
 ' New Year's Gift,' has been out in my Garden for this 
 fortnight past. Thrushes (and, I think. Blackbirds) try 
 to sing a little : and half yesterday I was sitting, with 
 no more apparel than in my rooms, on my Quarter-deck" 
 \i.c., the walk in the garden of Little Grange]. 
 
 ''April I, 18S2. [' Letters,' p. 4S1.] 
 
 "Thank you for your Birthday Greeting — a Ceremony 
 which, I nevertheless think, is almost better forgotten at 
 my time of life. But it is an old, and healthy, custom. 
 I do not quite shake off my Cold, and shall, I suppose, 
 be more liable to it hereafter. But what wonderful 
 weather ! I see the little trees opposite my window 
 perceptibly greener every morning. Mr Wood persists 
 in delaying to send the seeds of Annuals ; but I am 
 going to send for them to - day. My Hyacinths have 
 been gay, though not so fine as last year's : and I have 
 some respectable single red Anemones — always favourites 
 of mine. 
 
Edward FitzGerald: An Aftermath. 127 
 
 "Aldis Wright has been spending his Easter here; 
 and goes on to Beccles, where he is to examine and 
 report on the Books and MSS. of the late George Borrow 
 at Oulton." 
 
 The handwriting is shaky in this letter, and it is the 
 last of the series. It should have closed this article, 
 but that I want still to quote one more letter to my 
 father, and a poem : — 
 
 " WOODBRIDGE, March l6, 1878. 
 ['Letters,' pp. 410, 418.] 
 
 "My dear Groome, — I have not had any Academies 
 that seemed to call for sending severally : here are some, 
 however (as also A thcncvnins), which shall go in a parcel 
 to you, if you care to see them. Also, Munro's Catullus, 
 which has much interested me, bad Scholar as I am : 
 though not touching on some of his best Poems. How- 
 ever, I never cared so much for him as has been the 
 fashion to do for the last half century, I think. I had a 
 letter from Donne two days ago: it did not speak of 
 himself as other than well ; but I thought it indicated 
 feebleness. 
 
 " Eh ! voila que j'ai deja dit tout ce que vient au bout 
 de ma plume. Je ne bouge pas d'ici ; cependant, I'annee 
 va son train. Toujours a vous et a les votres, E. F. G. 
 "By the by, I enclose a Paper of some stepping-stones 
 
128 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 in * Dear Charles Lamb ' — drawn up for my own use in 
 reading his Letters, and printed, you see, for my Friends 
 — one of my best Works ; though not exact about Book 
 Dates, which indeed one does not care for. 
 
 " The Paper is meant to paste in as Flyleaf before any 
 Volume of the Letters, as now printed. But it is not a 
 ' Venerable ' Book, I doubt. Daddy Wordsworth said, 
 indeed, ' Charles Lamb is a good man if ever good man 
 was ' — as I had wished to quote at the End of my Paper, 
 but could not find the printed passage." 
 
 The poem turned up in a MS. book of my father's, 
 while this article was writing. It is a version of the 
 " Lucius iEmilius PauUus," already published by Mr Aldis 
 Wright, in vol. ii. p. 483 of the ' Remains,' but the two 
 differ so widely that lovers of FitzGerald will be glad to 
 have it. Here, then, it is : — 
 
 A Paraphrase by Edward FitzGerald of the 
 Speech of Paullus ^milius in Livy, lib. 
 xlv. c. 41. 
 
 " How prosperously I have served the State, 
 And how in the Midsummer of Success 
 A double Thunderbolt from heav'n has struck 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 129 
 
 On mine own roof, Rome needs not to be told, 
 Who has so lately witness'd through her Streets, 
 Together, moving with unequal March, 
 My Triumph and the Funeral of my Sons. 
 Yet bear with me if in a few brief words. 
 And no invidious Spirit, I compare 
 With the full measure of the general Joy 
 My private Destitution. When the Fleet 
 Was all equipp'd, 'twas at the break of day 
 That I weigh'd anchor from Brundusium ; 
 Before the day went down, with all my Ships 
 I made Corcyra ; thence, upon the fifth, 
 To Delphi ; where to the presiding God 
 A lustratory Sacrifice I made, 
 As for myself, so for the Fleet and Army. 
 Thence in five days I reach'd the Roman camp ; 
 Took the command ; re-organis'd the War ; 
 And, for King Perseus would not forth to fight, 
 And for his camp's strength could not forth be forced, 
 I slipped between his Outposts by the woods 
 At Petra, thence I foUow'd him, when he 
 Fight me must needs, I fought and routed him. 
 Into the all-constraining Arms of Rome 
 Reduced all Macedonia. 
 
