mmenced what proved to be a highly-successful pastoral career.

As to the theology of the cottagers in East Anglia at that time, I can
offer no better illustration of it than that given by Miss Caroline Fox
of a cottage talk she had somewhere near Norwich. She writes, "A young
woman told us that her father was nearly converted, and that a little
more teaching would complete the business," adding "He quite believes
that he is lost, which, of course, is a great consolation to the old
man."

Literature flourished in East Anglia in 1837. Bulwer Lytton, an East
Anglian by birth and breeding, had just published "Paul Clifford," and
was about to commence a new and better style of novel. Norwich had long
been celebrated for its Literary Society, and one of the most remarkable
of the literary men of the age was George Borrow, author of the "Bible in
Spain," the materials for which he was then collecting, and who spent
much of his life in East Anglia, where he was born. He was five years in
Spain during the disturbed early years of Isabella II., and he travelled
in every part of Castile and Leon, as well as the southern part of the
Peninsula and Northern Portugal. Again and again his adventurous habits
brought him into danger among brigands and Carlists, as well as Roman
Catholic priests, and he experienced a brief imprisonment in Madrid. At
Norwich also was then living Mrs. Opie--as a Quakeress--after having
spent the greater part of her life in London gaiety. A lady who met her
in Brussels says she spoke with much enthusiasm of the eminent artists,
who, in her part of the world--videlicet, the Eastern Counties--had
become men of mark. Of her husband, who had been dead many years, she
said playfully that if neither Suffolk nor Norfolk could boast of the
honour of being his birthplace, he had done his best to remedy the evil
by marrying a Norwich woman. At Reydon Hall, rather a tumble-down old
place, as I recollect it, lived the Stricklands, and of the six daughters
of the house five were literary women more or less successful. Of these
the best known was Agnes, author of "The Lives of the Queens of England,"
which owed much of its success to being published just after the Princess
Victoria had become Queen of England.

It was amusing to hear her talk, in her somewhat affected and stilted
style, of politics. She was a Jacobin, and hated all Dissenters, whom
she sneered at as Roundheads. With modern ideas she and her