ing allowed to vent itself so
seldom. Everybody goes to the play every night,--that is, every other
night, which is as often as they perform. Visiting, drinking, and even
card-playing, is for this happy month suspended; nay, I question if, like
Lent, it does not stop the celebration of weddings, for I do not believe
there is a damsel in the town who would spare the time to be married
during this rarely-occurring scene of festivity. It must be confessed,
however, the good folks have no bad taste.' It must be recollected that
Hannah More in reality belongs to East Anglia. She was the daughter of
Jacob More, who was descended from a respectable family at Harleston. He
was a High Churchman, but all his family were Nonconformists. His mother
used to tell young people that they would have known how to value Gospel
privileges had they lived like her, when at midnight pious worshippers
went with stealthy steps through the snow to hear the words of
inspiration delivered by a holy man at her father's house; while her
father, with a drawn sword, guarded the entrance from violent or profane
intrusion, adding that they boarded the minister and kept his horse for
10 pounds a year. An unfortunate lawsuit deprived the Mores of their
property, and thus it was that the celebrated Hannah was born at
Gloucestershire, and not in Suffolk or Norfolk. The family mansion was
at Wenhaston, not very far from Wrentham.

In my young days Bungay owed all its fame and most of its wealth to the
far-famed John Childs, who was one of our first Church Rate martyrs, to
whom is due mainly the destruction of the Bible-printing monopoly, and to
whom the late Edward Miall was much indebted for establishing the
_Nonconformist_ newspaper. For many years it was the habit of Mr. Childs
to celebrate that event by a dinner, at which the wine was good and the
talk was better. Old John Childs, of Bungay, had a cellar of port which
a dean might have envied; and many was the bottle that I cracked with him
as a young man, after a walk from Wrentham to Bungay, a distance of
fourteen miles, to talk with him on things in general, and politics in
particular. He was emphatically a self-made man--a man who would have
made his way anywhere, and a man who had a large acquaintance with the
reformers of his day in all parts of the country. On one occasion the
great Dan O'Connell came to pay him a visit, much to the delight of the
Suffolk Radicals, and to the horror of