the rest, but weak and irritable. There was
Dr. Alderson, Mrs. Opie's father, solemn and sententious and eccentric in
manner, but not an able man in any way;' and thus the leading lights of
Norwich are contemptuously dismissed. 'The great days of the Gurneys
were not come yet. The remarkable family from which issued Mrs. Fry and
Priscilla and Joseph John Gurney were then a set of dashing young people,
dressed in gay riding habits and scarlet boots, as Mrs. Fry told us
afterwards, and riding about the country to balls and gaieties of all
sorts. Accomplished and charming young ladies they were; and we children
used to overhear some whispered gossip about the effects of their charms
on heart-stricken young men; but their final characteristics were not yet
apparent.'

It is to a Norwich man that we owe the publication of Hansard's
Parliamentary Debates. Luke Hansard, to whom they owe their name, was
born in Norwich, 1725, was trained as a printer, went to London with but
a guinea in his pocket, was employed by Hughes, the printer of the House
of Commons, succeeded to the business and became widely known for his
despatch and accuracy in printing Parliamentary papers and debates. He
died in 1828, but the business was continued by his family, and to refer
to Hansard became the invariable custom when an M.P. was to be condemned
out of his own mouth--as Hansard was supposed never to err. Recently
Hansard has been carried on by a company, but the old name still remains.

Dr. Stoughton has in vain, in a number of the _Congregationalist_,
attempted to record the memory of a man well known and much honoured in
his day--the Rev. John Alexander, of Norwich. The portrait is a failure.
It gives us no idea of the man with his rosy face, his curly black hair,
his merry, twinkling eye, his joyous laugh, when mirth befitted the
occasion, or his tender sympathy where pain and sorrow and distress had
to be endured. Mr. Alexander's jubilee was celebrated in St. Andrew's
Hall in 1867, when the Mayor and a crowd of citizens did him honour, and
a sum of money for the purchase of an annuity was presented, thus
obviating the necessity of doing to him as on one occasion he in his
humorous way suggested should be done with old ministers when past
work--that they should be shot. In 1817 Mr. Alexander had come to
Norwich to preach in the old Whitfield Tabernacle in place of Mr. Hooper,
one of the tutors at Hoxton Academy. When I went to Norw