me to vote, and had stayed to see the
fun. For the timid, the infirm, the old, the day was a trying one; but
there was an excitement and a life about the affair one misses now that
the ballot has come into play, and has made the voter less of a man than
ever. Of course the shops were shut up. All who could afford to do so
kept open house, and at every available window were the bright, beaming
faces of the Suffolk fair--oh, they were jolly, those election days of
old! Well, in East Anglia, as elsewhere, spite of the parsons, spite of
the landlords, spite of the slavery of old custom, spite of old
traditions, the freeholders voted Reform, and Reform was won, and
everyone believed that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. In ten years,
I heard people say, there would be no tithes for the farmer to pay, and
welcome was the announcement; for then, as now, the agricultural interest
was depressed, and the farmer was a ruined man. Now one takes but a
languid interest in the word Reform, but then it stirred the hearts of
the people; and how they celebrated their victory, how they hoisted flags
and got up processions and made speeches, and feasted and hurrahed,
'twere tedious to tell. All over the land the people rejoiced with
exceeding joy. Old things, they believed, had passed away--all things
had become new.

CHAPTER V.
BUNGAY AND ITS PEOPLE.

Bungay Nonconformity--Hannah More--The Childses--The Queen's
Librarian--Prince Albert.

In the beginning of the present century, a disgraceful attack on
Methodism--by which the writer means Dissent in all its
branches--appeared in what was then the leading critical journal of the
age, the _Edinburgh Review_. 'The sources,' said the writer, a clergyman
(to his shame be it recorded) of the Church of England--no less
distinguished a divine than the far-famed Sydney Smith--'from which we
shall derive our extracts are the Evangelical and Methodistical magazines
for the year 1807, works which are said to be circulated to the amount of
18,000 or 20,000 every month, and which contain the sentiments of
Arminian and Calvinistic Methodists, and of the Evangelical clergymen of
the Church of England. We shall use the general term of Methodism to
designate these three classes of fanatics, not troubling ourselves to
point out the finer shades and nicer discriminations of lunacy, but
treating them as all in one general conspiracy against common-sense and
rational orthodox Christianit