the destructive process we love to call improvement--not even disturbed
in his quiet study by the storm of civil war, inditing his thoughts as
follows: 'That crystal is nothing else but ice strongly congealed; that a
diamond is softened or broken by the blood of a goat; that bays preserve
from the mischief of lightning and thunder; that the horse hath no gall;
that a kingfisher hanged by the bill showeth where the wind lay; that the
flesh of peacocks corrupteth not;' and so on--questions, it may be, as
pertinent as those learnedly discussed in half-crown magazines at the
present day.

As a boy, I was chiefly familiar with Norwich crapes and bombazines and
Norwich shawls, which at that time were making quite a sensation in the
fashionable world. It was at a later time that I came to hear of Old
Crome and the Norwich school. Of him writes Mr. Wedmore, that 'he died
in a substantial square-built house, in what was a good street then, in
the parish of St. George, Colegate, having begun as a workman, and ended
as a bourgeois. He was a simple man, of genial company. To the end of
his life he used to go of an evening to the public-house as to an
informal club. In the privileged bar-parlour, behind the taps and
glasses, he sat with his friends and the shopkeepers, talking of local
things. But it is not to be supposed that because his life was from end
to end a humble one, though prosperous even outwardly after its kind,
Crome was deprived of the companionship most fitted to his genius, the
stimulus that he most needed. The very existence of the Norwich Society
of Artists settles that question. The local men hung on his words; he
knew that he was not only making pictures, but a school. And in the
quietness of a provincial city a coterie had been formed of men bent on
the pursuit of an honest and homely art, and of these he was the chief.'
Dying, his last words were, 'Hobbema, oh, Hobbema, how I loved thee!' In
my young days Mr. John Sell Cotman chiefly represented Norwich, although
in later times he became connected with King's College, London. A lady
writes to me: 'I think it was in the summer of 1842 Mr. Cotman came down
to Norwich to visit his son John, who at that time was occupying a house
on St. Bennet's Road. He visited us at Thorpe several times, and was
unusually well and in good spirits, with sketchbook or folio always in
hand. His father and sisters, too, were then living in a small house at
Thorpe, and f