read “spirit-powers.”

CHAPTER I.
introduction.

Who that has ever looked upon the strange conglomerations of architecture that line the thoroughfares of an ancient city, bearing trace of a touch from the hand of every age, from centuries far remote,—or watched the busy scenes of modern every-day life, surrounded by solemnly majestic, or quaintly grim old witnesses of our nation’s’ infancy,—but has felt the Poetry of History that lies treasured up in the chronicles of an “Old City?”

We may not all be archæologists, we may many of us feel little sympathy with the love of accumulating time-worn, moth-eaten relics of ages passed away, still less may we desire to see the resuscitation of dead forms, customs or laws, which we believe to

have been advances upon prior existing institutions, living their term of natural life in the season appointed for them, and yielding in their turn to progressions more suited to the growing wants of a growing people; but there are few minds wholly indifferent to the associations of time and place, or that are not conscious of some reverence for the links connecting the present with the past, to be found in the many noble and stupendous works of ancient art, yet lingering amongst us, massive evidences of lofty thoughts and grand conceptions, which found expression in the works of men’s hands, when few other modes existed of embodying the imaginations of the mind.

It is not now my purpose to draw comparisons between the appeals thus made through the outward senses to the spirituality of our nature, and the varied other and more subtle means employed in later days, to awaken our feelings of veneration and devotion, but it may be observed in passing, that amid the floods of change that have swept across our country’s history, it is scarcely possible but that some good should have been lost among the débris of decayed and shattered institutions.  We have now to take a sweeping glance at the general outline of the place that has been chosen as the nucleus from which to spin our web, of light and perhaps fanciful associations.  A desultory ramble through the streets

and bye-ways of an old city, that owns six-and-thirty parish churches, the ghosts of about twenty more defunct, the remains of four large friaries and a nunnery, some twenty or thirty temples of worship flourishing under the divers names and forms of “dissent,” two Roman branches of the Catholic Church, a Jewish synagogue, a hospital, museum, libraries, and institutions of every possible name, and “refuges” for blind, lame, halt, deaf, “incurable,” and diseased in mind, body, or estate; that is sprinkled with factories, bounded by crumbling ruins of old rampart walls, and studded with broken and mutilated bastion towers,—brings into view a series of objects so heterogeneous in order and character, that to arrange the ideas suggested by them to the mind or memory, is a task of no slight difficulty.

The great “lions” of interest to one, may rank the very lowest in the scale of another’s imagination or fancy.  The philosopher, the poet, the philanthropist, the antiquarian, the utilitarian, the man of the world, and the man of the day, each may choose his separate path, and each find for himself food for busy thought and active investigation.

The archæologist may indulge his love of interpreting the chiselled finger-writing of centuries gone by, upon many a richly decorated page of sculpture, and, hand in hand with the historian and divine, may trace out the pathway of art and religion, through

the multiform records of genius, devotional enthusiasm, taste, and beneficence, chronicled in writings of stone, by its ecclesiastical remains; he may gratify himself to his heart’s content with “vis-à-vis” encounters with grim old faces, grinning from ponderous old doorways, or watching as sentinels over dark and obscure passages, leading to depths impenetrable to outward vision, and find elaborately carved spandrils and canopies, gracing the entrances of abodes where poverty and labour have long since found shelter in the cast-off habitations of ancient wealth and aristocracy.

He may venture to explore cavernous cellars with groined roofings and piers that register their age; may make his way through moth-corrupted storehouses of dust and lumber; to revel in the grandeur of some old “hall,” boasting itself a relic of the domestic architecture of the days of the last Henry, and there lose himself in admiration of old mullioned windows, tie-beams, and antique staircases; may ferret out old cabinets and quaint old buffets hard by, that once, perchance, found lodging in the “Stranger’s Hall,” as it is wont, though erringly, to be designated; he may wander thence through bye lanes and streets, stretching forth their upper stories as if to meet their opposite neighbours half way with the embrace of friendship; over the plain, memorable as the scene of slaughter in famous Kett’s rebellion,

to the “World’s End;” and see amid the tottering ruins of half demolished pauper tenements, the richly carved king-posts and beams of the banquet chamber of the famous knight, Sir Thomas Erpingham, whose martial fame and religious “heresy” have found a more lasting monument than the perishable frame-work of his mansion-house, in the magnificent gateway known by his name, and raised in commemoration of his sin of Lollardism.  He may accompany the philanthropist in his visit to the “Old Man’s Hospital,” and mourn over the misappropriation of the nave and chancel of fine old St. Helen’s, where lies buried Kirkpatrick, a patriarch of the tribe of antiquaries; he may visit the grammar school that has sent forth scholars, divines, warriors, and lawyers; a Keye, a Clarke, an Earle, [5] a Nelson, and a Rajah Brooke, to spread its fame in the wide world.  He may see in it a record of the days when grammar was forbidden to be taught elsewhere; he may peep through the oriels that look in upon the charnel-house of the ancient dead beneath; may feast his eyes upon the beauties of the Erpingham, and strange composite details of the Ethelbert gateways; explore the mysteries of the Donjon, or Cow Tower; and following the windings of the river past the low archway of the picturesque little ferry, find himself at length stumbling upon some fragment

of the old “Wall.”  Thence he may trace the ancient frontier line of the Old City, and the sites of its venerable gateways, that were, but are not; the flintwork of the old rampart, now clinging to the precipitous sides of “Butter Hills,” with an old tower at the summit, mounted, sentinel-like, to keep watch over the ruins of the Carrow Abbey, and the alder cars, that gave it its name in the valley below; now, following a broken course, here and there left in solitude for wild creepers and the rare indigenous carnation to take root upon; now bursting through incrustations of modern bricks and mortar, and showing a bastion tower, with its orifices ornamented by spread-eagle emblems of the stone-mason’s craft in the precincts below; here, forming the back of slaughter-houses, or the foundations of some miserable workshop, fashioned from the rubble of its sides; thence wandering on through purlieus of wretchedness and