sisters had
no sympathy whatever. There never was such an antediluvian family. All
of them were very long-lived, and must have bitterly bewailed the
progress of Democracy and Dissent. I question whether the "Lives of the
Queens of England" has many readers now. Near Woodbridge, as rector of
Benhall, lived the Rev. J. Mitford, an active literary man, the editor of
_The Gentleman's Magazine_, and of some of the standard works known as
Pickering's Classics. As a clergyman he was a failure. It was urged in
his defence, by his friends, that his profession had been chosen for him
by others, and that when it was too late for him to escape from the bonds
which held him in thrall he made the discovery that the life that lay
before him was utterly uncongenial to his tastes and habits. His life,
when in Suffolk, writes Mrs. Houston, author of "A Woman's Memories of
World-known Men," must have been a very solitary one. For causes which I
have never heard explained, his wife had long left him, and his only son
was not on speaking terms with the Rector of Benhall. In his small
lodgings on the second floor in Sloane Street, he was doubtless a far
happier man than, in spite of his well-loved garden and extensive library
at Benhall Rectory, he ever, in his country home, professed to be. But
perhaps the most notable East Anglian author at the time was Isaac
Taylor, of Ongar, whose books--"The Natural History of Enthusiasm" and
"The Physical Theory of Another Life"--were most popular, and one of
which, at any rate, had been noticed in _The Edinburgh Review_. In a
private letter to the editor, Sir James Stephen describes Taylor "as a
very considerable man, with but small inventive but very great diffusive
powers, possessing a considerable mastery of language, but very apt to be
over-mastered by it--too fine a writer to write very well; too fastidious
a censor to judge men and things equitably; too much afraid of falling
into cant and vulgarity to rise to freedom and ease; an over-polished
Dissenter, a little ashamed of his origin among that body; but, with all
this, a man of vigorous and catholic understanding, of eminent purity of
mind, happy in himself and in all manner of innocent pleasure, and
strenuously devoted to the grand but impracticable task of grafting on
the intellectual democracy of our own times the literary aristocracy of
the days that are passed." Quite a different man was dear old Bernard
Barton, the Quaker poet