It was wonderful the utter stagnation of the village. The chapel was the only centre of intellectual life; next to that was the alehouse, whither some of the conscript fathers repaired to get a sight of the county paper, to learn the state of the markets, and at times to drink more ale than was good for them. About ten I had my first experience of death. I had lost an aged grandmother, but I was young, and it made little impression on me, except the funeral sermon—preached by my father to an overflowing congregation—which still lives in my recollections of a dim and distant past. I was a small boy. I was laid up with chilblains and had to be carried into the chapel; and altogether the excitement of the occasion was pleasing rather than the reverse. But the next who fell a victim was a young girl—whom I thought beautiful—who was the daughter of a miller who attended our chapel, and with whom I was on friendly terms. On the day of her funeral her little brothers and sisters came to our house to be out of the way. But I could not play with them, as I was trying to realise the figure I thought so graceful lying in the grave—to be eaten of worms, to turn to clay. But I shuddered as I thought of what we so often say:

There are no acts of mercy past
In the cold grave to which we haste,
But darkness, death, and long despair
Reign in eternal silence there.

I was sick at heart—I am sick at heart now—as I recall the sad day, though more than seventy years have rolled over my head since then.

I have spoken of the excitement of the Reform struggle. It was to most of us a time of fear. A mob was coming from Yarmouth to attack Benacre Hall, and then what would become of Sir Thomas “Guche”? But older heads began to think that the nation would survive the blow, even if Benacre Hall were burnt and Sir Thomas “Guche” had to hide his diminished head. As it happened, we did lose Sir Thomas’s services. He was thrown out for Suffolk, and Mr. Robert Newton Shaw, a Whig, reigned in his stead. How delighted we all were! Now had come the golden age, and the millennium was at hand. Pensioners and place men were no longer to fatten on the earnings of a suffering people, Radical politicians even looked forward to the time when the parson would lose his tithes.

The villagers rarely left the village; they got work at the neighbouring farms, and if they did not, they did not do so badly under the old Poor Laws, which paid a premium to the manufacturers of large families. The cottages were miserable hovels then, as they mostly are, and charity had full scope for exercise, especially at Christmas time, when those who went to the parish church were taught the blessedness of serving God and mammon. At one time the dear old chapel would hold all the meetingers; but soon came sectarian divisions and animosities. There was a great Baptist preacher at Beccles of the name of Wright, and of a Sunday some of our people walked eight miles to hear him, and came back more sure that they were the elect than ever, and more contemptuous of the poor blinded creatures who, to use a term much in common then, sat under my father. Now and then the Ranters got hold of a barn, and then there was another secession. Perhaps we had too much theological disputation. I think we had; but then there was nothing else to think about. The people had no cheap newspapers, and if they had they could not have read them, and so they saw signs and had visions, and told how the Lord had converted them by visible manifestations of His presence and power. Well, they were happy, and they needed somewhat to make them happy amidst the abounding poverty and desolation of their lives. By means of a vehicle—called a whiskey—which was drawn by a mule or a pony, as chance might determine, the family of which I was a member occasionally visited Southwold, prettier than it is now, or Lowestoft, which had no port, merely a long row of houses climbing up to the cliff; or Beccles, then supposed to be a very genteel town, and where there was a ladies’ boarding school; or to Bungay, where John Childs, a sturdy opponent in later years of Church rates and Bible monopoly, carried on a large printing business for the London publishers, and cultivated politics and phrenology. It was a grand outing for us all. Sometimes we got as far as Halesworth, where they had a Primitive meeting-house with great pillars, behind which the sleeper might sweetly dream till the fiddles sounded and the singing commenced. But as to long journeys they were rarely taken. If one did one had to go by coach, and there was sure to be an accident. Our village doctor who, with his half-dozen daughters, attended our chapel, did once take a journey, and met with a fall that, had his skull been not so thick, might have led to a serious catastrophe. Then there was Brother Hickman, of Denton, a dear, good man who never stirred from the parish. Once in an evil hour he went a journey on a stage coach, which was upset, and the consequence was a long and dangerous illness. If home-keeping youths have ever homely wits, what homeliness of wit we must have had. But now and then great people found their way to us, such as Edward Taylor, Gresham Professor of Music, who had a little property in the village, which gave him a vote, and before the Reform Bill was carried elections were elections, and we knew it, for did not four-horse coaches at all times, with flags flowing and trumpets blowing, drive through with outvoters for Yarmouth, collected at the candidates’ expense from all parts of the kingdom? In the summer, too, we had another excitement in the shape of the fish vans—light four-wheel waggons, drawn by two horses—which raced all the way from Lowestoft or Yarmouth to London. They were built of green rails, and filled up with hampers of mackerel, to be delivered fresh on the London market. They only had one seat, and that was the driver’s. At the right time of year they were always on the road going up full, returning empty, and they travelled a good deal faster than the Royal mail. They were an ever-present danger to old topers crawling home from the village ale-house, and to dirty little boys playing marbles or making mud pies in the street. Of course, there was no policeman to clear the way. Policemen did not come into fashion till long after; but we had the gamekeeper. How I feared him as he caught me bird-nesting at an early hour in the Park, and sent me home with a heavy heart as he threatened me with Beccles gaol.

