nd poets. Hardly a mile to the east of Bishop's Gate is Englefield
Green, a high and breezy common surrounded by delightful old houses.
Poor "Perdita," Mrs. Robinson, died in one of them, deserted and
forgotten by the Prince for whom she had thought her name well lost.

To a later generation Englefield became familiar, if unvisited, through
Mrs. Oliphant's _Neighbours on the Green_. Two of her friends in real
life who lived there were Richard Holt Hutton, essayist and theologian,
and one of the greatest of English journalists; and Sir George Chesney,
author of _The Battle of Dorking_, whom we are to meet on the scene of
one of his hitherto bloodless battlefields. Other neighbours, perhaps
even better known, survive in the half-fiction of Mrs. Oliphant's pages.

But the most enthusiastic admirer of the neighbourhood was a poet, Sir
John Denham. What would the author of the poem in praise of Cooper's
Hill say to some of the buildings which crown that "airy mountain"
to-day? For Englefield Green stands on Cooper's Hill as Sir John saw it,
and to him the common must have been part of the hill itself. To us
Cooper's Hill has become less a hill than a college, and will become a
hill again. The buildings of the College, started with the brightest
hopes to provide a special education for the Indian Civil Service in
1870, and closed as a failure in 1905, stand untenanted and unhappy,
fenced about with placards. There is no building quite so depressing as
an empty school.

On a day of light mists one may see the view from the hill as Denham
knew it, and as it was seen and known by Surrey nobles long before his
day. For below the hill lies Runemede, and it needs the filmy gauze of
mist to spread the meadows and trees of the Thames banks into a green
carpet, untouched with the mark of the builder and the roadmaker. But
Runemede is not seen best from the hill. Best, I think, you can measure
that broad green floor by coming on it as King John might have come had
he ridden or rowed from Windsor. Then it stretches suddenly before you,
a level plain of springing grass, a single rich hayfield in June, as
perhaps John looked out over it on the day he sealed the Charter. The
meadow and the river can have changed little in seven hundred years, and
perhaps the farming of the meadow is not wholly different. But I shall
always remember the shock with which once I came upon Runemede on an
open day in March, when the farmers' men were out over