is _Picturesque Promenade Round Dorking_, printed in
1823, meditates thus:--

"Such eccentric imageries, making irrefragable appeals to the
feelings of the dissolute debauchee, might form a persuasive
penitentiary, and urge the necessity of amendment with better effect
than all the farcical frenzies of mere formalists and fanatics."

A later owner removed temple and all. Denbies of to-day offers the
traveller a kindlier welcome by allowing access to more than one private
roadway, from which the outlook over the country to the south is more
than worth the steady climb from Dorking.

The road runs on to Ranmer Common, where Mr. John Timbs was able to look
north to the dome and pinnacles of St. Paul's Cathedral and Westminster
Abbey, but I was not lucky enough with the weather. Ranmer has a church
more finely placed, I think, than any in the county, except perhaps St.
Martha's; but St. Martha's has no spire like Ranmer. Ranmer spire is a
landmark: you take your bearings from that graceful needle for many
miles in central Surrey, as you may from Crooksbury Hill in the west.
East Surrey has no landmark quite so friendly.

Polesden Lacey, where Sheridan lived after his second marriage, is a
mile away to the north. To the south, below Ranmer, at the foot of the
Downs, is Westcott, once a small hamlet and now something more, with a
pretty little church set on a hill. Further on the road west, is Wotton
Hatch, and at Wotton House and in the church you are with John Evelyn.
Of all the great men who belong to Surrey history, John Evelyn is first.
He had not the religious exaltation, nor the ambition of a stern divine
like Archbishop Abbot; he had the dignity, but not the desire of public
service, of a politician such as Sir Arthur Onslow; he was not a fiery
reformer like William Cobbett, or a diplomatist like Sir William
Temple; he left behind him no such monument of stately learning as
Edward Gibbon, nor a record of military service like that of the great
Howard, the general of Queen Elizabeth's navy at sea against the navy of
Spain. But what he left will endure; the fame of an English gentleman
who was honest, surrounded by intrigue; unambitious of honours and
titles, a royalist who had the friendship of kings whom courtiers
flattered; a virtuoso of learning hardly equalled in his time, a diarist
whose jottings, never meant for printing, are a classic; a pious,
honourable, shrewd, country squire of deep family