of a
learned woman who was also a fascinating woman; it has given us again the
most remarkable letter-writers in the English language--Margaret Paston,
Horace Walpole and Edward FitzGerald. To these there were only three
serious rivals as letter-writers--William Cowper, Thomas Grey and Charles
Lamb; and the first found a final home and a last resting-place in our
midst. It has given us that remarkable novelist and entertaining
diarist, Fanny Burney. Finally, it has given us in that same William
Cowper--who rests in East Dereham Church, and for whom we claim on that
and for other reasons some share and participation in his genius--a great
and much loved poet. It has given us indeed in William Cowper and George
Crabbe the two most natural and the two most human poets in the English
literature of two centuries, only excepting the favourite poet of
Scotland--Robert Burns. It is to these of all writers that I would pin
my faith in talking of East Anglia and its literature; it is their names
that I would have you keep in your mind when you call up memories of the
literature which has most inspired our East Anglian life.

In connexion with many writers a point of importance will occur to us.
Only occasionally has a great English author a special claim on one
particular portion of England. He has not been the lesser or the greater
for that, it has merely been an accident of his birth and of his career.
The greatest of all writers, the one of whom all Englishmen are naturally
the most proud, Shakspere, has, it is true, an abundant association with
Warwickshire, but Shakspere stands almost alone in this, as in many
things. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Byron and Keats were born in London;
they travelled widely, they lived in many different counties or
countries, and cannot be said to have adorned any distinctively local
tradition. Shelley was born in Sussex, but a hundred cities, including
Rome, where his ashes rest, may claim some participation in his fine
spirit. Wordsworth, on the other hand, who was born in Cumberland,
certainly obtained the greater part of his inspiration from the
neighbouring county of Westmorland, where his life was passed. But when
we come to East Anglia we are face to face with a body of writers who
belong to the very soil, upon whom the particular character of the
landscape has had a permanent effect, who are not only very great
Englishmen and Englishwomen, but are great East Anglians as well.