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‘Here is committed to earth’s trust
Wise, pious, spotlesse, learned dust,
Who living more adorned the place
Than the place him. Such was God’s grace.’
 

Is the verse of this epitaph from Milton’s pen or not? Mr. Hollingsworth writes: ‘The probability is quite in favour that the pupil should write the last memorial of one whom he so highly honoured and loved as his old master. Nor is the verse itself, with the exception of the last line, unlike the character of Milton’s poetry, and this last may have been mutilated and rendered inharmonious by the action of the stone-cutter, who also confused the death of the father and son.’ It is pleasant to think, not only that Milton now and then came to the Stowmarket Vicarage, but that in the church itself there is a slight record of his poetical fame. Let me add, as a further illustration of the connection of the great poet with the county of Suffolk, that I am informed one of the family of the Meadowses, of Witnesham, was for a time one of his secretaries.

Young died, aged sixty-eight, in the year 1655, when Milton was fully embarked in public life, when he could spare but little time; but we may be sure that he would be the last at that time of life to forget all that he owed to his tutor Young. Wife and son had predeceased the Vicar. It seems as if there was no one left but the poet to record on the marble in the middle aisle, in front of the present reading-desk, the virtues of a character which had long exercised so beneficial an influence on his own, and which he had loved so well. Milton’s regret for the loss of such a guide, philosopher, and friend must have been lasting and sincere.

CHAPTER XI.
IN CONSTABLE’S COUNTY

East Bergholt – The Valley of the Stour – Painting from nature – East Anglian girls.

Charles Kingsley was wont to glorify the teaching of the hills, and to maintain that the man of the mountain is more imaginative and poetical than the man of the plain. There are many Scotch people, mostly those born in the Highlands, who tell us much the same. If the theory be true – and I am not aware that it is – the exceptions are striking and many. Lincolnshire is rather a flat country, but it gave us (I can never bring myself to call him Lord) Alfred Tennyson. Many of our greatest poets and artists were cockneys; and Constable, that sweet painter of cornfields and shady lanes and quiet rivers, used to say that the scenes of his boyhood made him a painter. I was one autumn in Constable’s county, and I do not wonder at it. It is a wonderful district. I trod all the while, it seemed to me, on enchanted ground: in the gilded mist of autumn, with its river and its marsh lands, where the cows lazily fed – or got under the pollards to be out of the way of the flies – where laughing children swarmed along the hedges in pursuit of the ripe blackberry, where every cottage front was a thing of beauty, with its ivy creeping up the roof or over the wall; while the little garden was a mass of flowers. We expected to see the old gods and goddesses again to participate in the joyousness of an ancient mirth.

Nor was it altogether a flat land, sacred to fat cattle and wheat and turnips. All round me were the elements of romance. At one end of the Vale of Dedham is a hill whence you may look all along the valley (Constable has made it the subject of one of his pictures) as far as Harwich; and as I lingered by the Stour – the river which divides Essex and Suffolk – East Bergholt, clothed with woods and crowned with a church, in which there is a stained-glass window put up in honour of Constable, and a baptismal font, the gift of Constable’s brother, unfolded to my wondering eye all her rural charms. There are people who love to climb hills; I hate to do so. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit; when you get to the top of one hill the chances are all you see is another hill, to the top of which you will have to climb. Give me a country lane, with its luxuriant hedges, its shady trees, its flowers, its richness of greensward, its pigs and poultry and farmyard; there is poetry in such nooks and corners of the earth, as Burns and Bloomfield and Gerald Massey found. No wonder the place made Constable an artist, and an artist whose name will not speedily pass away. My dear sir or madam, the next time you are on your way from London to Ipswich, don’t rush along at express speed; get out at Ardleigh, make your way to the Vale of Dedham, then walk along the Stour, and cross it by a couple of rustic bridges, and you are at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, where Constable was born, and if you do so you will bless me evermore. Then, if you like, rejoin the train at Manningtree, and resume your journey. Few East Anglians even are aware of the wealth of beauty in that quiet corner. ‘The beauty of the surrounding scenery,’ writes Constable’s biographer, ‘its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadows, flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated Uplands, its woods and rivers, with mansions scattered, and churches, farms, and picturesque cottages – all impart to this spot an amenity and elegance hardly anywhere else to be found.’

