order to allow themselves the honour of
being incorporated in East Anglia, a name that one never pronounces
without recalling that fine old-world compliment of St. Augustine of
Canterbury to our ancestors, that they ought to be called not "Angles"
but "Angels."

Every one in particular who loves books must be proud to partake of our
great literary tradition. If it is difficult to decide precisely what
East Anglia is, it is perhaps equally difficult to speak for a few
minutes on so colossal a theme as the literature of East Anglia. It
would be easy to recapitulate what every biographical dictionary will
provide, a long list of famous names associated with our counties; to
remind you that we have produced two poet-laureates--John Skelton, of
Diss, the author of _Colyn Cloute_, and Thomas Shadwell, of Broomhill,
the playwright--the latter perhaps not entirely a subject for pride; two
very rough and ready political philosophers, Thomas Paine, born at
Thetford, and William Godwin, born at Wisbeach; a very popular novelist
in Bulwer Lytton, and a very popular theologian in Dr. Samuel Clarke; as
also the famous brother and sister whose works appealed to totally
different minds, James and Harriet Martineau. Then there was that
pathetic creature and indifferent poet, Robert Bloomfield, whose
_Farmer's Boy_ once appeared in the luxurious glories of an expensive
quarto. Finally, one recalls that two of the most popular women writers
of an earlier generation, Clara Reeve, the novelist, and Agnes
Strickland, the historian, were Suffolk women.

But I am not concerned to give you a recapitulation of all the East
Anglian writers, whose names, as I have said, can be found in any
biographical dictionary, and the quality of whose work would rather
suggest that East Anglia, from a literary point of view, is a land of
extinct volcanoes. I am naturally rather anxious to make use of the
golden opportunity that has been afforded me to emphasize my own literary
sympathies, and to say in what I think lies the glory of East Anglia, at
least so far as the creation of books is concerned. Here I make an
interesting claim for East Anglia, that it has given us in Captain
Marryat perhaps the very greatest prose writer of the nineteenth century
who has been a delight to youth, and two of the very greatest prose
writers of all times for the inspiration of middle-age, Sir Thomas Browne
and George Borrow. It has given us in Sarah Austin an example