affections, and set in
a niche of his own by all who live and work in the country to-day, as
one of the greatest of English woodmen and gardeners. Upon his grave, on
the two hundredth anniversary of his death, February 27, 1906, the
Society of Antiquaries placed a wreath of bays--an honour, I think,
unique in the annals of Surrey churches.

[Illustration: _Wotton House._]

The Evelyns have their own chapel in Wotton Church, locked by the same
wooden gate which opened to John Aubrey. In the little square space lie
John Evelyn and his wife, in raised tombs, and on the walls are
elaborate memorials of other Evelyns. One tomb the chapel does not hold,
though John Evelyn intended it should. His son Richard, who lived to be
scarcely five years old, died at Sayes Court, John Evelyn's property in
Kent, and lies at Deptford. The father wrote nothing sadder than his
short record of his child's few years--a strange enough comment on the
life of the nursery (if it was a nursery) of Stuart days:--

"At two years and a-half old, he could perfectly read any of the
English, Latin, French, or Gothic letters, pronouncing the three first
languages exactly. He had, before the fifth year, or in that year, not
only skill to read most written hands, but to decline all the nouns,
conjugate the verbs regular, and most of the irregular; learned out
_Puerilis_, got by heart almost the entire vocabulary of French
primitives and words, could make congruous syntax, turn English into
Latin, and _vice versa_, construe and prove what he read and did the
government, and use of relatives, verbs, substantives, ellipses, and
many figures and tropes, and made a considerable progress in Comenius's
_Janua_; began himself to write legibly, and had a strong passion for
Greek.... He was all life, all prettiness, far from morose, sullen, or
childish in anything he said or did."

"Far from childish"--it is perverse enough. John Evelyn himself began
the dreary round of tropes and primitives almost as early. He was taught
in a little room above Wotton church porch, by one Frier, when he was
nearly four. The porch has been renewed, and the room has gone.

Wotton House stands in a dip of grassland under noble trees. It is
little like what it was in Evelyn's day, for fire has taken away part of
it, and much that is new is added. The result is partly imposing, partly
incongruous; but much of the best of the house has aged well, and the
red-brick court and walled c