The Constables have been long in the district. The grandfather was a farmer at a village close by. The father, who was well-to-do, purchased a water-mill at Dedham and two windmills at East Bergholt, where he lived. The great artist, his son John, was born in the last century, and was educated at Lavenham and the Dedham Grammar School, and when the lad had reached sixteen or seventeen became addicted to painting, his studio being in the house of a Mr. John Dunthorne, a painter and glazier, with whom he remained on terms of the greatest intimacy for many years. The father would fain have made the son a farmer. He preferred to be a miller, and in his young days was known in the district as the handsome miller. His windmills, when he took to painting, were wonderful, and well deserved the criticism of his brother, who used to say, ‘When I look at a windmill painted by John, I see that it will go round, which is not always the case with those of other artists,’ for the simple reason that John knew what he was about, which the others did not. Again, his industrial career helped him in another way. A miller learns to study the clouds, and Constable’s clouds were exceptionally life-like and real. The handsome young miller soon acquired artistic friends, one of them being Sir George Beaumont, the guide, philosopher, and friend of most of the geniuses of that time. Said another to him, ‘Do not trouble yourself about inventing figures for a landscape; you cannot remain an hour in a spot without the appearance of some living thing, that will in all probability better accord with the scene and the time of day than any invention of your own.’ After a visit to his artist friends in London, he resumed his mill life, and in 1779 he finally commenced his artistic career, and painted all the country round. His studies were chiefly Dedham, East Bergholt, the Valley of the Stour, and the neighbouring village of Stratford. At Stoke Nayland he painted an altar-piece for the church. There is also another altar-piece in a neighbouring church, but his altar-pieces are not known or treasured like his other works.

Cooper tells a good story of Constable. One day Stodart, the sculptor, met Fuseli starting forth with an old umbrella. ‘Why do you carry the umbrella?’ asked the sculptor. ‘I am going to see Constable,’ was the reply, ‘and he is always painting rain.’ One can only remark that, if Constable was always painting rain, he always did it well.

Another good story was told Redgrave by Lee. ‘I hear you sell all your pictures,’ said Constable to the younger landscape-painter. ‘Why, yes,’ said Lee; ‘I’m pretty fortunate. Don’t you sell yours?’ ‘No,’ said Constable, ‘I don’t sell any of my pictures, and I’ll tell you why: when I paint a bad picture I don’t like to part with it, and when I paint a good one I like to keep it.’ It is well known that one year when Constable was on the Council of the Royal Academy, one of his own pictures was passed by mistake before the judges. ‘Cross it,’ said one. ‘It won’t do,’ said another. ‘Pass on,’ said a third. And the carpenter was just about to chalk it with a cross, when he read the name of ‘John Constable.’ Of course there were lame apologies, and the picture was taken from the condemned heap and placed with the works of his brother Academicians. But after work was over Constable took the picture under his arm, and, despite the remonstrance of his brother colleagues, marched off with it, saving: ‘I can’t think of its being hung after it has been fairly turned out. The work so condemned was the ‘Stream bordered in with Willows,’ now in the South Kensington Museum. Leslie once remarked to Redgrave that he would give any work he had painted for it, so warmly did he admire it.

‘Constable is the best landscape-painter we have,’ wrote Frith to his mother in 1835. ‘He is a very merry fellow, and very rich. He told us an anecdote of a man who came to look at his pictures; he was a gardener. One day he called him into his painting-room to look at his pictures, when the man made the usual vulgar remarks, such as, “Did you do all this, sir?” “Yes.” “What, all this?” “Yes.” “What, frame and all?” At last he came to an empty frame that was hung against the wall without any picture in it, when he said to Constable, “But you don’t call this picture quite finished, do you, sir?” Constable said that quite sickened him, and he never let any ignoramuses ever see his pictures again, or frames either.’

Constable’s great merits, writes Mr. Frith, were first recognised in France, with the result upon French landscape art that is felt at the present time. His advice to Frith was: ‘Never do anything without nature before you if it be possible to have it. See those weeds and the dock leaves? They are to come into the foreground of this picture. I know dock leaves pretty well, but I should not attempt to introduce them into a picture without having them before me.’

Constable died very suddenly in 1837. His fame, now that he is dead, is greater than when he was alive. His work abides in all its strength.

