Bishop Cosin, Bishop Pearson, -all Norwich born; also Erpingham, Bishop Hall, and, best known of all, Sir Thomas Browne, had found here their home. It was surely no empty panegyric on the part of Lord Houghton, when he said in an address at Norwich, not many years ago: "I know no provincial city adorned with so many illustrious names in literature, the professions, and public life; those of Taylor, Martineau, Austin, Alderson, Opie, come first to my recollection, and there are many more behind; and there is this additional peculiarity of distinction, that these are for the most part not the designation of individuals, but of families numbering each men and women conspicuous in various walks of life."1

In this period, too, flourished a somewhat famous school of landscape painting, distinguished by the works of Crome and Cotman and Vincent, far enough from Gainsborough and Turner, yet awaking some admiration and enkindling some incentives in their day.

Norwich is a venerable town, with its heirlooms of tradition and its historic monuments, a more marked feature in the first quarter of our century, perhaps, than now. In the first quarter of the eleventh century it was the home of Canute; in the first quarter of the twelfth century Henry I. gave it a charter. Here are traces of the ancient wall, which in the first half of the fourteenth century surrounded whatever of city there then was, a circuit of four miles. Here is a Cathedral, a Norman structure, somewhat more than four hundred feet in length, with a spire of three hundred and fifteen feet. Here, too, is a Benedictine monastery, completed before the middle of the twelfth century. Here are numerous churches said to antedate the discoveries of Columbus; and here is the Walloon Church in which Mr. Martineau's ancestors worshipped. Mrs. Chapman, in her Memorials of Harriet Marti1 Three Generations of English Women, Janet Ross.

neau, writing of Norwich, speaks of its "uninteresting antiquity." The antiquity may have been uninteresting to Harriet, very likely to Mrs. Chapman. To James, however, who was of another order of mind, it may have been not only interesting but profitable. Now it were pleasant to tell how as a youth he explored crypt or churchyard, or was lost in reverie as he gazed on some venerable pile; of his thus doing, however, there has come to us no tale. But from our knowledge of the man we may come at least to some divination of the boy; and from this we may be sure of a sensibility to which these traditions and these associations had meaning. Silently, and perhaps unconsciously, he must have received their influence.

James and Harriet were children of the same mother; yet the contrasts of their ruling characteristics were very marked, and here we meet one of them. Harriet was a child of to-day, who bravely looked to the future for whose weal she toiled. She had, however, little reverence for the past; she was wanting in the sensibility by which she should have seen that through the toils and struggles of other generations had been handed to her the very torch she bore. The institutions, the ideas, the faiths of other times she was apt to treat as the dry stalks and decayed herbage of her spring-time garden, which she cleared away to give space for the fresh summer blossoms. James, too, is a child of to-day, yet a Janus that looks before him and behind,—to the future with prophetic hope, to the past with eye clear to the deep meaning of its endeavors. His is the historic sense that finds in to-day the unfolding of yesterday, and in yesterday the interpretation of to-day. In his garden he is not so much mindful of the dry stalks and decaying herbage as of the hardy root from which they sprang, and from which each season comes another and, by some miracle, a different flower.

CHAPTER II

EDUCATION

AMONG the useful institutions of Norwich is a grammar school, a foundation of the fourteenth century. To this school James Martineau was sent from eight to fourteen. years of age as a day-scholar. The school was not without reputation. It had had among its pupils not a few who had won distinction; Dr. Samuel Parr was at one time at its head. When James was in attendance, Edward Valpy was head-master. As a classical scholar Valpy had reputation, nor is he yet forgotten. Before James entered the school, he had published Elegantia Latina, a text-book for such as would teach an elegant Latinity, which he used. Somewhat later he brought out editions of the Greek Testament, the Septuagint, and the Iliad. Under a teacher of such marked classical accomplishment, the emphasis of the school was naturally upon classical studies, and in these James made rapid progress. He also learned the French language. Mathematics, however, then as ever after a favorite study, he was not permitted to pursue to an extent commensurate with his abilities and his desires.

