Some of our East Coast Towns

IN the year 1727 there was born in Sudbury, and baptized in the Independent Meeting there, Thomas Gainsborough, one of the earliest and the greatest of English painters. The family were Dissenters, and in the meeting-house, now under the care of the Rev. Ira Bosely, who seems very happy and successful in his new sphere of labour, are the memorials of two of them who were buried in the graveyard attached. There are two bequests of the Gainsborough family for the support of the minister for the time being, of which the present incumbent made favourable mention when I saw him the other day, in the comfortable manse attached to the meeting-house. One of the items in the ancient account-book seemed to be curious. It was as follows: "Four shillings for tobacco. " I have only to assume in the good old times our pious ancestors had an idea of Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Services, and for that purpose possibly the tobacco had been acquired. Be that as it may, we may be sure the Gainsborough family were as remarkable as any that then attended on the means of grace. In person, Mr. Gainsborough's father is represented as a fine old man, who wore his hair carefully parted, and was remarkable for the whiteness and regularity of his teeth. According to the custom of the last century he always wore a sword and was an adroit fencer, possessing the fatal facility of using the weapon in either hand. He introduced into Sudbury the straw trade from Coventry, and he managed to keep it in his own hands. He had a large family of five sons and four daughters.

One of the latter married a Dissenting Minister at Bath. One son, John, was a great mechanical genius, and invented wings, by means of which he essayed to fly, but, to the amusement of the spectators, found himself, instead of soaring into the air, dropped in a ditch by the way. Humphrey Gainsborough, the painter's second brother, settled as a Dissenting Minister at Henley-on-Thames. Of him, the celebrated Edgeworth, the father of the equally celebrated daughter, says he had never known a man of a more inventive mind. Thomas, the artist, must have inherited something of his artistic skill from his mother, for she herself loved to paint fruit and flowers, but with the boy, painting became the one great object of his life, and he was always at it, even when he should have been studying at the ancient grammar school where he was a pupil; and thus it is Sudbury has two great men to boast of-Thomas Gainsborough, the artist, and Simon de Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was beheaded by the populace in Wat Tyler's rebellion, and whose skull is still shown you in St. Gregory's Church. I have known many thick skulls in East Anglia, but surely that of the martyred Archbishop must have been one of the thickest to have lasted all this time.