There is little in East Bergholt to remind one of Constable, where his reputation remains as that of a genial and kindly-hearted man; but the landscape in all its essential features remains the same. The house in which he was born was pulled down in 1841, which is a great pity, as it is described as a large and handsome mansion. But I never saw a small village with so many attractive residences, though why anybody should live in any of them I could not, for the life of me, understand. Yet there they were, quite a street of them, all in beautiful order, as if they were the residences of wealthy citizens in the suburbs of a busy town. They ought to have been filled with handsome girls, as Charles Kingsley tells us East Anglia is famed for the beauty of its women; all I can say, however, is that I saw none of them, or any sign of life anywhere, beyond the inevitable tradesmen’s carts. Independently of Constable, East Bergholt claims to be worth a pilgrimage for its rustic beauty, which, however, becomes tame and common as you get away from it. The church is old, and has a history – of little consequence, however, to anyone now. One of its rectors was burned at Ipswich in Queen Mary’s reign. His name, Samuel, ought to be preserved by a Church which, till lately, had few martyrs of its own. East Bergholt has also a Congregational and Primitive Methodist chapel, and a colony of Benedictine nuns, driven away from France by the great Revolution. We are a hospitable people, and we are proud to be so, but have we not just at this time too many refugee nuns and monks in our midst?

CHAPTER XII.
EAST ANGLIAN WORTHIES

Suffolk cheese – Danes, Saxons, and Normans – Philosophers and statesmen – Artists and literati.

Abbo Floriacencis, who flourished in the year a. d. 910, describes East Anglia as ‘very noble, and particularly because of its being watered on all sides. On the south and east it is encompassed by the ocean, on the north by the moisture of large and wet fens which, arising almost in the heart of the island, because of the evenness of the ground for a hundred miles and more, descend in great rivers into the sea. On the west the province is joyned to the rest of the island, and, therefore, may be entered (by land); but lest it should be harassed by the frequent incursions of the enemy it is fortifyed with an earthen rampire like a high wall, and with a ditch. The inner parts of it is a pretty rich soil, made exceeding pleasant by gardens and groves, rendered agreeable by its convenience for hunting, famous for pasturage, and abounding with sheep and all sorts of cattle. I do not insist upon its rivers full of fish, considering that a tongue as it were of the sea itself licks it on one side, and on the other side the large fens make a prodigious number of lakes two or three miles over. These fens accommodate great numbers of monks with their desired retirement and solitude, with which, being enclosed, they have no occasion for the privacy of a wilderness.’ Before the monks came the place was held by the Iceni – a stout and valiant people, as Tacitus describes them. In the time of the Heptarchy, King Uffa was their lord and master. In later times Suffolk, when explored by Camden, was celebrated for its cheeses, which, to the great advantage of the inhabitants, were bought up through all England, nay, in Germany also, with France and Spain, as Pantaleon Medicus has told us, who scruples not to set them against those of Placentia both in colour and taste. To the Norfolk people, it must be admitted, Camden gives the palm. The goodness of the soil of that country, he argues, ‘may be gathered from hence, that the inhabitants are of a bright, clear complexion, not to mention their sharpness of wit and admirable quickness in the study of our common law. So that it is at present, and always has been, reputed the common nursery of lawyers, and even amongst the common people you shall meet with a great many who (as one expresses it), if they have no just quarrel, are able to raise it out of the very quirks and niceties of the law.’ In our time it is rather the fashion to run down the East Anglians, yet that they have done their duty to their country no one can deny. ‘They say we are Norfolk fules,’ said a waiter at a Norfolk hotel, to me, a little while ago; ‘but I ain’t ashamed of my county, for all that.’ Why should he be, the reader naturally asks?