In the winter I used to go out rabbiting. A young farmer in our neighbourhood was fond of the sport, and would often take me out with him, not to participate in the sport, but simply to look on. It might be that a friend or two would bring his gun and dog, and join in the pastime, which, at any rate, had this advantage as far as I was personally concerned, that it gave me a thundering appetite. The ferrets which one of the attendants always carried in a bag had a peculiar fascination for me, with their long fur, their white, shiny teeth, their little sparkling black eyes. The ferret is popped into the hole in which the rabbit is hidden. Poor little animal, he is between the devil and the deep sea. He waits in his hole till he can stand it no longer, but there is no way of escape for him out. There are the men, with their guns and the dogs eager for the fun. Ah! it is soon over, and this is often the way of the world.

To us in that Suffolk village the sports of big schools and more ambitious lads were unknown. For us there was no cricket or football, except on rare occasions, when we had an importation of juveniles in the house, but I don’t know that we were much the better for that. We trundled the hoop, and raced one with another, and that is capital exercise. We played hopscotch, which is good training for the calves of the legs. We had bows and arrows and stilts, and in the autumn—when we could get into the fields—we built and flew kites, kites which we had to make ourselves. If there was an ancient sandpit in the neighbourhood how we loved to explore its depths, and climb its heights, and in the freshness of the early spring what a joy it was to explore the hedges, or the trees of the neighbouring park, when the gamekeepers happened to be out of sight in search of birds’ nests and eggs; and in the long winter evenings what a delight it was to read of the past, though it was in the dry pages of Rollin, or to glow over the poems of Cowper. We were, it is true, a serious family. We had family prayers. No wine but that known as gingerbeer honoured the paternal hospitable board. Grog I never saw in any shape. A bit of gingerbread and a glass of water formed our evening meal. Oh, at Christmas what games we had of snap-dragon and blind man’s buff. I always felt small when a boy from Cockneydom appeared amongst us, and that I hold to be the chief drawback of such a bringing up as ours was. The battle of life is best fought by the cheeky. It does not do to be too humble and retiring. Baron Trench owned to a too great consciousness of innate worth. It gave him, he writes, a too great degree of pride. That is bad, but not so bad as the reverse—that feeling of humility which withers up all the noblest aspirations of the soul, and which I possessed partly from religion, and partly from the feeling that, as a Dissenter, I was a social Pariah in the eyes of the generation around. My modesty, I own, has been in my way all through life. The world takes a man at his own valuation. It is too busy to examine each particular claim, and the prize is won by him who most loudly and pertinaciously blows his own trumpet. At any rate, in our Suffolk home we enjoyed

Lively cheer of vigour born;
The thoughtless day—the easy night—
The spirits pure—the slumbers light—
That fly the approach of morn.

