It is a very charming old church, with a shingled spire, and deeply embowered in dark heavy trees, as though Nature herself had put on a solemn mood, in deference to the spirit of the place. Most prominent in the approach is a fine eighteenth-century monument, like a tea-caddy, with an epitaph starting off suddenly in this wise:

This is followed by an inscription stating how Virgil Pomfret’s wife was “Virtuous and Discreet,” and this by another that tells us how, in the same year, Virgil Pomfret, junior, was “snatch’d away By the Small Pox,” aged 28.

I think it gives that dreadful disease an added terror to personify it in this larcenous way.

At the foot of the hill lies quiet, beautiful Lamberhurst. Mr. Rudyard Kipling has not inaptly named it “Slumberhurst,” and Cobbett, not given to indiscriminate praise, spoke of it as “a very pretty place, lying in a valley with beautiful hills round it.”

Old writers gave it as their opinion that the place-name came from “the Anglo-Saxon Lam, meaning ‘loam,’” and supported their contention by referring to the sticky clay of the neighbourhood; but Lamberhurst probably took the first part of its name from the Saxon genitive plural for lambs. The second part means, of course, a wood. Most surrounding places take their names, in this manner, from natural objects.

LAMBERHURST.

Kent and Sussex here march together, and the village was, until 1894, in both counties, the dividing-line being the little river Teise that flows under the picturesque and narrow bridge in the village street. In that year, however, Lamberhurst was transferred wholly to Kent. The old “Chequers” inn, type of an old English hostelry, has lately been neighboured by an upstart hotel, disturbing with its raw newness the ancient peace of this Sleepy Hollow.

It was once a busy enough place, and black and smoky, for close by were the famous furnaces, or “bloomeries,” where iron-ore was smelted and cannon cast, and where the famous iron railings that now partly, and once wholly, surrounded St. Paul’s Cathedral, were made. Great outcry was made when the railings were removed from the west front of the cathedral in 1873, but we need not lack in admiration of them to realise that the open space thus created is a better sight than the strictly enclosed approach to London’s chief place of worship. The railings originally weighed 200 tons, cost £11,202, and were considered to be the finest, as they certainly were the heaviest, in the world.