The Saxons of East Anglia gave the name of England to this land of ours; but before this time East Anglia had attained, by means of its sons and daughters, to fame far and near. If we may believe Gildas, a Christian church was planted in England in the time of Nero. Claudia, to whom Paul refers in Philippians and Timothy, was a British lady of great wit and greater beauty, celebrated by the poet Martial. She may have been converted by Paul, argued the Rev. Mr. Hollingsworth, a local historian, Rural Dean and Rector of Stowmarket; nor is it at all improbable, he adds, ‘that Claudia, the British beauty, may have been an Iceni, or East Anglian lady, as her brilliant complexion, for which so many in these counties are celebrated, had caused a vivid feeling of sensation and curiosity and envy even among the haughty dames of the imperial city of Rome.’ The Romans were glad to make terms with the Iceni till the unfortunate Boadicea perished in the revolt which she had so rashly raised. The Saxons came after the Romans, and took possession of the land. Saxon proprietors compelled the people, whose lives they spared, to till the very lands on which their fathers had lived under the Roman Government or their own chiefs. Pagan worship was reintroduced; but when Sigberht, the son of Redwald, King of East Anglia, reigned, he sent to France for Christian ministers, and one of them, Felix, a Burgundian, landed at Felixstowe, and there commenced his Christian labours. Felix was held in high repute by the Bishops in other parts of the kingdom. His opinions were quoted and revered. The diocese was large, and the fourth Bishop divided it into two parts, the second Bishop being planted at North Elmham, in Norfolk. In 955 the see was again united, when Erfastus, the twenty-second Bishop, removed to Thetford. A little while after the Bishop’s residence was removed to Norwich, and there it has ever since remained; but the land was not long permitted to remain in peace. In 870 a large party of Danes marched from Lincolnshire into Suffolk, defeated King Edmund, near Hoxne, and, as he would not become an idolater, shot him to death with arrows. Bury St. Edmunds still preserves the name and fame of one of the most illustrious of our Anglo-Saxon martyrs. King Alfred, with a policy worthy of his sagacity, made Guthrum, the Danish governor of Suffolk, a Christian, and continued him in his rule. The Danes in East Anglia were then an immense army, and thus at once they were turned from foes into friends. Guthrum was baptized, and it is to be hoped was all the better for it. At any rate, he returned to Suffolk and divided many of the estates which had been held by Saxon proprietors killed in war. He died in peace, and had a fitting funeral at Hadleigh. The children of those Danish soldiers were dangerous friends, and too frequently betrayed the Saxons. Blood is thicker than water, and as each succeeding band of Danish adventurers landed on our eastern coast, they were welcomed by such followers of Guthrum as had settled in Suffolk as friends and allies. Nevertheless, the Danes found the conquest of the island impossible. Divine Providence, Mr. Hollingsworth tells us, did not suffer the Saxon race to be vanquished by those who were connected with them by blood. Nevertheless, the struggle was long and severe. The two races were equally matched in courage, but the Saxon surpassed his foe in that stern, unyielding endurance which enabled him to resist every defeat and prepare again for the contest. The whole surface of the country became studded with entrenchments, moats, and mounds, within whose line the harassed Saxon defended his property and all he valued in his home. History begins, as far as England is practically concerned, with the Norman Conquest. It was then the Norsemen, blue-eyed, fair-haired, the finest blood in Europe, planted themselves in Norfolk and Suffolk, and brought with them feudalism and civilization. It was in 787 that, according to the Saxon Chronicle, they first reached England; but it was not till William the Conqueror made the land his own that they settled as English lords, and divided between them the land in which their rapacious forefathers had won many a precious treasure.

 
‘The red gold and the white silver
He covets as a leech does blood,’
 

wrote an old poet of the Norseman.

