ould have little chance of preaching before a
London Lord Mayor. Talent is supposed to exist only in the crowded town,
where men have no time to think of anything but of the art of getting on.

Other heroic associations--of men who had suffered for the faith, who
feared God rather than man, who preferred the peace of an approving
conscience to the vain honours of the world--also were connected with the
place. I remember being shown a bush in which the conventicle preacher
used to hide himself when the enemy, in the shape of the myrmidons of
Bishop Wren, of Norwich, were at his heels. That furious prelate, as
many of us know, drove upwards of three thousand persons to seek their
bread in a foreign land. Indeed, to such an extent did he carry out his
persecuting system, that the trade and manufactures of the country
materially suffered in consequence. However, in my boyish days I was not
troubled much about such things. Dissent in Wrentham was quite
respectable. If we had lost the Brewster family, whose arms were still
to be seen on the Communion plate, a neighbouring squire attended at the
meeting-house, as it was then the fashion to call our chapel, and so did
the leading grocer and draper of the place, and the village doctor, the
father of six comely daughters; and the display of gigs on a Sunday was
really imposing. Alas! as I grew older I saw that imposing array not a
little shorn of its splendour. The neighbouring baronet, Sir Thomas
Gooch, M.P., added as he could farm to farm, and that a Dissenter was on
no account to have one of his farms was pretty well understood. I fancy
our great landlords have, in many parts of East Anglia, pretty well
exterminated Dissent, to the real injury of the people all around. I
write this advisedly. I dare say the preaching in the meeting-house was
often very miserably poor. The service, I must own, seemed to me often
peculiarly long and unattractive. There was always that long prayer
which was, I fear, to all boys a time of utter weariness; but,
nevertheless, there was a moral and intellectual life in our Dissenting
circle that did not exist elsewhere. It was true we never attended
dinners at the village public-house, nor indulged in card-parties, and
regarded with a horror, which I have come to think unwholesome, the
frivolity of balls or the attractions of a theatre; but we had all the
new books voted into our bookclub, and, as a lad, I can well remember how
I revell