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But not the most brilliant of speeches, not all the enthusiasm of all the critics, can ever restore Cowper to his former immense popularity. We do well, however, to celebrate his centenary, because it is good at certain periods to remember our indebtedness to the great men who have helped us in literature or in life. But that is not to say that we work for the dethronement of later favourites. "Each age must write its own books," says Emerson, and this is particularly the case with the great body of poetry. Cowper, however, will live to all time among students of literature by his longer poems; he will live to all time among the multitude by his ballads and certain of his lyrics. He will, assuredly, live by his letters, to study which will be a thousand times more helpful to the young writer than many volumes of Addison, to whom we were once advised to devote our days and our nights. Cowper will live, above all, as a profoundly interesting and beautiful personality, as a great and good Englishman--the greatest of all the sons of this his adopted town.

An Address delivered in Norwich on the Occasion of the Borrow Centenary, 1903.

One hundred years ago there was born some two miles from the pleasant little town of East Dereham, in this county, a child who was christened George Henry Borrow. That is why we are assembled here this evening. I count it one of the most interesting coincidences in literary history that only three years earlier there should have left the world in the same little town--a town only known perhaps to those of us who are Norfolk men--a poet who has always seemed to me to be one of the greatest glories of our literature: I mean William Cowper. Cowper died in April, 1800, and Borrow was born in July, 1803, in this same town of East Dereham: and there very much it might be thought, any point of likeness or of contrast must surely end.

You could not conceive a more extraordinary contrast than the life of this other writer associated with East Dereham, whom we have met to celebrate this evening. George Borrow was the son of a soldier, who had risen from the ranks, and of a mother who had been an actress. Soldier and actress both imply to all of us a restless, wandering life. The soldier was a Cornishman by birth, the actress was of French origin, and so you have blended in this little Norfolk boy--who is a Norfolk boy in spite of it all--every kind of nomadic habit, every kind of fiery, imaginative enthusiasm, a temperament not usually characteristic of those of us who claim East Anglia as the land of our birth or of our progenitors. I wish it were possible for me to reconstruct that Norwich world into which young George Borrow entered at thirteen years of age. That it was a Norwich of great intellectual activity is indisputable. In the year of Borrow's birth John Gurney, who died six years later, first became a partner in the Norwich bank. His more famous son, Joseph John Gurney--aged fifteen--left the Earlham home in order to study at Oxford. His sister, the still more famous Elizabeth Fry, was now twenty-three. So that when Borrow, the thirteen year old son of the veteran soldier--who had already been in Ireland picking up scraps of Irish, and in Scotland adding to his knowledge of Gaelic--settled down for some of his most impressionable years in Norwich, Joseph John Gurney was a young man of twenty-eight and Elizabeth Fry was thirty-six. Dr. James Martineau was eleven years of age and his sister Harriet was fourteen. Another equally clever woman, not then married to Austin, the famous jurist, was Sarah Taylor, aged twenty-three. This is but to name a few of the crowd of Norwich worthies of that day. Would that some one could produce a picture of the literary life of Norwich of this time and of a quarter of a century onward--a period that includes the famous Bishop Stanley's occupancy of the See of Norwich and the visits to this city from all parts of England of a great number of famous literary men. It is my pleasant occupation to-night to endeavour to show that Borrow, the very least of these men and women in public estimation for a good portion of his life, and perhaps the least in popular judgment even since his death, was really the greatest, was really the man of all others to whom this beautiful city should do honour if it asks for a name out of its nineteenth century history to crown with local recognition.

Dr. Knapp, from dictates of courtesy, left it unrevealed, and as he could say nothing to Borrow's credit, passed the affair over in silence, and on this point all well-wishers of Borrow's reputation would be wise to take their cue from this biographer's example.

Now there is nothing more damnatory than a sentence of this kind. What does it amount to? What is the 'it' that is unrevealed by the courteous Dr. Knapp? It seems to amount to the charge that Borrow is accused of gibbeting in his books the people he dislikes; this is what every great imaginative writer has been charged with to the perplexing of dull people. There are many characters in Dickens's novels which are supposed to be a presentation of near relatives or friends. These he ought to have treated with more kindliness. That heroic little woman, Miss Bronte, gave a picture of Madame Heger, who kept a school at Brussels, that conveyed, I doubt not, a very mistaken presentation of the subject of her satire. Imaginative writers have always taken these liberties. When the worst is said it simply amounts to this, that Borrow was a good hater. Dr. Johnson said that he loved a good hater, and he might very well have loved Borrow. Dante, whom we all now agree to idolize, treated people even more roughly; he placed some of his acquaintances who had ill- used him in the very lowest circles of hell. May I express a hope, therefore, that this type of letter to the Norwich newspapers about Dr. Knapp's "kindness" to Borrow's reputation may cease. If Dr. Knapp had printed the whole of the facts we should know how to deal with them; but this is one of his limitations as a biographer. He has not in the least helped to a determination of Borrow's real character.

