assembled the sapient justices to give
immediate effect to the legislation described, and
were surprised to see Doctor Tucker assume
for the first time his privilege of magistrate,
and take his seat on the bench beside them.
"Why, gentlemen," said the dean, "what are
you going to do? How can you expect to
have any corn at all, if you mean to punish
the only persons perhaps that will bring you
any?" This home-thrust had its effect; and,
says a contemporary account of the incident,
"the markets were immediately supplied with
corn." For the dean's great principle, pursues
the same authority (a writer in a magazine of
the time) about trade and commerce is,
"that they will ever find their level; that
what commodities are wanted, and can be
paid for, will always be had; that a
nation will always go to the best and
cheapest market for what they have occasion
for; and that neither political friendship
nor enmity have anything to do with these
matters, but that they are regulated by utility
and convenience." A very simple and
sufficient creed, which it took nearly a hundred
years more to make manifest to English
statesmen.

Happily the dean had not to wait so long
before his view of the American quarrel
received its ample justification. He did not
live, indeed, to see that country enlarged and
raised by Independence from thirteen colonies
to thirty-one, and from three millions to thirty-
five millions of population; but his life was
spared till sixteen years after the treaty of
Paris; and when, on the Duke of Portland's
installation at Oxford in the summer of 1793,
the Dean of Gloucester, then between eighty
and ninety years of age, entered the theatre
with his brother doctors, the whole assemblage
welcomed with acclamation, on each
of the three days of the ceremony, the
venerable man whose advice, if timely taken,
would have saved the useless bloodshed of more
than a hundred thousand of the Saxon race,
and an addition to the English debt of more
than eighty millions sterling.

And as Mr. Curwen himself was still living
at the time, in his native town of Salem, we
may perhaps presume that even he had grown
to be much more tolerant of Dean Tucker and
his opinions, as a citizen of the American
Republic, than when he first heard them in
Bristol as a Loyalist exile and refugee.

THE NORFOLK GRIDIRON.

THE palace of the Escurial in Spain is
said to have been contrived on the model
of a gridiron—the lines of building
representing the bars in honour of St. Lawrence;
for, as yet, Gobbet and his gridiron were
not. St. Nicholas, the patron of fishermen
and children in general, and of Great
Yarmouth in particular, has no special or
legendary connection with gridirons; and
yet Great Yarmouth is one vast gridiron, of
which the bars are represented by "Rows,"
to the number of one hundred and fifty-six.
Repel the recollection of a Chester Row, a
Paradise Row, or a Rotten Row. A
Yarmouth Row is none of these. A row is a
long narrow lane or alley, quite straight, or
as nearly so as may be, with houses on each
side, both of which you can sometimes touch
at once with the finger-tips of each hand, by
stretching out your arms to their full extent.
Now and then the houses overhang, and even
join above your head, converting the row, so
far, into a sort of tunnel, or tubular passage.
Many and many a picturesque old bit of
domestic architecture is to be hunted up amongst
the rows. In some rows there is little more
than a blank wall for the double boundary.
In others, the houses retreat into tiny square
courts, where washing and clear-starching
are done, and wonderful nasturtiums and
scarlet-runners are reared from green boxes,
filled with that scarce commodity, vegetable
mould. Most of the rows are paved with
pebbles from the beach; and, strange to say,
these narrow gangways are traversed by
horses and carts which are built for this
special service, and which have been the cause
of serious misunderstandings amongst
antiquaries, as to whether they were, or were not,
modelled after the chariots of Roman
invaders. Of course, if two carts were to meet
in the middle of a row, one of the two must
either go back to the end again, or pass over
the other one, like goats upon a single-file ledge
of precipice. The straightness of the passage
usually obviates this alternative. A few rows
are well paved throughout with flag-stone;
carts are not allowed to enter them, and foot
passengers prefer them to the pebbly
pathways. Hence they are the chosen locality of
numerous little shopkeepers. If you want a
stout pair of hob-nailed shoes, or a scientifically-
oiled dreadnought, or a dozen of bloaters,
or a quadrant or compass, or a bunch of
turnips the best in the world, or a woollen
comforter and nightcap for one end of your
person, and worsted overall stockings for the
other, or a plate of cold boiled leg of pork
stuffed with parsley, or a ready-made
waistcoat, with blazing pattern and bright glass
buttons—with any of these you can soon be
accommodated in one or other of the paved
rows. Here, you have a board announcing
the luxurious interval during which hot joints
are offered to the satisfaction of a salt-water
appetite; from twelve till two no one need
suffer hunger. There, you behold a valuable
oil-painting representing a gentleman taking
off his hat to a lady in a row, to intimate
how happy he shall be to cut her corns.
Elsewhere is the notice over the door that, within,
"Live and Boil'd Shrimps are sold BY THE
CATCHER." Shrimps unadulterated, caught
and sold by the very catcher himself; the
original article, and no mistake! Many are
the pints of shrimps we have had from thy
shrimp-net, O hard-faring catcher, with the