sober and steady as he looks, leads so many a British stream to end its skittish, froward, and headstrong youth by running away to sea:—
And round about him many a pretty page
Attended duly, ready to obey;
All little rivers which owe vassalage
To him, as to their lord, and tribute pay:
The chalky Kennet and the Thetis grey;
The moorish Colne, and the soft sliding Breane;
The wanton Lea, that oft doth lose his way;
And the still Darent, in whose waters clean
Ten thousand fishes play and deck his pleasant stream.
Further on in his catalogue of rivers, Spenser gives the Mole a whole couplet to itself, well known to guide-book writers in search of copy. But one rubs one’s eyes to find him omitting Surrey’s principal tributary, so compliant, too, in yoke of rhyme,—the Wey, a clansman of the Welsh Wye, and also of that disguised “Thetis grey,” which turns out to be the stream flowing into the Thames at Cookham, on maps styled Wye, though a high authority suspects that it adopted this good old British name only by suggestion from its course beside Wycombe, even as the men of some broken clan might wrap themselves in the tartan of Campbell or Macdonald.
III
DOWN THE WEY
THE chief river flowing through Surrey is one which Pope shows himself not infallible in mislabelling “the chalky Wey that pours a milky wave.” But as the Amazon is not altogether a Brazilian stream, so the Wey has its rise in other counties; and still further to compare great and small, there might be some question as to its main source. One branch springs on Blackdown in Sussex, flowing round Hindhead; another comes less deviously from beyond the Hampshire Alton, rising beside White’s Selborne. The latter has more honour in maps, so let us take this up where it enters a bulging south-western corner of Surrey near Farnham’s pleasant market-town, whose antiquity is vouched for by a scattering of old houses and cobbled ways about the long main street. Here the Wey crooks through green meadows, on which oast-houses and stacked hop-poles, if not a show of trailing vines, reveal the rich gault soil making this corner of the country an oasis of hop cultivation, especially in the woodbine variety. It is but natural, then, that ale should be a renowned product of Farnham, which has also, at the outlying village of Wrecclesham, a notable manufactory of green pottery known as Farnham ware. If I am not mistaken, the hop-fields appear to have shrunk of late years hereabouts; but still Farnham would make a scene for that story of a learned stranger preaching on the evidences of design as evinced in the study of optics, and being duly complimented by the churchwarden: “capital sermon of yours, sir, about the ’opsticks; we mostly calls ’em ’oppoles in these parts; but we knew what you meant!”
The lion of the place is its Castle, originally built in Stephen’s troubled days, and now making a lordly abode for the Bishops of Winchester. Its most prominent appearance in our annals is during the Civil War, when it was held for the Parliament by George Wither, and for the King by a more loyal bard, Sir John Denham, but was partly blown up by the namesake of another poet, Sir William Waller; then it came to be dismantled under Cromwell. Restored and modernised, it still preserves the ivied Keep enshrining a flower garden, Fox’s Tower, the stately hall, the ancient servants’ hall and kitchen, the chapel with its rich carvings, said to be by Grinling Gibbons, and other old features to put a prelate in no danger of forgetting his historic dignity. The park, with its elm avenue, open to the public, is a noble expanse sloping up towards Hungry Hill, by which one passes from this home of peaceful state to the dusty purlieus of Aldershot Camp.
Below the Castle, on the opposite side of the high-road, stands the Parish Church, among whose memorials the most interesting is the tomb of William Cobbett beside the porch. Inside the building also is a tablet in his honour, as could hardly have been foreseen by that porcupinish Tory-democrat, whose quills were so readily roused at the very name of a parson. He is believed, not without question, to have been born at the “Jolly Farmer” Inn, near the station; and he died at Normandy Farm, on the north side of the Hog’s Back. Amid his crabbed grumblings and cross-grained whims, his heart always warms at the recollection of boyish toils and pranks about Farnham, his early entrance on life as an unschooled bird-scarer, his games of rolling and sliding down the sandy sides of Crooksbury, his bird’s-nesting sport on its tall trees, his trotting after the hounds, and his malicious trick of drawing a red herring across a hare’s scent to revenge himself for a cut from the huntsman’s whip.