I have said that Captain Marryat was an East Anglian, and have we not a
right to be proud of Marryat's breezy stories of the sea? Our youth has
found such plentiful stimulus in _Peter Simple_, _Frank Mildmay_, and
_Mr. Midshipman Easy_; generations of boys have read them with delight,
generations of boys will read them. And not only boys, but men. One
recalls that Carlyle, in one of his deepest fits of depression, took
refuge in Marryat's novels with infinite advantage to his peace of mind.
Speaking of Captain Marryat and books for boys, a quite minor kind of
literature perhaps some of you may think, I must recall that an earlier
and still more famous story for children had an East Anglian origin. Did
not The Babes in the Wood come out of Norfolk? Was it not their estate
in that county that, as we learn from Percy's _Reliques_, their wicked
uncle coveted, and were not the last hours of those unfortunate children,
in this most picturesque and pathetic of stories, solaced by East Anglian
robins and their poor bodies covered by East Anglian vegetation?

Let me pass, however, to what may be counted more serious literature.
What can one say of Sir Thomas Browne unless indeed one has an hour in
which to say it. Every page of that great writer's _Religio Medici_ and
_Urn Burial_ is quotable--full of worldly wisdom and of an inspiration
that is not of the world. Browne was born in London, and not until he
was thirty-two years of age did he settle in Norwich, where he was "much
resorted to for his skill in physic," and where he lived for forty-five
years, when the fine church of St. Peter Mancroft, received his ashes--a
church in which, let me add, with pardonable pride, my own grandfather
and grandmother were married. I am glad that Norwich is shortly to
commemorate by a fitting monument not the least great of her sons, one
who has been aptly called "the English Montaigne." {138}

Perhaps there are those who would dispute my claim for Marryat and for
Sir Thomas Browne that they were East Anglians--both were only East
Anglians by adoption. There are even those who dispute the claim for one
whom I must count well-nigh the greatest of East Anglian men of
letters--George Borrow. Borrow, I maintain, was an East Anglian if ever
there was one, although this has been questioned by Mr. Theodore Watts-
Dunton. Now I have the greatest possible regard for Mr. Watts-Dunton. He
is distinguished alike as a critic, a poet, and a rom