animal was a steady-going mare, and behaved as such; but all had not gigs
or steady-going mares. Some were in carts, some were on horseback, some
in ancient vehicles furbished up for the occasion; and as the band played
and the people shouted, some of the animals felt induced to dance, and
especially was this restlessness on the part of the quadrupeds increased
as we neared Halesworth, in the market-place of which was the
polling-booth, and in the streets of which we out-lying voters riding in
procession made quite a show. Halesworth, or Holser, as it was called,
was distant about nine miles, lying to the left of Yoxford, a village
which its admirers were wont to call the Garden of Suffolk. In 1809 the
Bishop of Norwich wrote from Halesworth: 'The church in this place is
uncommonly fine, and the ruins of an old castle (formerly the seat of the
Howards) are striking and majestic.' But when we went there the ruins
were gone--the more is the pity--and the church remained, at that time
held by no less a Liberal than Richard Whately, afterwards Archbishop of
Dublin. I used at times to meet with a country gentleman--a brother of a
noble lord--who after he had spent a fortune merrily, as country
gentlemen did in the good old times, came to live on a small annuity,
and, in spite of his enormous daily consumption of London porter at the
leading inn of the town, managed to reach a good old age. The hon.
gentleman and I were on friendly terms, and sometimes he would talk of
Whately, who had often been at his house. But, alas! he remembered
nothing of a man who became so celebrated in his day except that he would
eat after dinner any number of oranges, and was so fond of active
exercise that he would take a pitchfork and fill his tumbrels with
manure, or work just like a labourer on a farm. Of the Doctor's aversion
to church-bell ringing we have a curious illustration in a letter which
appeared in the _Suffolk Chronicle_ in 1825: 'A short time since a
wedding took place in the families of two of the oldest and most
respectable inhabitants of the town, when it was understood that the
Rector had, for the first time since his induction to his living, given
permission for the bells to greet the happy pair. After, however,
sounding a merry peal a short hour and a half, a message was received at
the belfry that the Rector thought they had rung long enough. The
tardiness with which this mandate was obeyed soon brought the rev.
ge