The one drawback was the long-drawn darkness of the winter night. I slept in an old attic in an old house, where every creak on the stairs, when the wind was roaring all round, gave me a stroke of pain, and where ghastly faces came to me in the dark of old women haggard and hideous and woebegone. De Quincy hints in his numerous writings at boyish times of a similar kind. I fancy most of us in boyhood are tortured in a similar way. Fuseli supped on pork chops to procure fitting subjects for his weird sketches. But we never had pork chops; yet in the visions of the night what awful faces I saw—almost enough to turn one’s brain and to make one’s hair stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine.

Country villages are always fifty years behind the times, and so it was with us. In the farmyard there was no steam engine, and all the work was done by manual labour, such as threshing the corn with the flail. In many families the only light was that of the rushlight, often home made. Lucifer matches were unknown, and we had to get a light by means of a flint and tinder, which ignited the brimstone match, always in readiness. Cheap ready-made clothes were unknown, and the poor mother had a good deal of tailoring to do. In the cottage there was little to read save the cheap publications of the Religious Tract Society, and the voluminous writings of the excellent Hannah More, teaching the lower orders to fear God and honour the king, and not to meddle with those that were given to change. Her “Coelebs in Search of a Wife” was the only novel that ever found its way into religious circles—with the exception of “Robinson Crusoe” and “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and that was awfully illustrated. Anybody who talked of the rights of man at that time was little better than one of the wicked. One of Hannah More’s characters, Mr. Fantom, is thus described:—“He prated about narrowness and ignorance (the derisive italics are Hannah’s own), and bigotry and prejudice and priestcraft on the one hand, and on the other of public good, the love of mankind, and liberality and candour, and above all of benevolence.” Dear Hannah made her hero, of course, come to a shocking end, and so does his servant William, who as he lies in Chelmsford gaol to be hung for murder confesses, “I was bred up in the fear of God, and lived with credit in many sober families in which I was a faithful servant, till, being tempted by a little higher wages, I left a good place to go and live with Mr. Fantom, who, however, never made good his fine promises, but proved a hard master.” Another of Hannah’s characters was a Miss Simpson, a clergyman’s daughter, who is always exclaiming, “’Tis all for the best,” though she ends her days in a workhouse, while the man through whose persecution she comes to grief dies in agony, bequeathing her £100 as compensation for his injustice, and declares that if he could live his life over again he would serve God and keep the Sabbath. And such was the literature which was to stop reform, and make the poor contented with their bitter lot!

But the seed, such as it was, often fell on stony soil. The labourers became discontented, and began more and more to feel that it was not always true that all was for the best, as their masters told them. They were wretchedly clad, and lodged, and fed. Science, sanitary or otherwise, was quite overlooked then. The parson and the squire took no note of them, except when they heard that they went to the Baptist, or Independent, or Methodist chapel, when great was their anger and dire their threats. Again Hannah More took the field “to improve the habits and raise the principles of the common people at a time when their dangers and temptations—social and political—were multiplied beyond the example of any former period. The inferior ranks were learning to read, and they preferred to read the corrupt and inflammatory publications which the French Revolution had called into existence.” Alas! all was in vain. Rachel, weeping for her children who had been torn from her to die in foreign lands, fighting to keep up the Holy Alliance and the right divine of kings to govern wrong, or had toiled and moiled in winter’s cold and summer’s heat, merely to end their days in the parish workhouse, refused to be comforted. Good people grew alarmed, and goody tracts were circulated more than ever. The edifying history of the “Shepherd of Salisbury Plain” was to be seen in many a cottage in our village. The shepherd earned a shilling a day; he lived in a wretched cottage which had a hole in the thatch which made his poor wife a martyr to rheumatism in consequence of the rain coming through. He had eight children to keep, chiefly on potatoes and salt, but he was happy because he was pious and contented. A gentleman says to him, “How do you support yourself under the pressure of actual want? Is not hunger a great weakener of your faith?” “Sir,” replied the shepherd, “I live upon the promises.” Yes, that was the kind of teaching in our village and all over England, and the villagers got tired of it, and took to firing stacks and barns, and actually in towns were heard to cry “More pay and less parsons.” What was the world coming to? said dear old ladies. It was well Hannah More had died and thus been saved from the evil to come. The Evangelicals were at their wits’ end. They wanted people to think of the life to come, while the people preferred to think of the life that was—of this world rather than the next.

