Beneath the gentleman's cranium was this
poetical rap on the knuckles:

     Why start? The case is yours—or will be soon,
     Some years perhaps—perhaps another moon.
     Life, &c. &c.

              *              *              *              *              *

     Farewell! remember! nor my words despise,
     The only happy are the only wise.

All this sham asceticism of the proprietor of
the Lambeth tea-gardens, was swept away by
the next proprietor in 1767, and instead of
dismal graves there are now broad sweeps of
sunny lawn, and instead of ladies' and gentlemen's
skulls, a scarlet blaze of geranium-beds
and golden billows of calceolarias.

The crow drops from Ranmore Hill upon
Dorking, which stands close to the old Roman
road, or " stone street" leading from Arundel
to the Sussex coast. There is one long street
with an ugly church of the Georgian Gothic,
lying back shily behind the houses, as if ashamed
of itself. The whole town is guarded by
wooded hills.

The literary pilgrim looks in vain for his
special throne—the Marquis of Granby. The
famed house, where the fatal widow beguiled
old Weller, and where the Shepherd, after
imbibing too deeply of his special vanity, was
cooled in the horse-trough, is gone. Let the
pilgrim be informed that the real " Markis"
was the King's Head (now the Post Office),
a great coaching house on the Brighton road
in the old days, and where many a smoking
team drew up when Sammywell was young.
Long before old Weller mounted his chariot
throne Dorking was a quiet place, much
frequented by London merchants (chiefly the
Dutch) who came down to see Box Hill, and
to eat fresh-caught perch. Here and there a
gable end marks a house of this period, but
the only history the town claims is that its
church has the honour of containing the body
of that fat Duke of Norfolk, who died in 1815,
and who was famous for eating more beef
steaks at a meal than any other Englishman
living. This portly peer was the sworn boon
companion of Fox and the Regent, and the
daring man who, in 1798, consistently opposed
war with revolutionary France, and was
dismissed from the Lord-Lieutenancy of
Yorkshire for having, at the Whig Club, toasted
"the Majesty of the People." At Deepdene,
that beautifully wooded estate, with hilly
plantations rising above it in three dark green
billows, "Anastatius" Hope resided, and
collected his stores of Etruscan vases, ancient
statues, and Thorwaldsen sculptures. At Deepdene
Mr. Disraeli wrote Coningsby.

Through Deepdene Park, with its huge
twisted Spanish chesnuts, and its defaced
castle ruin, approached by a funereal triple
avenue of limes, the crow skims to an
unobtrusive cottage near Brockham Green, that
many a midnight has echoed to the songs of
that Bacchanalian veteran of the Regent's
times, Captain Morris, to whom the fat Duke
of  Norfolk, after much pressure, gave this
asylum for his old age. Under this quiet roof
the Regent has, perhaps, joined in the chorus
of " Billy's too Young to drive Us," or " Billy
Pitt and the Farmer." The captain not only
won the gold cup from the Anacreontic Society
for his song "Ad Poculum," but carried his
poems through twenty-four editions, and was
for years the choicest spirit of the Beef Steak
Club, where he was always the chosen brewer
of the punch. What a contrast, this quiet
haven with noisy Offley's and the club revelries
that never shook the Captain's iron constitution!
He has been described as one night
heartlessly reading a funeral service from the
back window of Offley's that opened on Covent
Garden churchyard, and pouring out as a swilling
libation a crown bowl of punch on the
grave of the original of Mr. Thackeray's Costigan,
a poor, clever, worn-out sot, who had
been recently buried there. If this was the
fun of the Regency times, Heaven guard us
from its revival under whatever Prince.

The crow cannot tear himself away en route
for Southampton without one swoop on Wotton,
close to Dorking, where John Evelyn was
born. His life was uneventful; first, a traveller
and student in Italy, then a secret correspondent
of the Royalists, and after the Restoration
one of the first and most active fellows of the
Royal Society. After much public employment,
and much patronage of all good and useful
discoveries, Evelyn inherited Wotton, and was
here in the great storm of 1703, when above a
thousand trees were blown down in sight of
the house. Evelyn was a great promoter of
tree planting, and he particularly mentions, in
his quiet, amiable way, so devoid of all self-
assertion, that his grandfather had at Wotton
timber standing worth one hundred thousand
pounds. Of that timber in Evelyn's own lifetime
thirty thousand pounds' worth had fallen
by the axe or storm.

They show at Wotton an old beech table,
six feet in diameter, which is probably as old
as the days of " Silvy Evelyn;" but the oak
table he himself mentions, five feet broad,
nine feet long, and six inches thick, is gone.
The worthy man, whose life was, as Horace
Walpole says, " a course of inquiry, study,
curiosity, instruction, and benevolence," has
described his own house at Wotton, where he
wished to found his ideal college, as " large
and ancient, suitable to those hospitable times,
and so sweetly environed with delicious streams
and venerable woods as, in the judgment of
strangers as well as Englishmen, it may be
compared to one of the most pleasant seats in
the nation, most tempting to a great person
and a wanton purse, to render it conspicuous;
it has rising grounds, meadows, woods, and
water in abundance."

Skirting the woods Evelyn loved so well, the
crow passes to Leith Hill. From the tower,
under whose pavement the builder, Mr. Hull,
an eccentric old barrister, who had known
Pope and Bishop Berkeley, and who had lived
for years close by, in learned retirement, was
buried in 1772, the bird sees a region of moor
and sandbank, the delight of Mr. Linnell and a