Let us take, as an illustration of the county, a Norfolk family. In Westminster Abbey there is monument to Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, who was buried in the ruined chancel of the little church at Overstrand, near Northrepps, ‘a droll, irregular, unconventional-looking place,’ as Caroline Fox calls it, where he loved at all times to live, and where he retired to die. The family from which Sir Thomas descended resided, about the middle of the sixteenth century, at Sudbury, in Suffolk. It was while at Earlham that he made his début as a public speaker at one of the earlier meetings of the Norfolk Bible Society. In the winter of 1817 he went over to France with some of the Gurneys and the Rev. Francis Cunningham, who was anxious to establish a Bible Society in Paris. He was also anxious to inquire into the way in which the gaols at Antwerp and Ghent were conducted. On his return he examined minutely into the state of the London gaols, and, to use his own expression, his inquiries developed a system of folly and wickedness which surpassed belief. In the following year he published a work entitled ‘An Inquiry whether Crime be Produced or Prevented by our Present System of Penal Discipline,’ which ran through six editions, and tended powerfully to create a proper public feeling on the subject. In 1819 we find him in Parliament seconding Sir James Mackintosh in his efforts to promote a reform of our criminal law – then the most sanguinary in Europe. One of his earliest efforts was to get the House to abolish the burning of widows in India; and in 1821 he received from Wilberforce the command to relieve him of a responsibility too heavy for his advancing years and infirmities – the care of the slave: a holy enterprise for which Mr. Buxton had been qualifying himself by careful thought and study, and which he was spared to carry to a successful end. At first he resided at Cromer Hall, an old seat of the Windham family, which no longer exists, having been pulled down and replaced by a modern residence. It was situated about a quarter of a mile from the sea, but sheltered from the north winds by closely surrounding hills and woods, and with its old buttresses, gables, and porches clothed with roses and jessamine, and its famed lawn, where the pheasants came down to feed, had a peculiar character of picturesque simplicity. The interior corresponded with its external appearance, and had little of the regularity of modern building. One attic chamber was walled up, with no entrance save through the window: and at different times large pits were discovered under the floor or in the thick walls – used, it was supposed, in old times by the smugglers of the coast. There is much picturesque scenery around Cromer, and large parties were often made up for excursions to Sherringham – one of the most beautiful spots in all the eastern counties, to the wooded dells of Felbrigg and Runton, or to the rough heath ground by the beach beacon. One who was a frequent guest at Cromer Hall wrote: ‘I wish I could describe the impression made upon me by the extraordinary power of interesting and stimulating others which was possessed by Sir Fowell Buxton some thirty years ago. In my own case it was like having powers of thinking, powers of feeling, and, above all, the love of true poetry suddenly aroused within me, which, though I had possessed them before, had been till then unused. From Locke “On the Human Understanding,” to “William of Deloraine, good at need,” he woke up in me the sleeping principle of taste, and, in giving me such objects of pursuit, has added immeasurably to the happiness of my life.’ On a Sunday afternoon, we are told, his large dining-hall was filled with a miscellaneous audience of fishermen and neighbours, as well as of his own household, to whom he would read the Bible, commenting on it at the same time. Very simple and beautiful seems to us that far-away Norfolk life; except that his hospitalities were more bounded by want of room, his life at Northrepps was much the same as it had been at Cromer Hall. It is one of the pleasures of my life that I have heard Sir Thomas speak. In modern England the influence of the Buxton family and name is yet a power.

Having already alluded to the Windhams and Felbrigg, it remains to say that the last of that illustrious line died in 1810. Felbrigg was purchased by the Windhams as far back as 1461. The public life of Windham, the statesman, may be considered as having commenced in 1783, when he undertook the office of Principal Secretary to Lord Northington, who was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The great Marquis of Lansdowne, when he was last at Felbrigg, in 1861, said Mr. Windham had the best Parliamentary address of any man he had ever seen, which was enhanced by the grace of his person and the dignity of his manners. Still more glowing was the testimony borne to Mr. Windham by Earl Grey when he heard of his death. A mere glance at his diary is sufficient to convince us that Windham, when in London, mixed with the first men and women of his time. The late Lord Chief Justice Scarlett, on being asked by his son-in-law to name the very best speech he had heard during his life, and that which he thought most worthy of study, answered, without hesitation, ‘Windham’s speech on the Law of Evidence.’ In a conversation with Lord Palmerston, Pitt observed of Windham: ‘Nothing can be so well-meaning or eloquent as he is. His speeches are the finest productions possible of warm imagination and fancy.’ In 1800 we read in the Malmesbury Diaries that old George III. had meant Windham to be his First Minister. As a friend of Burke and Johnson, Windham’s name will not easily fade away. It is to him we owe the most pathetic account of the closing hours of the Monarch of Bolt Court.