 And this grave War that, growing year by year, 
 
 I 
 
130 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 Four Consuls each to each made over worse 
 Than from his predecessor he took up, 
 In fifteen days victoriously I closed. 
 With that the Flood of Fortune, setting in 
 Roll'd wave on wave upon us. Macedon 
 Once fall'n, her States and Cities all gave in, 
 The royal Treasure dropt into my Hands ; 
 And then the King himself, he and his Sons, 
 As by the finger of the Gods betray'd, 
 Trapp'd in the Temple they took refuge in. 
 And now began my over-swelling Fortune 
 To look suspicious in mine eyes. I fear'd 
 The dangerous Seas that were to carry back 
 The fruit of such a Conquest and the Host 
 Whose arms had reap'd it all. My fear was vain : 
 The Seas were laid, the Wind was fair, we touch'd 
 Our own Italian Earth once more. And then 
 When nothing seem'd to pray for, yet I pray'd ; 
 That because Fortune, having reach'd her height, 
 Forthwith begins as fatal a decline. 
 Her fall might but involve myself alone. 
 And glance beside my Country. Be it so ! 
 By my sole ruin may the jealous Gods 
 Absolve the Common-weal — by mine — by me. 
 Of whose triumphal Pomp the front and rear — 
 
Edward FitzGerald : An Aftermath. 131 
 
 O scorn of human Glory— was begun 
 
 And closed with the dead bodies of my Sons. 
 
 Yes, I the Conqueror, and conquer'd Perseus, 
 
 Before you two notorious Monuments 
 
 Stand here of human Instability. 
 
 He that was late so absolute a King 
 
 Now, captive led before my Chariot, sees 
 
 His sons led with him captive— but alive ; 
 
 While I, the Conqueror, scarce had turn'd my face 
 
 From one lost son's still smoking Funeral, 
 
 And from my Triumph to the Capitol 
 
 Return — return in time to catch the last 
 
 Sigh of the last that I might call my Son, 
 
 Last of so many Children that should bear 
 
 My name to Aftertime. For blind to Fate, 
 
 And over-affluent of Posterity, 
 
 The two surviving Scions of my Blood 
 
 I had engrafted in an alien Stock, 
 
 And now, beside himself, no one survives 
 
 Of the old House of Paullus." 
 
 Myself, on the whole, I greatly prefer this version to 
 Mr Aldis Wright's : still, which is the later, which the 
 earlier, it were hard to determine on internal grounds. 
 For, as has befallen many a greater poet, FitzGerald's 
 
132 Two Suffolk Friends. 
 
 alterations were by no means always improvements. 
 One sees this in the various editions of his masterpiece, 
 the ' Rubaiyat.' However, by a comparison of the date 
 (1856) on the fly-leaf of my father's notebook with that 
 of a published letter of FitzGerald's to Professor Cowell 
 (May 28, 1868), I am led to conclude that my father's 
 copy is an early draft. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 PRINTIiO UV WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. 
 

 'Lorcf, have mercy." 
 
 cres. 
 P 
 
 Lord, who wast content to die, 
 That poor sinners may draw nigh 
 To the throne of grace on high, 
 Miserere, Doinine. 
 
 2. Who dost hear my every groan, 
 Intercedest at the throne, 
 
 cres. Making my poor prayers Thine own, 
 p Miserere, Doinine. 
 
 3. When some sorrow, pressing sore, 
 Tells me, that life nevermore 
 
 cres. Can be, as it was of yore, 
 p Miserere, Doinine. 
 
 4. Let me hear the Voice, that said, 
 " It is L be not afraid " ; 
 
 cres. So the sorrow shall be stay'd, 
 p Miserere, Doinine, 
 
 5. When the hour of death is nigh, 
 And the watchers, standing by, 
 
 cres. Raise the supplicating cry, 
 p Miserere, Dojnine. 
 
 6. Take me to Thy promised rest, 
 Number me among the blest, 
 
 p Poor, and yet a welcomed guest. 
 f Alleluia, Domine. 
 
US-f- 
 
 /; 
 
 .-V 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
 BERKELEY 
 
 Return to desk from which borrowed. 
 This book is DUE on the last date stamped below. 
 
 1. '-•'> • 
 
 REC'D LD 
 
 AUG 51959 
 
 LD 21-100m-9,'47(A5702sl6)476 
 
 
-f^ V flvl- 
 
 
 ivil36144 
 
 
 '."J^ 
 
 VD 48289 <?52 
 FSS3 
 
 ^ to 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY