"Tea veniente die, tea decedente"
—a phrase which has been of incalculable service to tea-drinking undergraduates. It was Tom Tyers who summed up Dr. Johnson, to the Doctor's liking: "Tom Tyers described me the best: 'Sir,' said he, 'you are like a ghost: you never speak till you are spoken to.'"
Jonathan Tyers reserved a private gloom for his own garden at Denbies. He named one of his plantations Il Penseroso and in it built a small temple which he bespattered with dismal texts. A clock struck every minute, to remind the visitor of the constant approach of death, and in an alcove were two life-size paintings of a Christian and an Unbeliever in their last moments. At the end of a walk stood a pair of pedestals, one of which carried a "Gentleman's Scull" and the other a "Lady's Scull" with appropriate verses; upon all of which melancholy properties Mr. John Timbs in his 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 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.
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:—