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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Hail to thee once again , old Norwich , dear old Norwich , whom I venerate as if thou wert , not indeed my mother , but my grandmother , or at least my mother ' s great aunt , or somewhere thereabouts . Thou art sadly and sorely changed ; but as the poet , if the most gentlemanly of professors be indeed a poet , says of his Maria , if he ever had a Maria ,
No change will I see , But * o ] d Norwich' shall still be ' old Norwich' to me . I love thy old looks and old ways ; thy substantial red brick houses , those especially with their gables to the crooked street ; thy two o ' clock dinners , not yet superseded by the multiplication and velocity of those country-refiners the London coaches ; thy • "Mm h — _ *» m
primitive population whose seniors even yet boast that their city is only fifty years behind the metropolis , forgetting the date at which their comparison was instituted ; thy little river the Wensum , that ' winsome wee thing , which runs through thee between brick walls ; thy multitudinous churches with clocks that strike the hour all the hour round , forgetting their allegiance to St . Peter who here keeps ( or used to keep , perhaps they have superseded
him now ) the keys of time , as he does , above , those of eternity . Yes , I venerate all thy venerabilities , from the grace of the cathedral and the majesty of the castle , down to the very pebble pavement , the unchanging pebbles , that like Wordsworth ' s dutiful heavens c are fresh and strong / their rotundity not visibly impaired by an authenticated century of hob-nail friction . Why will they modernize thee here and there , making thee neither old nor young ,
but a serni-renovated patriarch in the caldron of Medea ? They can never cook thy old English bones into the fashion of an omelet ; they can only make thee an-omalous . To boil thee from black to red , like a lobster , was practicable ; but there thy capacity of transcoloration ended , and thou wilt never bleach nor blanch into white brick and stucco . O ! they have committed many abominations upon thee . One modern appendage to the
castle miirht be tolerated : it recalled an Edinburgh simile , and castle might be tolerated ; it recalled an Edinburgh simile , and was ' like a chieftain old and grey with a young and bonny bride ;' though after all , the new gaol , which stood for the bride , was somewhat a-miss ; but now there is a whole brood of them , blockin g up the public way , making people walk round and round , as if in a show shop , to see that noble civic panorama , instead of having
it cast before their eyes , a stray benediction , while they pursued , over the hill , their path of business . And the Gildencroft again ; now hidden by brick and mortar , hut once covered not with marble , but with marbles ; where every ragged urchin might have his fancy ball , and many a soaring kite brought down lightnings from heaven into the dust of young imaginations ; all gone now .
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UTILITARIAN REFLECTIONS ON THE NORWICH MUSICAL FESTIVAL .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1833, page 751, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2626/page/19/
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