the delivery of a most effective speech in Drury Lane
Theatre on the Corn Laws, step into a little ham and beef shop close by
for a light for his cigar. At that time, let me remind the reader,
waxlights and matches were unknown. The electoral body in Ipswich was
not a large one. At the Reform Act period it consisted of 1,800. At
that time the constituency had been increased by adding to the freemen,
of whom little more than three hundred remained, the ten-pound
householders within the old borough, which included twelve parishes. It
is curious to note that, in 1839, Mr. Milner Gibson, who had resigned his
seat on his becoming a Liberal, was rejected, the numbers being--Sir
Thomas Cochrane (Conservative), 621; Milner Gibson, 615. Ipswich seems
always to have been undergoing the excitement of a General Election--and,
it is to be feared, enjoying the profits of an election contest, as no
sooner was an election over than it was declared void--and a new writ was
issued. In 1837 Thetford, no longer a Parliamentary borough, returned
two M.P.'s, one Conservative and one Liberal. A little more has yet to
be written relative to smaller East Anglian boroughs. Lynn, under the
influence of the Duke of Portland, in 1837 returned two distinguished men
to Parliament: Lord George Bentinck, then a great racing man, but who was
better known as the leader of the Protectionist party, and Sir Stratford
Canning, the great Eltchi, who was to reign imperiously in the East, and
at whose frown Turkish Sultans trembled. Maldon returned two
Conservatives. It has long very properly ceased to exercise that
privilege. Great Yarmouth, which has now an electorate of 7,876, at the
General Election in 1837 returned two Liberals, but the highest Liberal
vote was 790, and the highest Tory vote 699. Money was the best friend
at Yarmouth, as in most boroughs. In accounting for the loss of his seat
at Weymouth in 1837, one of our greatest East Anglians, Sir Thomas Fowell
Buxton, writes:--"My supporters told me that it would be necessary to
open public-houses, and to lend money--a gentle name for bribery--to the
extent of 1,000 pounds. I, of course, declined." Yet, as a boy, I must
own I enjoyed the fun, the excitement, the fighting of the old elections,
much more than the elections of later times. If now and then a skull was
cracked, what mattered, while the Constitution was saved!

In the religious world the change in East Anglia has been immen