I heard the other day of the death of dear old John Loder, the Woodbridge bookseller, at the age of ninety-two.  Though ill equipped to do justice to his memory, it seems to me a duty, and a duty that I take up gladly.  It is not often that a young man has the good fortune to know as a friend one who has been a crony of his own grandfather and great-grandfather.  Such was my privilege in the case of John Loder, a man whose life was all sturdy simplicity and generous friendship.  He shines in no merely reflected light, but in his own native nobility.  I think there are a few lovers of England and of books who will be glad not to forget his unobtrusive services to literature.  If only John Loder had kept a journal it would be one of the minor treasures of the Victorian Age.  He had a racy, original turn of speech, full of the Suffolk lingo that so delighted his friend FitzGerald; full, too, of the delicacies of rich thought and feeling.  He used to lament in his later years that he had not kept a diary as a young man.  Alas that his Boswell came too late to do more than snatch at a few of his memories.

There is a little Suffolk town on the salt tidewater of the Deben, some ten miles from the sea.  Its roofs of warm red tile are clustered on the hill-slopes that run down toward the river; a massive, gray church tower and a great windmill are conspicuous landmarks.  Broad barges and shabby schooners, with ruddy and amber sails, lie at anchor or drop down the river with the tide, bearing the simple sailormen of Mr. W.W.  Jacobs’s stories.  In the old days before the railway it was a considerable port and a town of thriving commerce.  But now—­well, it is little heard of in the annals of the world.

Yet Woodbridge, unknown to the tourist, has had her pilgrims, too, and her nook in literature.  It was there that George Crabbe of Aldeburgh was apprenticed to a local surgeon and wrote his first poem, unhappily entitled “Inebriety.”  There lived Bernard Barton, “the Quaker poet,” a versifier of a very mild sort, but immortal by reason of his friendships with greater men.  Addressed to Bernard Barton, in a plain, neat hand, came scores of letters to Woodbridge in the eighteen-twenties, letters now famous, which found their way up Church Street to Alexander’s Bank.  They were from no less a man than Charles Lamb.  Also I have always thought it very much to Woodbridge’s credit that a certain Woodbridgian named Pulham was a fellow-clerk of Lamb’s at the East India House.  Perhaps Mr. Pulham introduced Lamb and Barton to each other.  And as birthplace and home of Edward FitzGerald, Woodbridge drew such visitors as Carlyle and Tennyson, who came to seek out the immortal recluse.  In the years following FitzGerald’s death many a student of books, some all the way from America, found his way into John Loder’s shop to gossip about “Old Fitz.”  In 1893 a few devoted members of the Omar Khayyam Club of London pilgrimaged to Woodbridge to plant by the grave at Boulge (please pronounce “Bowidge”) a rosetree that had been raised from seed brought from the bush that sheds its petals over the dust of the tent-maker at Naishapur.  In 1909 Woodbridge and Ipswich celebrated the FitzGerald centennial.  And Rupert Brooke’s father was (I believe) a schoolboy at Woodbridge; alas that another of England’s jewels just missed being a Woodbridgian!