East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations. James Ewing Ritchie
steadily attached to the Royal cause, and who after the Restoration rose high in command, and won many a victory over the Dutch and the Algerines; of Sir Andrew Leake, who fell in the attack on Gibraltar; of Rear-Admiral Richard Utbar, also a renowned fighter when England and Holland were at war. To the same town also belong Admiral Sir John Ashby, who died in 1693, and his nephew Vice-Admiral James Mighells. Nor must we fail to do justice to Thomas Nash, a facetious writer of considerable reputation in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The most witty of his productions is a satirical pamphlet in praise of red herrings, intended as a joke upon the great staple of Yarmouth, and the pretensions of that place to superiority over Lowestoft. It must be confessed that Nash is chiefly famous as a caustic pamphleteer and an unscrupulous satirist. For illustration we may point to his battle with Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Edmund Spenser, who desired that he might be epitaphed the inventor of the not yet naturalized English hexameter; and his other battle with Martin Mar Prelate, or the writer or writers who passed under that name, and who have acquired a reputation to which poor Nash can lay no claim. His one conspicuous dramatic effort is ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament.’ Nash wrote for bare existence – to use his own words, ‘contending with the cold, and conversing with scarcity.’ Nash lived in an unpropitious age. A recent French writer has placed him in the foremost rank of English writers. Dr. Jusserand, the author referred to, in his accounts of the English novel in the time of Shakespeare, tells us Nash was the most successful exponent in England of the picturesque novel. The picturesque novel is the forerunner of the realistic novel of modern times. It portrays the life and fortunes of the picaro – the adventurer who tries all roads to fortune. Spanish in its origin, it developed into a school in which Defoe and Thackeray distinguished themselves. ‘Nash,’ writes the French author, ‘mingled serious scenes with his comedy, in order that his romances might more nearly resemble real life.’ In fact (he writes), ‘Nash does not only possess the merit of learning how to observe the ridiculous side of human nature, and of portraying in a full light picturesque figures – now worthy of Teniers and now of Callot – some fat and greasy, others lean and lank; he possesses a thing very rare with the picturesque school, the faculty of being moved. He seems to have foreseen the immense field of study which was to be opened later to the novelist. A distant ancestor of Fielding, as Lilly and Sidney appear to us to be distant ancestors of Richardson, he understands that a picture of active life, reproducing only in the Spanish fashion scenes of comedy, is incomplete and departs from reality. The greatest jesters, the most arrogant, the most venturesome, have their days of anguish. No hero has ever yet remained imprisoned from the cradle to the grave, and no one has been able to live an irresponsible spectator, and not feel his heart sometimes beat the quicker, nor bow his head unmoved. Nash caught a glimpse of this.’ As an illustration, Dr. Jusserand points to his ‘Jack Wilton’ – ‘The best specimen of the picturesque tale in English literature anterior to Defoe.’ In Lowestoft they ought to keep his memory green.
The writer well remembers the day when Mr., afterwards Sir, Morton Peto, assembled the inhabitants of Lowestoft in the then dilapidated Town Hall, and promised that if they would sell their ruined harbour works, and back him in making a railway, their mackerel and herrings should be delivered almost alive in Manchester, Liverpool, and London. The inhabitants believed in the power of the enchanter, and Lowestoft is metamorphosed. The old town remains upon its beautiful eminence, and memory clings to the cliffs and to the denes, tenanted only, the one by wild rabbits, the other by the merry children and the nets of the fishermen. But a new town has grown up around the harbour – a grand hotel, excellent lodging-houses, a new church; a great population have upset the romance, and borne witness to the spirit of enterprise which characterizes this generation. The new town has spread to Kirkley, has Londonized even quiet Pakefield, and awakened a sleeping neighbourhood to what men call life.
