n in town. The gentry were but little better than those drawn
to the life in the novels of Fielding and Smollett. I am inclined to
think there was very little reading outside Dissenting circles--where the
book club was a standing institution, and _The Edinburgh Review_ was
looked up to as an oracle, as indeed it was, sixty years ago. There was
little encouragement of manly sports and pastimes--indeed, very little
for any one in the way of amusement but at the public-house. Not that
any one was ever drunk, in the liberal opinion of the landlord of the
public-house, only "a little fresh," and the village policeman was
unknown. It is true there might be a constable, but he was a very
mythical person indeed. Everybody drank, and as a rule the poorer people
were the more they drank.

One of the early temperance lecturers in the district, Mr. Thomas
Whittaker, who was mobbed, especially at Framlingham, tells us Essex and
Suffolk are clayey soils, in some districts very heavy and not easily
broken up, and the people in many cases correspond. It was due to Mr.
Marriage, of Chelmsford, a maltster, who turned his malting house into a
temperance hall, and Mr. D. Alexander, of Ipswich, that the temperance
reformers made way; and at that time James Larner, of Framlingham, aided
by young Mr. Thompson (now the great London surgeon, Sir Henry Thompson),
was quite a power. But the difficulties were great in the way of finding
places for meetings, or of getting to them in muddy lanes, or of getting
the anti-teetotalers to behave decently, or of the lecturers finding
accommodation for the night. Education would have been left almost
alone, had not the Liberals started the British and Foreign schools,
which roused the Church party to action. The one village schoolmaster
with whom I came into contact was--as were most of his class--one who had
seen better days, who wore top boots, and whose chief instrument in
teaching the young idea how to shoot was a ruler, of which he seemed to
me to take rather an unfair advantage. The people were ignorant, and,
like Lord Melbourne, did not see much good in making a fuss about
education. They could rarely read or write, and if they could there was
nothing for them to read--no cheap books nor cheap magazines and
newspapers. Now we have run to the other extreme, and it is to be hoped
we are all the better. Cottages were mostly in an unsanitary state, but
the labourer, in his white smock, look