you tell us to consider, we are of the same
opinion still." The very fact that they are
beyond all doubt men of high and honourable
character, may make it less easy for
them to yield. They feel how conscientiously,
and even with a wish to deal justly,
and—as far as, in law, was possible to
them—even generously, by India, they
arrived at their original decision. Knowledge
of this may make them only the more
tenacious of it, when all the world cries out
upon it as a blunder. Here seems to be a
new example of an old experience, that
sometimes the most ingenious and
monstrous blunders are those of the ablest and
most conscientious men.

AS THE CROW FLIES.

DUE SOUTH.—- DORKING AND WOTTON.

ONE dart from the road the crow makes
between Norbury Park and Dorking, to visit
"VVesthumble, " Camilla Lacy," the house built
by Mr. Locke for his friend General D'Arblay.
To this pleasant retreat " Little Fanny D'Arblay"
came when she gave the general her hand,
and here she wrote Camilla, one of her most
successful novels, drawing some of her
characters from the family of Mr. Locke. Madame
D'Arblay wrote Camilla, or a Picture of
Youth—for which she received three thousand
pounds—in 1795, two years after her marriage,
and the year her tragedy of Edwy and Elgiva
failed at Drury Lane. The world may forget Miss
Burney the novelist, but they will never forget
the keeper of that admirable Diary, for, amid
much silly toadyism and sentimental vanity, she
has left us an extraordinary series of pictures
of internal court life. It is the only book in
which we really see the respectable old royal
couple and their wild and selfish children drawn
in detail.

Not far away over these hills is Polesden,
among whose beech woods is the house
where Sheridan retired during one of the lulls
of his revelling life, just after his marriage
with his second wife, Miss Ogle, a daughter of
the Dean of Winchester. It was here in 1795,
just after his famous reply on the Begum
charge, and his four days' deluge of eloquence
and invective, that this extraordinary meteor
of a man expended twenty thousand pounds
(Heaven and the Jews only knew where he got
it). He was living here during the great
debates on the mutiny at the Nore and the
dreadful Irish Rebellion. A toothless old man
is still living at Polesden, who, when young
and curly-headed, was a foot-boy in Sheridan's
house. He has preserved many traditions of
those wild and reckless days. It was not
unfrequent, says the old boy, for Sheridan to drive
out with four horses, and before the first stage
to have the leaders seized by an ambuscade of
hook-nosed sheriff's officers. It was well
known to the Dorking tradesmen that they
only had to toil up Rainmore Hill to Polesden,
to be sure if they did not get their bill paid,
to at least secure a box at Drury Lane for
themselves and friends. If stories were true
"Sherry" was not very scrupulous in his
expedients for raising ready supplies, relying on
his ultimate power of always obtaining money.
On one occasion he sold a butcher a drove of
hogs that he had allowed a friendly farmer
to drive into his stubbles, and on another
time when a choleric and refractory butcher
refused to leave a juicy leg of mutton that
had been ordered, without being first paid
for it, Sherry sent a servant, while the joint
was in the parlour for approval, to thrust
it in the pot, and begin to sodden it, so as
to checkmate the irascible tradesman when he
asked for its return.

Not far from Polesden, is Ranmore Common,
the breezy summit of a hill that commands
Dorking, a wild undulating sweep of
fox-haunted furze and brake with a twenty-
five miles' range of landscape.

"Can you see St. Paul's from here?"
asked a traveller of an old native breaking
stones on this high plateau of Surrey down.

"Lor' bless your honour, yes," said the old
man, pushing back the wire shade from his eyes;
"and generally just before a shower—it's
always going to be wet, master, when we see
Saint Paul's, so we calls it hereabouts our
weather-glass."

Thus time and distance dwarf objects. A
king's reign forms a line in a chronicler's book
of dynasties, and a huge cathedral becomes at
a distance a countryman's weather-glass.

The Aladdin's Palace of a mansion that crowns
this embowered hill, and rises like a fortress
above Dorking, is Denbies, now Mr. Cubitt's,
once Mr. Denison's, and originally built on the
site of an obscure farm-house by Mr. Jonathan
Tyers, that ingenious and eccentric gentleman
who in 1730 bought Vauxhall, in the Borough,
and opened a nightly Ridotto al fresco. An
hypochondriac, like his son Tommy Tyers, who
was an amateur poet, and a friend of Dr. .John-
son's, the proprietor of the centre of fashion
and folly turned the place into a sort of
sentimental cemetery. One wood of eight acres he
called " the Penseroso," and it was supposed to
resemble the pleasantest side of the Valley of
the Shadow of Death. There was a small temple
with elegiac inscriptions, and a loud but
concealed clock to break the intolerable "sound
of nothing." A dismal alcove with paintings
by roystering Hayman, of The Dying Christian
and The Dying Unbeliever, and the stern
statue of Truth trampling on a mask, had as a
wind-up and final corrector, at the termination
of a walk, two " elegantly carved pedestals"
with two skulls. Beneath one, a lady's, was
written:

         Blush not, ye fair, to own me—but be wise,
         Nor turn from sad mortality your eyes,

and so on, ending thus:

         When coxcombs flatter, and when fools adore,
         Here learn the lesson to be vain no more.