At Lowestoft commence what are known to sailors as the Yarmouth Roads – a grand stretch of sea protected by the sands, where an armada might anchor secure; and it was a sight not to be seen now, when gigantic steamers do all the business of the sea, to watch the hundreds of ships that would come inside the Roads at certain seasons of the year. There, in the winter-time – that is, from Lowestoft to Covehithe – I have seen the beach strewed with wrecks, chiefly of rotten colliers, or ships in the corn trade; but inside ‘Lowestoft Roads,’ to which they were guided by a lighthouse on the cliff, they were supposed to be secure. Lowestoft at that time, with its charming sands, was little known to the gay world, and depended far more on the fishing than the bathing season. The former was a busy time, and kept all the country round in a state of excitement. Many were the men, for instance, who, even as far off as Wrentham, went herring or mackerel fishing in the big craft, which, drawn up on the beach when the season was over, seemed to me ships such as never had been seen by the mariners of Tyre and Sidon; but the chief interest to me were the vans in which the fish were carried from Lowestoft to London – light spring-carts with four wheels and two horses, that, after changing horses at our Spread Eagle, raced like lightning along the turnpike-road, at all hours, and even on Sundays – a sad grievance to the godly – beating the Yarmouth mail.
Now and then, even at that remote period, when railways were not, and when Lowestoft was no port, nothing but a fishing-station, distinguished people came to Lowestoft, attracted by its bracing air and exceptional bathing attractions. I can in this way recollect Sir Edward Parry and M. Guizot. But there were other personages equally distinguished. One of these was Mrs. Siddons, with whom an old Dissenting minister – the Rev. S. Sloper, of Beccles, whom I can well remember – contracted quite an intimacy. She had already passed the zenith of her celebrity. ‘Providence,’ writes my friend, Mr. Wilton Rix, of Beccles, in his ‘East Anglian Nonconformity,’ published as far back as 1851, ‘had repeatedly and recently called her to tread in domestic life the path of sorrow, and her religious advantages, however few, had taught her that
‘“That path alone
Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.”
‘“Sweet, sometimes,” said she, “are the uses of adversity. It not only strengthens family affection, but it teaches us all to walk humbly with God.” It is not surprising that she was disposed to cultivate the society of those who could blend piety with cheerfulness, and with whom she might be on friendly terms without ceremony. Such acquaintances she found in Mr. Sloper’s family. Mrs. Siddons, with unassuming kindness, contributed to their amusement by specimens of her powerful reading. She joined willingly in the worship of the family, and maintained the same invaluable practice at her own lodgings.’ Mr. Rix continues: ‘Just at that time Mr. Sloper was requested to preach to his own people on an affecting and mournful occasion, the death of a suicide. Though he keenly felt the delicacy and difficulty of the task, a sense of duty and a possibility of usefulness overcame his scruples. He selected for his text the impressive sentiment of the Apostle, “The sorrow of the world worketh death.” Mrs. Siddons was one of his auditors. She, who had been the honoured guest of Royalty, who had been enthroned as the Tragic Muse, and whose voice had charmed applauding multitudes, was seen in the humble Dissenting meeting-house at Beccles shedding abundant and unaffected tears at the plain and faithful exhibition of religious truth. Mr. Sloper’s preaching was as powerfully recommended to her by the delightful illustration of Christian principles exhibited in his private character, as by the intrinsic importance of those principles, and the simple gravity and penetrating earnestness with which they were announced from his lips. He afterwards procured for her, at her request, a copy of Scott’s admirable “Commentary on the Bible,” which he accompanied with a letter, warmly urging upon her attention the great realities her profession had so manifest a tendency to exclude from her contemplations. Mrs. Siddons,’ again I quote Mr. Rix, ‘more than once expressed her gratitude for the interest Mr. Sloper had evinced in her eternal welfare; she thanked him in writing for the advice he had given her, adding an emphatic wish that God might enable her to follow it – a wish which her pious and amiable correspondent echoed with all the fervour of his heart. She returned into the glare of popularity, but a hope may easily be indulged that the pressure of subsequent relative afflictions and of old age were not permitted to come upon her unaccompanied by the impressions and consolations of true religion. Her elegant biographer, Mr. Campbell, draws a veil over the state of her mind during her last hours, which it would be deeply interesting to penetrate. Would she not then, if reason were undimmed, reflect upon the faithful counsel she received