that be thought to disqualify you?' asked the Prince.
'It does nothing of the sort. If that is all, we are quite satisfied,
and feel perfectly safe in having you for a librarian.' Am I not
justified in saying that at one time Bungay influences reached far and
near?

CHAPTER VI.
A CELEBRATED NORFOLK TOWN.

Great Yarmouth Nonconformists--Intellectual life--Dawson Turner--Astley
Cooper--Hudson Gurney--Mrs. Bendish.

When David Copperfield, Dickens tells us, first caught sight of Yarmouth,
it seemed to him to look rather spongy and soppy. As he drew nearer, he
remarks, 'and saw the whole adjacent prospect, lying like a straight, low
line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might have
improved it, and also that if the land had been a little more separated
from the sea, and the town and the tide had not been quite so much mixed
up, like toast-and-water, it would have been much nicer.' He adds: 'When
we got into the street, which was strange to me, and smelt the fish, and
pitch, and oakum, and tallow, and saw the sailors walking about, and the
carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I had done so
busy a place injustice.' In this opinion his readers who know Yarmouth
will agree. Brighton and Hastings and Eastbourne might envy Yarmouth its
sandy beach, where you can lead an amphibious life, watching the
fishing-smacks as they come to shore with cargoes often so heavy as to be
sold for manure; watching the merchant-ships and yachts that lie securely
in the Roads, or the long trail of black smoke of Scotch or northern
steamers far away; watching the gulls ever skimming the surface of the
waves; or the children, as they build little forts and dwellings in the
sand to be rudely swept to destruction by the advancing tide. In the
golden light of summer, how blue is the sky, how green the sea, how
yellow the sand, how jolly look the men and handsome the women! What
health and healing are in the air, as it comes laden with ozone from the
North Sea! You have the sea in front and on each side to look at, to
walk by, to splash in, to sail on. The danger is, that you grow too fat,
too ruddy, too hearty, too boisterous. As we all know, Venus was born
out of the sea, and out there on that eastern peninsula, of which
Yarmouth is the pride and ornament, there used to flourish bonny lasses,
as if to show that the connection between the ocean and lovely woman is
as intimate as of yore. Ya