Page 7, line 15, for “these,” read “those.”

„ 8, line 10, for “querus,” read “querns.”

„ 37, line 16, for “veriest,” read “various.”

„ 59, lines 24 and 26, for “Hoptin,” read “Hopkin.”

„ 64, line 8, for “spirit—powers,” read “spirit-powers.”

CHAPTER I.
introduction.

Who that has ever looked upon the strange conglomerations of architecture that line the thoroughfares of an ancient city, bearing trace of a touch from the hand of every age, from centuries far remote,—or watched the busy scenes of modern every-day life, surrounded by solemnly majestic, or quaintly grim old witnesses of our nation’s’ infancy,—but has felt the Poetry of History that lies treasured up in the chronicles of an “Old City?”

We may not all be archÆologists, we may many of us feel little sympathy with the love of accumulating time-worn, moth-eaten relics of ages passed away, still less may we desire to see the resuscitation of dead forms, customs or laws, which we believe to have been advances upon prior existing institutions, living their term of natural life in the season appointed for them, and yielding in their turn to progressions more suited to the growing wants of a growing people; but there are few minds wholly indifferent to the associations of time and place, or that are not conscious of some reverence for the links connecting the present with the past, to be found in the many noble and stupendous works of ancient art, yet lingering amongst us, massive evidences of lofty thoughts and grand conceptions, which found expression in the works of men’s hands, when few other modes existed of embodying the imaginations of the mind.

It is not now my purpose to draw comparisons between the appeals thus made through the outward senses to the spirituality of our nature, and the varied other and more subtle means employed in later days, to awaken our feelings of veneration and devotion, but it may be observed in passing, that amid the floods of change that have swept across our country’s history, it is scarcely possible but that some good should have been lost among the dÉbris of decayed and shattered institutions. We have now to take a sweeping glance at the general outline of the place that has been chosen as the nucleus from which to spin our web, of light and perhaps fanciful associations. A desultory ramble through the streets and bye-ways of an old city, that owns six-and-thirty parish churches, the ghosts of about twenty more defunct, the remains of four large friaries and a nunnery, some twenty or thirty temples of worship flourishing under the divers names and forms of “dissent,” two Roman branches of the Catholic Church, a Jewish synagogue, a hospital, museum, libraries, and institutions of every possible name, and “refuges” for blind, lame, halt, deaf, “incurable,” and diseased in mind, body, or estate; that is sprinkled with factories, bounded by crumbling ruins of old rampart walls, and studded with broken and mutilated bastion towers,—brings into view a series of objects so heterogeneous in order and character, that to arrange the ideas suggested by them to the mind or memory, is a task of no slight difficulty.

The great “lions” of interest to one, may rank the very lowest in the scale of another’s imagination or fancy. The philosopher, the poet, the philanthropist, the antiquarian, the utilitarian, the man of the world, and the man of the day, each may choose his separate path, and each find for himself food for busy thought and active investigation.

The archÆologist may indulge his love of interpreting the chiselled finger-writing of centuries gone by, upon many a richly decorated page of sculpture, and, hand in hand with the historian and divine, may trace out the pathway of art and religion, through the multiform records of genius, devotional enthusiasm, taste, and beneficence, chronicled in writings of stone, by its ecclesiastical remains; he may gratify himself to his heart’s content with “vis-À-vis” encounters with grim old faces, grinning from ponderous old doorways, or watching as sentinels over dark and obscure passages, leading to depths impenetrable to outward vision, and find elaborately carved spandrils and canopies, gracing the entrances of abodes where poverty and labour have long since found shelter in the cast-off habitations of ancient wealth and aristocracy.

