uch as
in after-years I learned to admire his genius. One of the most fortunate
men of our day, Sir James Paget, the great surgeon, was a Yarmouth lad,
and the See of Chester was filled by an accomplished divine, also a
Yarmouth lad. Southey, when at Yarmouth, where his brother was a student
for some time, was so much struck with the uniqueness of the epitaphs in
the Yarmouth Church, that he took the trouble to copy many of them. One
was as follows:

'We put him out to nurse;
Alas! his life he paid,
But judge not; he was overlaid.'

And hence it may be inferred that in Yarmouth the custom of baby-farming
has long flourished. Possibly thence it may have extended itself to
London. Amongst the truly great men who have lived and died in Yarmouth,
honourable mention must be made of Hales, the Norfolk Giant. In times
past soldiers and sailors and royal personages were often to be seen at
Yarmouth. It was at Yarmouth the heroes, returning from many a distant
battle-field, often landed. Nelson on one occasion--that is, after the
affair of Copenhagen--when he landed, at once made his way to the
hospital to see his men. To one of them, who had lost his arm, he said,
'There, Jack, you and I are spoiled for fishermen.'

A good deal of Puritanism seems to have come into England by way of
Yarmouth. In Queen Elizabeth's time, 300 Flemings settled there, who had
fled from Popery and Spain in their native land. In Norwich the Dutch
Church remains to this day. Some of them seem to have been the friends
and teachers of the far-famed, and I believe unjustly maligned, Robert
Browne. In Norfolk the seed fell upon good soil. While sacerdotalism
was more or less being developed in the State Church, the Norfolk men
boldly protested against Papal abominations, as they deemed them, and
swore to maintain the gospel of Geneva and Knox. One of the men
imprisoned when Bancroft was Archbishop of Canterbury, for attending a
conventicle, was Thomas Ladd, 'a merchant of Yarmouth.' The writ ran:
'Because that, on the Sabbath days, after the sermons ended, sojourning
in the house of Mr. Jachler, in Yarmouth, who was late preacher in
Yarmouth, joined with him in repeating the substance and heads of the
sermons that day made in the church, at which Thomas Ladd was usually
present.' In 1624 the penal laws for suppressing Separatists were
strictly enforced in Yarmouth, and one of the teachers of a small society
of Anabaptists w