In a public school of two hundred and thirty pupils rude elements are to be looked for; and the sensitive boy who has endured well, should have a tolerable martyrdom put down to his credit. James was this kind of boy. He had also a moral sensibility to which the hazing and hectoring were moral affronts of serious proportion. Of course, therefore, he was not entirely happy there.

The way opened for his transfer to another school. His sister Harriet, who had been visiting in Bristol, brought home glowing accounts of Lant Carpenter, who was both minister and teacher there. She does not speak of him reverently in her Autobiography; but her representation of him then led her parents to place James under his care. His school was a boarding-school; therefore it was not large. It was intended to be, and doubtless was, select.

No proper account can be given of Dr. Martineau that does not embrace an account of Lant Carpenter. Dr. Martineau has never been stingy in his recognitions of the friends of his intellect or spirit; but to no other of his helpers has he confessed a debt so large as to him. Harriet Martineau speaks of him as "superficial in his knowledge, scanty in ability, narrow in his conceptions." His influence upon her brother, of which, after seventy years, he kindled into eloquence when telling, makes her judgment incredible. Writing of him in 1841 he said, and never after saw reason to unsay: "So forcibly, indeed, did that period act upon me, so visibly did it determine the subsequent direction of my mind and lot, that it always stands before me as the commencement of my present life, making me feel like a man without a childhood; and though a multitude of earlier scenes are still in view, they seem to be spread around a different being, and to belong, like the incidents of a dream, to some foreign self that became extinct when the morning light of reality broke upon the sight." If further testimony be needed, it may be drawn from the action of the University at Glasgow in which he studied. When yet but twenty-six years of age, forecasting authorship, he conceived that the degree of Master of Arts might be helpful to him; and wrote to his Alma Mater respecting it. The Faculty without dissenting voice sent him, not an M.A., but an LL.D. instead. Was it thus that the Glasgow University treated

young men of "superficial knowledge and scanty ability and narrow conceptions"? Again, the class of minds on which he acted, together with his ever-extending and lasting influence, makes the acceptance of this estimate impossible. There are those, indeed, who mistake twinkle for star; but the wise navigators of life's ocean speedily detect the difference. Yet again, here are his writings, not wise with the wisdom the last fifty years have gathered, but surely reflecting the scholar's mind, the thinker's insight, and, before all else, the Christian heart. Grant that he had less than the large and solid erudition of Arnold, less ability, also, to mould the opinions of his pupils after the fashion of his own, a thing he would have religiously shrunk from doing, we yet feel that we are here dealing with one of those instances in which Miss Martineau's early impressions were truer than her later retrospects.1 Finally,

1 There is a view of Harriet Martineau, entertained in very high quarters, which, in consideration of some of the judgments contained in her Autobiography, seems in its nature charitable. She was an invalid a large portion of her life; she suffered from extreme deafness, which is almost sure at last to leave its trace upon mind or spirit. Besides, she experienced a spiritual transition from a faith the most confiding, to a scepticism the most ultra. The view is that she threw back, as it were, her later and poorer moods, and so saw her past in the discoloring light of her present.

An illustrative instance is told at Oxford by a gentleman in very high standing. In earlier life, as is well known, Miss Martineau wrote a book of a devotional character. In later life, after she had become, as she supposed, an atheist, she was visited one morning by a lady whom she took into her garden, then profusely in blossom. Waving her hand over her flowers, she said, "Who would n't be grateful for blessings such as these?" "Grateful to whom, Miss Martineau, on your theory?" "Ah," said she, with a smile, "you have me there." "Do you know," said the friend, "it has always been a matter of great surprise to me that one who wrote those beautiful prayers should have become an atheist ?" "What prayers?" Why, those you wrote." "I never wrote any prayers.” “Why, certainly you did, Miss Martineau, and I have the book and prize it very highly." Miss Martineau still persisted that there must be some mistake about it; so the friend called again the next morning and placed the volume in her hands. "Well," said Miss Martineau, "I suppose I must have written it, but I had forgotten all about it; and I do not see how I could have done it."

66

Forgetting the authorship of a book seems an extraordinary lapse of