He may venture to explore cavernous cellars with groined roofings and piers that register their age; may make his way through moth-corrupted storehouses of dust and lumber; to revel in the grandeur of some old “hall,” boasting itself a relic of the domestic architecture of the days of the last Henry, and there lose himself in admiration of old mullioned windows, tie-beams, and antique staircases; may ferret out old cabinets and quaint old buffets hard by, that once, perchance, found lodging in the “Stranger’s Hall,” as it is wont, though erringly, to be designated; he may wander thence through bye lanes and streets, stretching forth their upper stories as if to meet their opposite neighbours half way with the embrace of friendship; over the plain, memorable as the scene of slaughter in famous Kett’s rebellion, to the “World’s End;” and see amid the tottering ruins of half demolished pauper tenements, the richly carved king-posts and beams of the banquet chamber of the famous knight, Sir Thomas Erpingham, whose martial fame and religious “heresy” have found a more lasting monument than the perishable frame-work of his mansion-house, in the magnificent gateway known by his name, and raised in commemoration of his sin of Lollardism. He may accompany the philanthropist in his visit to the “Old Man’s Hospital,” and mourn over the misappropriation of the nave and chancel of fine old St. Helen’s, where lies buried Kirkpatrick, a patriarch of the tribe of antiquaries; he may visit the grammar school that has sent forth scholars, divines, warriors, and lawyers; a Keye, a Clarke, an Earle, [5] a Nelson, and a Rajah Brooke, to spread its fame in the wide world. He may see in it a record of the days when grammar was forbidden to be taught elsewhere; he may peep through the oriels that look in upon the charnel-house of the ancient dead beneath; may feast his eyes upon the beauties of the Erpingham, and strange composite details of the Ethelbert gateways; explore the mysteries of the Donjon, or Cow Tower; and following the windings of the river past the low archway of the picturesque little ferry, find himself at length stumbling upon some fragment of the old “Wall.” Thence he may trace the ancient frontier line of the Old City, and the sites of its venerable gateways, that were, but are not; the flintwork of the old rampart, now clinging to the precipitous sides of “Butter Hills,” with an old tower at the summit, mounted, sentinel-like, to keep watch over the ruins of the Carrow Abbey, and the alder cars, that gave it its name in the valley below; now, following a broken course, here and there left in solitude for wild creepers and the rare indigenous carnation to take root upon; now bursting through incrustations of modern bricks and mortar, and showing a bastion tower, with its orifices ornamented by spread-eagle emblems of the stone-mason’s craft in the precincts below; here, forming the back of slaughter-houses, or the foundations of some miserable workshop, fashioned from the rubble of its sides; thence wandering on through purlieus of wretchedness and filth that might shake the nerves of any more vulnerable bodies than “paving commissioners” or “boards of health;” its arched recesses, once so carefully defined, its elevated walks, so studiously preserved for recreation as well as for defence, all now rendered an indefinite disfigured mass, with accretions of modern growth, that bear the stamp upon every feature of their parentage, poverty and decay. He may visit barns and cottages with remnants of windows and doorways, that make it easy to believe they once had been the shrine of a St. Mary Magdalen; may trace out for himself, among hovels and cellars, and reeking court-yards, grey patches of festering ruin, last lingering evidences of the age of conventual grandeur; here, in the priory yard of a parish, that might be said to shelter the offscum of poverty’s heavings up, he shall find a little ecclesiastical remnant of monastic architecture, converted into a modern meeting-house; the nursery walls that cradled the genius of a Bale, the carmelite monk, and great chronicler of his age, now echoing the doctrines of the “Reformed Religion,” as taught by the Anabaptist preacher. In another district, but still skirting on the river-side, where those old monks ever loved to pitch their dwelling-places, down in a dreary little nook, shut out from noisy thoroughfares, and bearing about it all the hushed stillness that beseems the place, he may seek the ghostly companionship of the old “friar of orders grey” in the lanes and walks that once bounded the flourishing territory of the rich “mendicant” followers of holy St. Francis, or “friars minors,” as they were wont to call themselves. Not far distant, the whereabouts of the old Austin Friars may invite attention; and the locale of the “Carrow Nunnery,” or ladies’ seminary of the mediÆval times, claim a passing enquiry, and note of admiration for the beauty of its site.

Sacred spots, consecrated by the holy waters of loving humanity and gentle charity, in ages gone by, as the refuge of the diseased leper and homeless poor, shall be pointed to as the mustard-seed from whence have sprung those glorious monuments of our land, the hospitals for the sick of these later generations.

Nor would he rest content without a glimpse of the Museum and its relics of the dead, its hieroglyphical urns and querns, spurs, fibulÆ, and celts, its pyxes and beads, its lamps and coins, that lead imagination back to pay domiciliary visits to the wooden huts, earthen fortifications, and sepulchral hearths of our Icenic, Roman, or Saxon forefathers, while gaping Egyptian mummies stand by, peering from their wizened-up eye-balls at the industrious student of the “gallery of antiquities,” looking wonder at the preference displayed for them, over the more brilliant attractions offered to the lover of natural history, and ornithology in particular, among the collections below.

Nor shall the antiquarian be alone in his enjoyment. The botanist shall delight to enrich his herbarium from the same hedgerows, fir-woods, cornfields and rivulets, that have yielded flowers, mosses, hepatica, and algÆ to the researches of a Smith, a Hooker, and a Lindley, the children of science nurtured on its soil. The lover of music shall find fresh beauties in the harmonies of its organs, quires, and choruses, from the halo of associations cast around them by the memories of a Crotch, the remembrance of the Gresham professorship, filled from the musical ranks of the city, and may be, in time to come from a new lustre added by another name, that has begun to be sounded forth by the trumpet of fame in the musical world.

The scholar and literary man shall acknowledge the interest claimed by the nursery in which has been reared a Bale, a Clarke, a Parker, a Taylor, a Gurney, an Opie, and a Borrow, and we may add, a Barwell and a Geldart, whose fruit and flowers, scattered on the way-side of the roads of learning, have made many a rough path smooth to young and tender feet.

