It is not only that the separate things in such towns are delightful, nor only that one comes upon them suddenly, but also that these separate things are so many.  They have characters as men have.  There is nothing of that repetition which must accompany the love of order and the presence of strong laws.  The similar insistent forms which go with a strong civilisation, as they give it majesty, so they give it also gloom, and a heavy feeling of finality:  these are quite lacking here in England, where the poor have for so long submitted to the domination of the rich, and the rich have dreaded and refused a central government.  Everything that goes with the power of individuals has added peculiarity and meaning to all the stones of Lynn.  Moreover, a quality whose absence all men now deplore was once higher in England than anywhere else, save, perhaps, in the northern Italian hills.  I mean ownership, and what comes from ownership—­the love of home.

You can see the past effect of ownership and individuality in Lynn as clearly as you can catch affection or menace in a human voice.  The outward expression is most manifest, and to pass in and out along the lanes in front of the old houses inspires in one precisely those emotions which are aroused by a human crowd.

All the roofs of Lynn and all its pavements are worthy (as though they were living beings) of individual names.

Along the river shore, from the race of the ebb that had so nearly drowned me many years before, I watched the walls that mark the edge of the town against the Ouse, and especially that group towards which the ferry-boat was struggling against the eddy and tumble of the tide.

They were walls of every age, not high, brick of a dozen harmonious tones, with the accidents, corners, and breaches of perhaps seven hundred years.  Beyond, to the left, down the river, stood the masts in the new docks that were built to preserve the trade of this difficult port.  Up-river, great new works of I know not what kind stood like a bastion against the plain; and in between ran these oldest bits of Lynn, somnolescent and refreshing—­permanent.

The lanes up from the Ouse when I landed I found to be of a slow and natural growth, with that slight bend to them that comes, I believe, from the drying of fishing-nets.  For it is said that courts of this kind grew up in our sea-towns all round our eastern and the southern coast in such a manner.  It happened thus.

The town would begin upon the highest of the bank, for it was flatter for building, drier and easier to defend than that part next to the water.  Down from the town to the shore the fishermen would lay out their nets to dry.  How nets look when they are so laid, their narrowness and the curve they take, everybody knows.  Then on the spaces between the nets shanties would be built, or old boats turned upside down for shelter, so that the curing of fish and the boiling of tar and the serving and parcelling of ropes could be done under cover.  Then as the number of people grew, the squatters’ land got value, and houses were raised (you will find many small freeholds in such rows to this day), but the lines of the net remained in the alley-ways between the houses.