I am sure that in our village we had too much religion. I write this seriously and after thinking deeply on the matter. A man has a body to be cared for, as well as a soul to be saved or damned. Charles Kingsley was the first to tell us that it was vain to preach to people with empty stomachs. But when I was a lad preaching was the cure for every ill, and the more wretched the villagers became the more they were preached to. There was little hope of any one who did not go to some chapel or other. There was little help for any one who preferred to talk of his wrongs or to claim his rights. I must own that the rustic worshipper was a better man in all the relationships of life—as servant, as husband, as father, as friend—than the rustic unbeliever. It astonished me not a little to talk with the former, and to witness his copiousness of Scripture phraseology and the fluency of his religious talk. He was on a higher platform. He had felt what Burke wrote when he tells us that religion was for the man in humble life, to raise his nature and to put him in mind of a State in which the privileges of opulence will cease, when he will be equal by nature and more than equal by virtue. Alas! we had soon Lord Brougham’s beershops, and there was a sad falling away. Poachers and drunkards increased on every side. All around there seemed to be nothing but poverty, with the exception of the farmers—then, as now, always grumbling, but apparently living well and enjoying life.

As one thinks of the old country years ago one can realise the truth of the story told by the late Mr. Fitzgerald of a Suffolk village church one winter’s evening:—

Congregation, with the Old Hundredth ready for the parson’s dismissal words.

Good Old Parson (not at all meaning rhymes): The light has grown so very dim I scarce can see to read the hymn.

Congregation (taking it up to the first half of the Old Hundredth):

The light has grown so very dim,
I scarce can see to read the hymn.

(Pause as usual.)

Parson (mildly impatient): I did not mean to sing a hymn, I only meant my eyes were dim.

Congregation (to second part of the Old Hundredth):

I did not mean to read a hymn,
I only meant my eyes were dim.

Parson (out of patience): I did not mean a hymn at all, I think the devil’s in you all.

Curious were the ways of the East Anglian clergy. One of our neighbouring parsons had his clerk give out notice that on the next Sunday there would be no service “because master was going to Newmarket.” No one cared for the people, unless it was the woman preacher or Methodist parson, and the people were ignorant beyond belief. Few could either read or write. It was rather amusing to hear them talk. A boy was called bow, a girl was termed a mawther, and if milk or beer was wanted it was generally fetched in a gotch.

Our home life was simple enough. We went early to bed and were up with the lark. I was arrayed in a pinafore and wore a frill—which I abhorred—and took but little pleasure in my personal appearance—a very great mistake, happily avoided by the present generation. We children had each a little bed of garden ground which we cultivated to the best of our power. Ours was really a case of plain living and high thinking. Of an evening the room was dimly lighted by means of a dip candle which constantly required snuffing. To write with we had the ordinary goose-quill. The room, rarely used, in which we received company was called the parlour. Goloshes had not then come into use, and women wore in muddy weather pattens or clogs. The simple necessaries of life were very dear, and tea and coffee and sugar were sold at what would now be deemed an exorbitant price. Postage was prohibitory, and when any one went to town he was laden with letters. As little light as possible was admitted into the house in order to save the window-tax. The farmer was generally arrayed in a blue coat and yellow brass buttons. The gentleman had a frilled shirt and wore Hessian boots. I never saw a magazine of the fashions; nowadays they are to be met with everywhere. Yet we were never dull, and in the circle in which I moved we never heard of the need of change. People were content to live and die in the village without going half-a-dozen miles away, with the exception of the farmers, who might drive to the nearest market town, transact their business, dine at the ordinary, and then, after a smoke and a glass of brandy and water and a chat with their fellow-farmers, return home. Of the rush and roar of modern life, with its restlessness and eagerness for something new and sensational, we had not the remotest idea.