the woods, the meadows,
all are beautiful. Nothing wild or bold, to be sure, but exceedingly
pretty; and it is almost impossible to ride along these four miles
without feelings of pleasure, though you have rain for your companion,
as it happened to be with me." Would the scenery have pleased Cobbett
better if it had been "wild or bold"? Probably not, since he calls
Hindhead "the most villainously ugly spot on God's Earth." Cobbett liked
smiling pastures and well grown crops. His prettiness is good timber
and clean farming.

In Cobbett's time, there were no suburbs to Guildford; to-day the
suburbs grow. Pewley Hill, south-east of the town, which old pictures of
Guildford show you bare downland, is hardly so much spotted as hidden by
undistinguished villas and dreary brick. Perhaps it would please Cobbett
as well as it pleased him ninety years ago. Pewley Hill in his day stood
naked to the wind, except for the semaphore and its buildings, and
Cobbett deeply hated the semaphore. To us, who have the telephone and
telegram, there seems nothing hateful in it (unless we hate the
telephone), but to Cobbett the line of semaphore towers between London
and Portsmouth stood for all that was dreadful in war, debt, jobbery and
alarums. He could see nothing attractive in the cleverness and despatch
of a system which enabled news to be sent from London to Portsmouth in a
few seconds. (It took three-quarters of a minute to signal the hour of
one o'clock from Greenwich to Portsmouth and back again to Greenwich).
All he saw was bloody war and money wrongly spent. Thus, of one of the
line:--

"This building is, it seems, called a _Semaphore_, or _Semiphare_, or
something of that sort. What this word may have been hatched out of I
cannot say; but it means _a job_, I am sure. To call it an _alarm-post_
would not have been so convenient; for, people not endued with Scotch
_intellect_, might have wondered why the d---- we should have to pay for
alarm-posts and might have thought that with all our 'glorious
victories' we had 'brought our hogs to a fine market' if our dread of
the enemy were such as to induce us to have alarm-posts all over the
country!" The semaphore north of the road from Guildford to Farnham
urges him to even higher flights:--

"What can this be _for_? Why are these expensive things put up all over
the country? Respecting the movements of _whom_ is wanted this _alarm
system_? Will no member ask this in Parliament? Not one!