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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red brick houses , those especially with their gables to the crooked street ; thy two o ' clock dinners , not yet superseded by the multiplication and velocity of those country-refiners the London coaches ; thy • "Mm h — _ *» m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 Peter who here keeps ( or used to keep , perhaps they have superseded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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    751

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    UTILITARIAN REFLECTIONS ON THE NORWICH MUSICAL FESTIVAL .

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    3 H 2

• Citation
  • 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/