James Ritchie - Christopher Crayon's Recollections. The Life and Times of the late James Ewing Ritchie as told by himself

It was amusing to hear her talk, in her somewhat affected and stilted style, of politics. She was a Jacobin, and hated all Dissenters, whom she sneered at as Roundheads. With modern ideas she and her sisters had no sympathy whatever. There never was such an antediluvian family. All of them were very long-lived, and must have bitterly bewailed the progress of Democracy and Dissent. I question whether the “Lives of the Queens of England” has many readers now. Near Woodbridge, as rector of Benhall, lived the Rev. J. Mitford, an active literary man, the editor of The Gentleman’s Magazine , and of some of the standard works known as Pickering’s Classics. As a clergyman he was a failure. It was urged in his defence, by his friends, that his profession had been chosen for him by others, and that when it was too late for him to escape from the bonds which held him in thrall he made the discovery that the life that lay before him was utterly uncongenial to his tastes and habits. His life, when in Suffolk, writes Mrs. Houston, author of “A Woman’s Memories of World-known Men,” must have been a very solitary one. For causes which I have never heard explained, his wife had long left him, and his only son was not on speaking terms with the Rector of Benhall. In his small lodgings on the second floor in Sloane Street, he was doubtless a far happier man than, in spite of his well-loved garden and extensive library at Benhall Rectory, he ever, in his country home, professed to be. But perhaps the most notable East Anglian author at the time was Isaac Taylor, of Ongar, whose books – “The Natural History of Enthusiasm” and “The Physical Theory of Another Life” – were most popular, and one of which, at any rate, had been noticed in The Edinburgh Review . In a private letter to the editor, Sir James Stephen describes Taylor “as a very considerable man, with but small inventive but very great diffusive powers, possessing a considerable mastery of language, but very apt to be over-mastered by it – too fine a writer to write very well; too fastidious a censor to judge men and things equitably; too much afraid of falling into cant and vulgarity to rise to freedom and ease; an over-polished Dissenter, a little ashamed of his origin among that body; but, with all this, a man of vigorous and catholic understanding, of eminent purity of mind, happy in himself and in all manner of innocent pleasure, and strenuously devoted to the grand but impracticable task of grafting on the intellectual democracy of our own times the literary aristocracy of the days that are passed.” Quite a different man was dear old Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, of Woodbridge, with whom I dined once, who was more fat than bard beseems, and who seemed to me to enjoy a good dinner, a glass of port – people could drink port in those days – and a pinch of snuff, quite as much as any literary talk. Poor Bernard never set the Thames on fire – he would have been shocked at the thought of doing anything so wicked; but he was a good man, and quite competent to shine in “Fulcher’s Pocket Book,” a work published yearly by Fulcher, of Bury St. Edmund’s, and much better than any of its contemporaries.

In connection with this subject let me quote from Bernard Barton a sketch of a Suffolk yeoman, very rare in these times: “He was a hearty old yeoman of about eighty-six, and occupied the farm in which he lived and died, about fifty-five years. Sociable, hospitable, friendly; a liberal master to his labourers, a kind neighbour, and a right merry companion within the limits of becoming mirth; in politics a staunch Whig; in his theological creed as sturdy a Dissenter; yet with no more party spirit in him than a child. He and I belonged to the same book club for about forty years. He entered it about fifteen years before I came into these parts, and was really a pillar in our literary temple, not that he greatly cared about books or was deeply read in them, but he loved to meet his neighbours and get them round him on any occasion or no occasion at all. As a fine specimen of the true English yeoman I have met few to equal, hardly any to surpass him, and he looked the character as well as he acted it, till within a very few years, when the strong man was bowed with infirmity. About twenty-six years ago, in his dress costume of a blue coat and yellow buckskins, a finer sample of John Bullism you would rarely see. It was the whole study of his long life to make the few who revolved about him in his little orbit as happy as he always seemed to be himself; yet I was gravely queried with, when I happened to say that his children had asked me to write a few lines to his memory, whether I could do so in keeping with the general tenor of my poetry. The speaker doubted if he was a decidedly pious character. He had at times been known in his altitudes to vociferate at the top of his voice a song, the chorus of which was not certainly teetotalish: —

Can anything be finer than this picture of a Suffolk yeoman? Is it not a pity that such men are no more to be seen? High farming was unknown when the old Suffolk yeoman lived. I claim for Bernard Barton that this sketch of the Suffolk yeoman is the best thing he ever wrote. Bernard Barton’s daughter married the great Oriental scholar, Edward Fitzgerald, the friend of Carlyle and correspondent of Fanny Kemble, who lived in the neighbourhood of Woodbridge, and whose fame now he is no more is far greater than when he lived. Little could he have anticipated that in after years literary men would assemble in the quiet churchyard of Boulge to erect his monument over his grave, or to found a society to perpetuate his name.

As I lean back for another glance, my eyes, as Wordsworth writes, are filled with childish tears —

My heart is idly stirred.

I see the dear old village where I was born, almost encroaching on Sir Thomas Gooch’s park, at Benacre Hall; I see the old baronet, a fine old bigoted Tory, who looked the picture of health and happiness, as he ambled past on his chestnut cob, wearing a blue coat, a white hat and trousers, in summer; his only regret being that things were not as they were – his only consolation the fact that, wisely, the Eternal Providence that overrules all human affairs had provided snug rectories for his kith and kin, however unworthy of the sacred calling; and had hung up the sun, moon and stars so high in the heavens that no reforming ass

Could e’er presume to pluck them down, and light the world with gas.

Then comes the village medico, healthy and shrewd and kindly, with a firm belief – alas! that day is gone now – in black draught and blue pill. I see his six sunny daughters racing down the village street, guarded by a dragon of a governess, and I get out of their way, for I am a rustic, and have all the rustic’s fear of what the East Anglian peasant was used to term “morthers”; and then comes the squire of the next parish, in as shabby a trap as you ever set eyes on, and the fat farmer, who hails me for a walk, and going to the end of a field, joyously, or as joyously as his sluggish nature will permit, exclaims, “There, Master James, now you can see three farms.” My friend was a utilitarian, and could only see the beautiful in the useful. Then I call up the memory of the village grocer, a stern, unbending Radical, who delights me with the loan of Cruikshank’s illustrations to the “House that Jack Built,” mysteriously wrapped in brown paper and stowed away between the sugar and treacle. He does not talk much, but he thinks the more. And now it strikes me that conversation was not much cultivated in the villages of East Anglia in 1837, and yet there were splendid exceptions – on such evenings as when the members of the Book Club met in our parlour, where the best tea things were laid, and where a kindly mother in black silk and white shawl and quakerish cap made tea; where an honoured father, who now sleeps far away from the scene of his life-long labours, indulged in a genial humour, which set at ease the shyest of his guests; and again, what a splendid talk there was when the brethren in black from Beccles, from Yarmouth, from Halesworth, gathered for fraternal purposes, perhaps once a quarter, to smoke long pipes, to discuss metaphysics and politics, and to puzzle their heads over divines and systems that have long ceased to perplex the world. Few and simple were East Anglian annals then. It was seldom the London coach, the Yarmouth Mail and Telegraph brought a cockney down to astonish us with his pert ways and peculiar talk. Life was slow, but it was kindly, nevertheless. There was no fear of bacteria, nor of poison in the pot, nor of the ills of bad drainage. We were poor, but honest. Are we better now?