A great open space stretches outside the boundary walls of the old Abbey precincts. Here, on “Angel Hill,” as it is called, Bury fair was held in days of old. It was no mere rustic saturnalia, but a fashionable institution, and lasted a fortnight. A one-day fair still held annually, on September 21st, is the sole relic of this once important event, famous not only for the business, but also for the matrimonial matches concluded there.

The “Angel,” a dyspeptic and gloomy-looking house of huge proportions and sad-coloured brick, faces this wide, empty space, and adds a quite unnecessary emphasis to its dulness. There was an inn of the same name here so early as 1452, neighboured by others, but in 1779 the whole of the buildings on this side were removed and the present row erected. No one would suspect from the commonplace exterior of the “Angel” that its great cellars are of mediÆval date, and comprised of groined crypts; but they do not redeem the general aspect of the building, and we do not look upon the “Angel” with interest because it figures in the Pickwick Papers, but only in surprise that Dickens should have thought it worth mention. He did so mention it because the “Angel” was the principal coaching-inn of the town. There was—indeed, there still is—the “Suffolk” hotel, but to and from the “Angel” came and went the Norwich Mail and the best of the post-chaise traffic. In the days when “every gentleman visited London at least once in his lifetime,” the house may by dint of much business have worn a cheery look; but now that almost every one comes up to town by rail many times a year, the place has the air of a public institution of the hospital or infirmary order. Looking upon this scene, the proverbial slowness of the Bury coaches recurs to the stranger, who remembers that old story of a pedestrian walking from Newmarket and overtaking—not being overtaken by—the stage. The coachman offered him a lift. “No, thank you,” said he; “I’m in a hurry to-day,” and soon disappeared in advance of the lumbering conveyance.

One never thoroughly realises the full meaning of the word “respectable” until the acquaintance of Bury St. Edmunds is made. Respectability squats heavily upon the place and is incarnated on every flat-faced house-front, twinkles from every matutinally polished brass door-knocker, is seen down every dull street vista, and dogs your footsteps into the Abbey grounds, where the respectable burgesses lie in their respectable graves, in hopes of a Heaven planned on respectable and exclusive lines. Even the old abbots and monks are robbed of their historic glamour and are respectable likewise—and by that same token commonplace. It is a respectable landscape, too, upon whose flat suave fields you look from the higher streets of the town; flat and featureless, good for the husbandman, but, lacking even the dropsical, water-logged interest of the Fens, the very negation of the picturesque. In Defoe’s time it was equally respectable, as he naÏvely tells us. “The beauty of this town,” he says, “consists in the number of gentry who dwell in and near it, the polite conversation among them, the affluence and plenty they live in, and the pleasant country they have to go abroad in.” How exquisitely fragrant of snobbishness!