Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 149.djvu/327

The chief aim of this article is to present to a larger public than the readers of a country newspaper my father's Suffolk stories but those stories may well be prefaced by a sketch of my father's life. Such a sketch I wrote shortly after his death, for Mr Leslie Stephen's great 'Dictionary of National Biography.' It runs thus:—

"Robert Hindes Groome, Archdeacon of Suffolk, was born at Framlingham in 1810. Of Aldeburgh ancestry, he was the second son of the Rev. John Hindes Groome, ex-fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and rector for twenty six years of Earl Soham and Monk Soham in Suffolk. From Norwich school he passed to Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated B.A. in 1832, M.A. in 1836. In 1833 he was ordained to the Suffolk curacy of Tannington-with-Brundish; in 1835 travelled through Germany as tutor to Rafael Mendizabal, the son of the Spanish ambassador in 1839 became curate of Corfe Castle, Dorsetshire, of which little borough he was elected mayor; and in 1845 succeeded his father as rector of Monk Soham. Here in the course of forty-four years he built the rectory-house and school, restored the fine old church, erected an organ, and re-hung the bells. He was Archdeacon of Suffolk from 1869 till 1887, when failing eyesight forced him to resign, and when the clergy of the diocese presented him with his portrait. He died at Monk Soham, 19th March 1889. Archdeacon Groome was a man of wide culture—a man, too, of many friends. Chief among these were Edward FitzGerald, William Bodham Donne, Dr Thompson of Trinity, and Henry Bradshaw, the Cambridge librarian, who said of him, 'I never see Groome but what I learn something new.' He read much, but published little—a couple of charges, a sermon and lecture or two, some hymns and hymn-tunes, and a good many articles in the 'Christian Advocate and Review,' of which he was editor from 1861 to 1866. His best productions are his Suffolk stories: for humour and tenderness these come near to 'Rab and his Friends.'"

An uneventful life, like that of most country clergymen. But as Gainsborough and Constable took