es so military, that, if he had
been hewing down other legions than those he encountered--_i.e._ of
spiders--he could scarcely have had a mien more tremendous, or have
demanded an arm more mighty. Heaven knows, I am 'the most _contente
personne_ in the world' to see his sabre so employed!"

The garden in which these severely military operations took place still
surrounds the same windows, gay with wistaria and roses. Possibly the
gnarled apple trees which fringe the lawn are actual survivors of the
general's sabre.

Great Bookham has grown a good deal since the d'Arblays knew it. But the
splendid shell of an ancient elm still shades the churchyard gate; the
flint-walled church, with ivy bunched over its buttressed tower, and
lichens glowing on the Horsham slabs of its chapel roof, can have
changed but little. Two or three of its monuments are interesting. One
is a brass plate recounting the virtues and the pedigree of Edmund
Slyfield and his wife Elizabeth. They were of Slyfield Place; he was "a
stoute Esquire who alwaies set God's feare before his Eyes"; she was a
model of all the graces, and descended from the Paulets, Capells,
Sydneys, Gainsfords, Finches, Arundels, Whites, and Lamberts--a good
long list to bring into an epitaph, but there are twenty-eight lines of
honest doggerel to do it in. Another monument is quite as striking,
which represents Colonel Thomas Moore in the full uniform of the
commanding officer of a regiment of foot in the reign of Queen Anne,
which the sculptor's convention has idealised into a mixture of a
bathing costume, a kilt, and a plaid. The church, indeed, is a museum of
records of different times and tastes to a degree uncommon in far more
important buildings. In the east wall of the chancel is a slab
commemorating in three Latin hexameters the founding of the building by
John de Rutherwyk, the great Abbot whom we meet at Chertsey; and the
east window of the Slyfield chapel is dedicated, in a long, biographical
inscription in brass, to the memory of Lord Raglan, who as Fitzroy James
Henry Somerset, military secretary to the Duke of Wellington, lost an
arm at the Duke's side at Waterloo, and forty years later commanded the
British army in the East before Sebastopol, where he died. Lord
Raglan's connection with Great Bookham is slight: but his niece, Lady
Mary Farquhar, who put up the window, lived at Polesden, a mile or two
away.

[Illustration: _Slyfield Place._]

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