grandson of
William, was father of Mrs. Austin, wife of the jurist. He was a man of
literary tastes, and his wife was known as the Madame Roland of Norwich.
Mrs. Opie (1765-1853) was daughter of James Alderson, a physician of
Norwich, and passed most of her life there. William Taylor (1761-1836),
another Norwich manufacturer, was among the earliest English students of
German literature. Norwich had afterwards the unique distinction of
being the home of a provincial school of artists. John Crome
(1788-1821), son of a poor weaver, and John Sell Cotman (1782-1842) were
its leaders; they formed a kind of provincial academy, and exhibited
pictures which have been more appreciated since their death. At Bristol,
towards the end of the century, were similar indications of intellectual
activity. Coleridge and Southey found there a society ready to listen to
their early lectures, and both admired Thomas Beddoes (1760-1808), a
physician, a chemist, a student of German, an imitator of Darwin in
poetry, and an assailant of Pitt in pamphlets. He had married one of
Edgeworth's daughters. With the help and advice of Wedgwood and Watt, he
founded the 'Pneumatic Institute' at Clifton in 1798, and obtained the
help of Humphry Davy, who there made some of his first discoveries. Davy
was soon transported to the Royal Institution, founded at the suggestion
of Count Rumford in 1799, which represented the growth of a popular
interest in the scientific discoveries.

The general tone of these little societies represents, of course, the
tendency of the upper stratum of the industrial classes. In their own
eyes they naturally represented the progressive element of society. They
were Whigs--for 'radicalism' was not yet invented--but Whigs of the left
wing; accepting the aristocratic precedency, but looking askance at the
aristocratic prejudices. They were rationalists, too, in principle, but
again within limits: openly avowing the doctrines which in the
Established church had still to be sheltered by ostensible conformity to
the traditional dogmas. Many of them professed the Unitarianism to which
the old dissenting bodies inclined. 'Unitarianism,' said shrewd old
Erasmus Darwin, 'is a feather-bed for a dying Christian.' But at present
such men as Priestley and Price were only so far on the road to a
thorough rationalism as to denounce the corruptions of Christianity, as
they denounced abuses in politics, without anticipating a revolutionary
change