The philanthropist shall dwell upon the early lessons of Christian love and humanity breathed into the heart of a Fry from its prison-houses, and the silent teachings of the quiet meeting-house, where the brethren and sisters, in simple garb of sober gray, are wont to assemble, and where yet may still be seen the adopted sister Opie, resting in the autumn of her days in the calm seclusion of the body of Friends, after a life spent in scattering abroad in the world, germs of simple truth, pure morality, and heart-religion, the fruits of the genius which has been her gift from God. He shall visit Earlham Hall, the birthplace of that great “sister of charity,” Elizabeth Fry, and her brother, the philanthropist, Joseph John Gurney, and beneath its avenues of chestnut, by the quiet waters of its little lake, and the banks of bright anemones, that lay spread like a rich carpet, in the early spring time, along its garden borders, inhale sweet odours, and drink in refreshing draughts of pure unsullied poetry, fresh from the fount of nature, and fragrant with the love that breathes through all her teachings, the first child of the Great Parent of good.

Hence he may trace his way back through the village hamlet, that gave a home in his last years to the weary-hearted Hall, yielding a refuge and a grave to the head bowed beneath the weight of a sorrow-burthened mitre; and with hearts yet vibrating to the mournful cadences of woe, that swept from his harp strings, forth upon the world from its saddened solitudes, they may pass on to the garden of the Bishop’s Palace, and the monuments yet lingering there; ivy-clad ruins, meet emblems of harsh realities, over which the hand of time has thrown the sheltering mantle of forgiveness. And among the many chords touched by the hand of memory here, where the shades of harsh bigotry and persecuting zeal vanish in the gentle and softened light of Christian charity, breathed forth by the spirits of later days, whose heart does not respond to the refined poetry of the Charlotte Elizabeth, who has given such sweet paintings of this familiar scene of her girlhood’s years? Who can forget the song of the Swedish Nightingale, as it thrilled through the evening air upon the listening ears of the ravished, though untutored multitude? happy associations of the enjoyments of working world life, and lay minstrels of God’s creation, to be blended with the grander, but scarce more solemn, memories of the great heads among the labourers in the harvest field of souls. Nor shall the poet forget to take a glimpse of the quiet home, not far distant hence, of Sayer, the poet, philanthropist, philosopher, and antiquarian, whose memory is still green in the hearts of many of the great and good still living, and the remembrance of whose friendship is esteemed by them among their choicest treasures.

The historian has a yet wider field for labour, and a busier work to do, to connect into one chain the links that lie scattered far and wide, among deserted thoroughfares, decaying mansion houses, desecrated churches, and monastic ruins; to gather up the broken fragments of political records, enshrined in many a mouldering parchment, crumbling stone, or withered tree; and to weave into a whole the threads of tradition and legendary lore, unravelled from the mystic fables of antiquity. It is his, to trace the identities of King Gurgunt and the Danish Lothbroc; to establish the founder of the castle, and commemorate the achievements of its feudal lords; upon him the duty of sifting evidence, and searching out causes, of tracing the famous “Kett’s rebellion,” to the deep-seated sense of wrong in the hearts of the people, that found expression in the vague predictions and mystical prophecies of the Merlin of the district.

It is for him to unfold the little germs of after-history, that he treasured up in the kernels of such documents as he order addressed to the county sheriff, to commit to prison those who refused to attend the services of the established church; to trace the growth of the spirit among the people, that opened the city gates to the army of the “Parliament,” fortified its castle against royalist soldiers, and turned its market-place into a place of execution for fellow-citizens, who dared to espouse the cause of their king; to rescue from oblivion the gems that were buried beneath the blows of the zealous puritan’s demolishing hammer; to read in the nailed horseshoes, that surmount the doorways of hundreds of its cottages, as a talisman against witchcraft, the legacy of superstition bequeathed to their descendants by these earnest “abolitionists;” to mark the rise and progress of the unfranchised masses in this age of enlightened liberalism, and the deepening and mellowed tone of the “voice of the people,” as it rises from the chastened and self-disciplined homes of the educated and thriving artisans. Upon him too, it devolves, to mark the age and the man—to see the monuments of the great-hearted and liberal-minded of the days gone by, in the hospitals, charities, and endowments, their munificence has showered down, from the heights of prosperity, upon the depths of poverty—to trace the progress of the philanthropist of later times, in his house to house visits, and read statistics of his labours in the renovated homes and gladdened hearts of thousands, thus lifted out from the swamps of misery and crime, by the single hand of Christian benevolence, stretched forth in sympathy; to mark the efforts of legislation to remove causes that evil results may cease, to note the patriotism of honest hearts, that would seek to level, if at all, by lifting up the poor to that standard of moral and physical comfort, beneath which the manhood of human nature has neither liberty nor room to grow; and finally, it is his to cast into the treasury of his nation’s history his gleanings among the bye-ways of a single city, no mean or despicable bundle of facts, with which to enrich its stores.

But we must tarry no longer to generalize with archÆologist, poet or historian; we have many storehouses to visit, where associations of religion, poetry, and art, lie garnered up in rich abundance.