Through East Anglia in a Motor Car. James Edmund Vincent

king of that country, whom they afterwards murdered in cool blood." (This is quoted from the edition of 1823, containing Adam Smith's "appreciation" of his friend, written in 1776, and the "author's last corrections and improvements.") The Student's Hume of my youth, mindful perhaps of the wisdom of appealing to the memory of the young through the imagination, gives the date of Edmund's defeat as 871, for the sake of variety perhaps, and adds that, Edmund having rejected with scorn and horror a proposal that he should abjure Christianity and rule under the Danish supremacy, "the Danes bound him naked to a tree, scourged and shot at him with arrows, and finally beheaded him." That is not unlikely. A live target was, as the Scandinavian mythology shows, quite to the taste of the northern barbarians. King Edmund's body may very likely have been, as Abbo says, "velut asper hericius, aut spinis hirtus carduus, in passione similis Sebastiano egregio martyri"; "like a rough hedgehog or a thistle bristling with thorns, etc." (There need be no apology for giving the translation which caused a classical schoolmaster some trouble, because hericius is not a word used in classical Latin.) That was a martyrdom sufficient to justify canonization, an abbey in honour of the martyred king, and pilgrimages to his shrine, which were undertaken by quite a number of distinguished persons to the great profit of the institution preserving of it. But the monkish chroniclers had an unhappy habit of spoiling their stories by excessive and impossible embroidery. The romantic inventions that, when Edmund's followers stole back to the scene of his torture, they heard a voice crying, "Here, here, here," in a wood, and there found a wolf guarding the saint's head between its paws, and that the head, being replaced upon the trunk by human hands, was miraculously reunited to it, only spoil the story for us of the modern world; for 870 a.d. is fairly late in the history of England really. They suggest the vision of crafty ecclesiastics plotting how most effectively to advertise the shrine, for the glory of God of course, but also for the profit of the abbey; and that, to our minds, is repellent. That the ecclesiastics knew their public is clear, however, from the results here, as at Walsingham. The wolf legend, palpably false as it was, passed into ecclesiastical heraldry throughout East Anglia as generally as the story, probably true, of the manner of the martyrdom, and East Anglian churches have many traces of it in stone and in painted glass. Hence came the illustrious pilgrims and their offerings, and hence, in some measure at any rate, the fact that this little inland city of East Anglia played in its time a very important part in the history of England.

      How great that part was it is exceedingly difficult to realize as one stands in the centre of that essentially peaceful town. Yet it really has a genuine claim to its motto: Sacrarium regis, cunabula legis. Of the two great meetings of barons and clergy held before King John was forced to sign Magna Charta, one was held in London, at St. Paul's, the other in the Abbey Church of Bury St. Edmunds, of all places in England, as we should be inclined to add now. In truth, nothing could be more natural, for the venue illustrates not only the paramount influence of ecclesiasticism in those days, but also the characteristic tendencies of the East Anglian people. Other ecclesiastical centres, of course, there were equal in importance and wealth, and other mitred abbeys. Only in London, always jealous for its liberties, and in East Anglia, could such meetings have been held with confident assurance of the support of the mass of the inhabitants. Read the scattered history of Eastern England, reflect upon the many democratic risings that it witnessed; remember the Eastern Counties Association and the almost complete unanimity of East Anglia for the Parliament against Charles—then the selection of Bury St. Edmunds for this memorable assembly becomes easily intelligible. Parliaments were held there sometimes; royal visits were frequent. In fact, this quiet country town was one of the most influential places in the kingdom until the Dissolution. Then it suffered "a knok of a kynge," to quote Piers Plow-man's prophecy concerning the abbey of Abingdon, and its glory departed for evermore. It remains a bright town, possessed of a famous old inn, "The Angel," and of the ruins of the abbey, still of uncommon interest, which were laid out as a botanical garden before Thomas Carlyle wrote Past and Present. They are a garden and a playground still.

      A good deal of imagination is called for before the architectural glories of the abbey can be reconstructed in a mental picture, and the best help to be obtained in such an exercise of the imagination comes from reading once again words spoken of the abbey, words purporting to have been uttered within what Carlyle called its "wide internal spaces," words conjuring up realities none the less for that they are themselves the product of an inspired imagination. Need it be said that the reference here is to the second part of Shakespeare's King Henry VI? Here Suffolk and the Queen dropped poison into the King's ears concerning absent Gloucester; here Gloucester pleaded his cause in vain in imperishable lines of despairing resignation and passionate patriotism:—

      I know their complot is to have my life;

      And if my death might make this island happy,

      And prove the period of their tyranny,

      I would expend it with all willingness.

      Here, in some dark recess of a dungeon, Suffolk's hireling villains "dispatched the Duke." Here was enacted the grim scene, very short, but infinitely pathetic, wherein Suffolk goes to summon his victim to trial, knowing him dead already, and the Queen, the very embodiment of cold-blooded hypocrisy, cries aloud to the King, the Cardinal, and Somerset:—

      God forbid any malice should prevail,

      That faultless may condemn a nobleman!

      Pray God he may acquit him of suspicion!

      Back came Suffolk, trembling and pale, for fear of consequences, to announce the news that was known to him, for he had made it all too certain before he left the "room of state" upon his futile errand. We can almost hear the dull sound of the swooning King's fall, and his agonized lament:—

      For in the shade of death I shall find joy;

      In life but double death now Gloucester's dead.

      And what comes next? Surely it is essentially characteristic of the people of East Anglia:—

      The Commons, like an angry hive of bees,

      That want their leader, scatter up and down.

      Here, again, the substratum of authentic fact is, as in the case of St. Edmund, made the foundation of an imaginative structure; but see how vast is the difference between the effects produced by the paltry monkish embroiderer and the Poet, the maker, the creator. The first tale almost raises a smile of incredulity; the second, written in characters of blood and tears, stirs the heart to its depths.

      Bury has its lighter memories and associations too. Many good Englishmen who would not step far out of their way to make a pilgrimage to what was once St. Edmund's shrine, who might even feel that the second part of King Henry VI was a little above their heads, may be relied upon to take a great deal of trouble for the sake of treading in the footsteps of the immortal Mr. Pickwick. It was at the "Angel" in Bury St. Edmunds, still "a large inn standing in a wide open street, and nearly facing the Old Abbey," that Mr. Pickwick enjoyed "a very satisfactory dinner." This was, as we shall have occasion to see at Ipswich, high praise indeed when uttered by the author of Mr. Pickwick's being, who, if displeased by the accommodation and fare offered to him, did not hesitate to express his opinion with remarkable force of language. In the tap-room of the said "Angel," Mr. Weller, having been voted into the chair, cracked such jests and evoked such uproarious laughter that his master's rest was broken. The pump in the "Angel" yard cooled Sam's throbbing head next morning so effectually that, shortly afterwards, he was able to describe the stranger in the mulberry suit, stranger as he deemed him, as looking "as conwivial as a live trout in a lime basket." In the adjoining tap, again, Sam, "the names of Veller and gammon" having "come into contract" for the one and only time in that veracious history, cemented his alliance with the deceitful Job Trotter over gin and cloves. He took the doubtless fragrant and pungent beverage as a pick-me-up in the morning; it might have served us, perhaps well, as a warmth-restorer in the afternoon; but candour compels the confession that, for the moment, we forgot the Pickwick Papers, drew up in front of the "Suffolk," not the "Angel," and did our best to restore heat to our chilled bodies by gargantuan consumption of crumpets, tea, and jam. Even this was mildly Pickwickian (who can forget the story of the gentleman who demonstrated by devoted self-slaughter the proposition that