Her who had to endure the apparently causeless fluctuation of spirits incidental to one compelled to dwell for long periods of time in the fitful realms of the imagination,

It appeared as if I had fallen asleep in the pew of the old church of pretty Dereham. I had occasionally done so when a child, and had suddenly woke up. Yes, surely, I had been asleep and had woke up; but no! if I had been asleep I had been waking in my sleep, struggling, striving, learning and unlearning in my sleep. Years had rolled away whilst I had been asleep--ripe fruit had fallen, green fruit had come on whilst I had been asleep--how circumstances had altered, and above all myself whilst I had been asleep. No, I had not been asleep in the old church! I was in a pew, it is true, but not the pew of black leather, in which I sometimes fell asleep in days of yore, but in a strange pew; and then my companions, they were no longer those of days of yore. I was no longer with my respectable father and mother, and my dear brother, but with the gypsy cral and his wife, and the gigantic Tawno, the Antinous of the dusky people. And what was I myself? No longer an innocent child but a moody man, bearing in my face, as I knew well, the marks of my strivings and strugglings; of what I had learnt and unlearnt.

Of my wife I will merely say that she is a perfect paragon of wives--can make puddings and sweets and treacle posset, and is the best woman of business in East Anglia: of my step-daughter, for such she is though I generally call her daughter, and with good reason seeing that she has always shown herself a daughter to me, that she has all kinds of good qualities and several accomplishments, knowing something of conchology, more of botany, drawing capitally in the Dutch style, and playing remarkably well on the guitar.

Yes, I am not quite sure but that Borrow was really a good fellow all round, as well as being a good husband and father. He hated the literary class, it is true. He considered that the "contemptible trade of author," as he called it, was less creditable than that of a jockey. He avoided as much as possible the writers of books, and particularly the blue-stocking, and when they came in his way he was not always very polite, sometimes much the reverse. Only the other day a letter was published from the late Professor Cowell describing a visit to Borrow and his not very friendly reception. Well, Borrow was here as elsewhere a man of insight. The literary class is usually a very narrow class. It can talk about no trade but its own. Things have grown worse since Borrow's day, I am sure, but they were bad enough then. Borrow was a man of very varied tastes. He took interest in gypsies and horses and prize fighters and a hundred other entertaining matters, and so he despised the literary class, which cared for none of these things. But unhappily for his fame the literary class has had the final word; it has revealed all the gossip of a gossiping peasantry, and it has done its best to present the recluse of Oulton in a disagreeable light. Fortunately for Borrow, who kept the bores at bay and contented himself with but few friends, there were at least two who survived him to bear testimony to the effect that he was "a singularly steadfast and loyal friend." One of these was Mr. Watts-Dunton, who tells us in one of his essays that:

George Borrow was a good man, a most winsome and a most charming companion, an English gentleman, straightforward, honest, and brave as the very best examplars of that fine old type.

I have dwelt longer on this aspect of my subject than I should have done had I been addressing any other audience than a Norwich one. But the fact is that all the gossip and backbiting and censoriousness that has gathered round Borrow for a hundred years has come out of this very city, commencing with the "bursts of laughter" that, according to Miss Martineau, greeted Borrow's travels in Spain for the Bible Society. Borrow was twenty-one years of age when he left Norwich to make his way in the world. During the next twenty years he may have undergone many changes of intellectual view, as most of us do, as Miss Martineau notably did, and Miss Martineau and her laughing friends were diabolically uncharitable. That lack of charity followed Borrow throughout his life. He was libelled by many, by Miss Frances Power Cobbe most of all. However, the great city of Norwich will make up for it in the future, and she will love Borrow as Borrow indisputably loved her. How he praised her fine cathedral, her lordly castle, her Mousehold Heath, her meadows in which he once saw a prize fight, her pleasant scenery--no city, not even glorious Oxford, has been so well and adequately praised, and I desire to show that that praise is not for an age but for all time.

All this is very interesting, but in literature as in life we have got to work out our own destinies. We have not got to accept Borrow because this or that critic tells us he is good. I have therefore no quarrel with any one present who does not share my view that Borrow was one of the greater glories of English literature. I only desire to state my case for him.

True genius is the ray that flings A novel light o'er common things

An Address delivered at the Crabbe Celebration at Aldeburgh in Suffolk on the 16th of September, 1905.

If you want to read Crabbe to-day in his entirety, you must become possessed of a huge and clumsy volume of sombre appearance, small type and repellant double columns. For fully seventy years it has not paid a publisher to reprint Crabbe's poems properly. When this was achieved in 1834, the edition in eight volumes was comparatively a failure, and the promised two volu

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