* and t Tennyson. ' Lady Clara Vere de Vere ' Even were it possibi to trace the name of Sibbes up to ' Norman blood,' we must remember our Scottishproverbs : — A' Stuarts are no sib to the king, "» = Though of the sa* name,
A' Campbells are no sib to the duke, / not of tlie same f^iily.
Moreover, as he says liimself of another (Shorland), 'What should I oeak of these things, when he has personal worth enough ? I need not go abroar to commend this man, for there were tliose graces and gifts in him that made hii so esteemed, that verily I tliink no man of his place and years lived more desired, tnd died more lamented.' (' Clirist is Best,' page 347 of this volume of the works.) |
MEMOIR OF RICH^VED SIBBES, D.D. XXVU
about to publish the lives of some worthies deceased, I shall think my labour well bestowed. For I am not of that philosopher's mind, who lighting upon a book newl}' put forth, entitled, " The En- comium of Hercules," cast it away, saying,^^ quisLacedcemoniorum eum vitwperavit ?■ accounting it a needless work to praise him whom no man did or could find fault withal. I rather judge it a com- mendable thing to perpetuate and keep fresh the memory of such worthy men whose examples may be of use for imitation in this declining and degenerate age.'* I give his ipsissima verba of the birth-place, as above, and embrace in the quotation the birth-date as well. ' But I come to the matter. This Richard, the eldest son of Paul Sibs and Johan [== Joanna ?] was born at Tostock, in Suffolk, four miles from Bury, anno domini 1577.'"!* The source of the blunder of making Sudbury the birth-place is evidently confound- ing 'Bury' St Edmunds with Sudbury. Tostock is 'nigh' the former, but not 'nigh' the latter, and cannot at all be described as * on the edges' of Suffolk, being fifteen or twenty miles in the interior. Tostock, to which I thus restore, if not in the popular sense a great, at least a revered, name, and one of which any place miglit be proud, remains to-day very much as we may suppose it to have been two hundred years ago, except perhaps that 'its tide of work has ebbed away,' and it is now wholly rural. It is a small sequestered village in Thedwestry hundred, about, as we have seen, four miles from Bury St Edmunds, and about thirteen miles from
Sudbury.
' A quaint, old, gabled place With Church stamped on its face.
Exactly such a 'village' as 'Our Village' has made dear to us all. Its few picturesquely scattered houses cluster around an unenclosed 'common' (once abundant in 'merry England,' but now sparse), and present fine specimens of what every year is seeing disappear — the peaked-roofed, mos.sy-thatched, or saffron-tiled ' homes ' of our forefathers of the 16th and 17th centuries, with every 'coign of van- tage' of the over-hanging upper storeys and lozenge-paned wiudov/s,
* Held by old swallows on a lease of love Unbroken, immemorial ;'
and little gardens a-front flinging out into the air the breath of
* Above and throughout I modernise the orthography ; but in Appendix A to this Memoir I reprint from my MS. the whole very interesting document. Thither I refer for further information concerning its author.
t Neal gives 1579, and is followed by otliers; but the misprint is corrected by the statement that his death took place in 1635, in his 57th year, which, however, ought to be 58th. The ' Registers' of Tostock that remain commence long subsequent to 1677, and hence the date of his birth-rfay is lost.
XSviii MEMOIR OF RICHARD SIBBES, D.D.
old-fashioned flowers. It is pleasant in our day to come upon
such a virgin spot.
' For it is well, amid the whirr Of restless wheels and busy stir, To find a quiet spot where live Fond, pious thoughts conservative,
That ring to an old chime,
And bear the moss of time.
' And sweeter far and grander too The ancient civilisation grew, With holy war and busy work Beneath the spire and round the kirk
Tlian miles of brick and stone
lu godless monotone.'
The 'church,' lichened and lady-ferned, but in excellent preser- vation, is approached by a fragrant lane that strikes off from ' the rectory,'
' . . . where the biidding purple rose, Prolific of its gifts, the long year through Breaks into beauty.
It is dedicated to St Andrew.
' Nor gargoyle lacks, grotesque and quaint, Nor saintly niche without its saint. Nor buttresi lightsome, nor the tower, Where the bell marks the passing hour.
And peals out with our mirth,
And tolls our earth to earth.'
The ' font' — from which no doubt little Richard Sibbes was bap- tized— is noticeable. The 'benches' are of dark oak, grotesquely carved. The graves around are ozier-woven, and on some of the stones, the once great Suffolk name of Bacon, is still to be read ; also in the wrecks of the ' Registers' that remain, the mighty name of Wolsey occurs, as elsewhere in the neighbourhood (by a strange link with Germany and the Reformation), is to be found that of Luther. We visited the pnmitive hamlet on one of the finest of English September days, and our Scottish eye and heart were touched with the quiet English scenery, long familiar by the 'landscapes' of Suffolk's Gainsborough and Constable, and her poets, Bloomfield and Crabbe. There were the ' Cart on a Road,' ' Cows crossing a Ford,' ' Boys a-straddle on a Gate,' the ' Stile,' ringed with honey-suckle, and now the glowing, and now the bleak originals of ' The Farmer's Boy' and of 'The Borough.' Tostock was a cheery, sunny, many-memoried birth-place ; to this hour, with its sister-villages, possessing traditions of martyrs and reformers, Rowland Taylor and Yeoman, and, farther off,