Sir Cloudesley Shovel may well claim to be one of Norfolk’s heroes. Born in an obscure village, an apprentice to a shoemaker, he obtained rank and fame as one of Queen Anne’s most honoured Admirals. It is denied that he was in very humble circumstances, and it is a fact that his original letters were so well worded as to indicate that he had received a fair education. At any rate, he went to sea at ten years old with his friend Sir John Hadough; and although not a cabin-boy in the modern acceptation of that term, he undertook his captain’s errands, swimming on one occasion through the enemy’s fire with some despatches for a distant ship, carrying the papers in his mouth, displaying a courage worthy of admiration. He distinguished himself in the Battle of Bantry Bay. As an enemy of France and Spain, he triumphed in many a fierce fight. Returning home flushed with victory, his ship and all on board were lost on the Scilly Isles in an October gale. Some uncertainty hangs over his last moments. It is asserted that he swam to shore alive, and that he was put to death for the sake of his ring of emeralds and diamonds. An ancient woman is stated to have confessed as much. For the honour of human nature, we would fain believe the story to be untrue. A still greater Norfolk hero was Lord Nelson, who is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. ‘My principle,’ said Nelson, on one occasion, ‘is to assist in driving the French to the devil, and in restoring peace and happiness to mankind.’ Whether he succeeded as regards the former we are not in a position to state; but peace and happiness, alas! are still far from being the common property of mankind. The rectory house at Burnham Thorpe, where Nelson was born, exists no longer. Sir Cloudesley Shovel lived in a castellated stone house in the small agricultural village of Cockthorpe, originally fortified as a defence against the incursions of smugglers. A room in this house, entered by a doorway arched over with stone, is shown, which is still called by the villagers Sir Cloudesley’s drawing-room.

A chapter might be written about the Norfolk Cokes. Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer, was buried at Tittleshale, in Norfolk. The well-known Coke, the distinguished agriculturist, inhabited that splendid Holkham, the fame of which exists in our day. It was begun by Lord Leicester in 1734, and finished by his Countess in 1764. Blomefield, the well-known Norfolk historian, speaks of it as a noble, stately, and sumptuous palace. Lord Coke and Lord Burlington were men of similar tastes and pursuits, and were diligent students of classical and Italian art. The Holkham Library still contains treasures rich and rare. Many of the latter formed part of the library of Sir Edward Coke; the title-page of the first edition of the ‘Novum Organum,’ published in 1620, bears the design of a ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules into an undulating sea. The Holkham copy is adorned by the inscription, ‘Ex dono auctoris.’

Above the ship, in the handwriting of Coke, is the couplet:

 
‘It deserveth not to be read in schools,
But to be freighted in the ship of fools.’
 

Thomas Shadwell, the Poet Laureate and historiographer of William III., was a Norfolk man. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. It is said by Noble that he was an honest man. Of course he was. Chalmers accuses him of indecent conversation, or Lord Rochester would not have said that he had more wit and humour than any other poet. I am afraid he confers little honour on his native county. ‘Others,’ wrote Dryden in one of his satires,

 
‘To some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.’
 

Sir Robert Walpole, who saved England from wooden shoes and slavery, was of a Norfolk family, yet flourishing; as are the Townshends, to whom we owe the introduction of the turnip. Norfolk also can boast of Sir Thomas Gresham and Sir Francis Walsingham. In Norfolk was born that ‘great oracle of law, patron of the Church, and glory of England,’ as Camden calls him, Sir Henry Spelman. At Bickling, in the same county, was born that ill-starred Anne Boleyn, of whom it is written that

 
‘Love could teach a monarch to be wise,
And Gospel light first beamed from Boleyn’s eyes.’
 

In the same neighbourhood, also, was born John Baconthorpe, the resolute doctor, of whom Pantias Pansa has written: ‘This one resolute doctor has furnished the Christian religion with armour against the Jews stronger than that of Vulcan.’ Pansa was a Norfolk man, and so was the great botanist Sir W. Hooker.

Who has not heard of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, when Eugene Aram was the usher,

 
‘Four-and-twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school’?
 

It was in that old town Fanny Burney, the friend of Mrs. Thrale and Dr. Johnson, the author of novels like ‘Evelina,’ which people even read nowadays, was born on the 13th of June, 1752. She grew up low of stature, of a brown complexion. One of her friends called her the dove, which she thought was from the colour of her eyes – a greenish-gray; her last editor thinks it must have been from their kind expression. She was very short-sighted, like her father. In her portrait, taken at the age of thirty, merriment seems latent behind a demure look. At any rate, her countenance was what might be called a speaking one. ‘Poor Fanny!’ said her father, ‘her face tells what she thinks, whether she will or no. I long to see her honest face once more.’ ‘Poor Fanny’ lived to a good old age, and her gossiping diary is a mine of wealth as regards the Royal Family, and Johnson, and Mrs. Thrale, and the cleverest men and women of her time.