Epitaphs and monuments can be dull enough, but no one could call the monuments dull which family piety has erected in Egham church to the memory of Sir John Denham, father of the poet. Sir John, clothed in a shroud, quits his tomb at the Last Trump; below him, among skeletons and skulls, two grisly corpses writhe to the light. It is edifying to conceive the satisfaction with which Sir John's descendants must have feasted on such horrors every Sunday. A gentler memory lives on a stone erected "to the most dutiful, engaging, and tender child of seven years old. Miss Sarah Honywood"; and a finer epitaph is Garrick's, written to the memory of Thomas Beighton, a former vicar:—
"He had no foe, and Camden was his friend."
Entering Egham.
Sir John Denham, the poet and unsuccessful defender of Farnham Castle in the Parliamentary Wars, lived at the house which is now the vicarage, and from its windows looked out on the long rising slope of Cooper's Hill. He has been laughed at for his description of the hill as an "airy mountain," but three hundred years ago, before the hill was cut up with hedges and ditches, and when he could look across open grass to its foot, Cooper's Hill may well have seemed higher than to-day. It is higher than St. Anne's Hill, after all, and can make an imposing break on the horizon.
Here is Runemede as Sir John Denham saw it from Cooper's Hill:—
"There lies a spatious and a fertile Greene,
Where from the woods, the Dryades oft meet
The Nayades, and with their nimble feet,
Soft dances lead, although their airie shape
All but a quicke Poeticke sight escape,
There Faunus and Sylvanus keepe their Courts,
And thither all the horrid hoast resorts,
When like the Elixar, with his evening beames,
The sunne has turn'd to gold the silver streames.
Here have I seene our Charles, when great affaires
Give leave to slacken, and unbend his cares,
Chacing the royall Stagge, the gallant beast,
Rowz'd with the noyse 'twixt hope and feare distrest,
Resolv's 'tis better to avoyd, than meet
His danger, trusting to his winged feet."
Which he does, a most moving business, until at last the gallant animal turns. He stands at bay—
"Till Charles from his unerring hand lets flie
A mortall shaft, then glad, and proud to dye
By such a wound he fals, the Chrystall flood
Dying he dyes, and purples with his blood."
Between Egham and Thorpe to the south is one of the few fine Elizabethan houses in the county, pleasantly named Great Fosters. But even Great Fosters, with all the charm of its gables, its chimneys and its mullioned windows, does not stand in quite such sharp contrast to the garishness of the Holloway buildings as the little village of Thorpe itself. Thorpe has been little written about. It lacks its sacred bard. But neither Shere, nor Gomshall, nor Thursley, nor Chiddingfold, which have been compared and criticised as the most beautiful of all Surrey villages, can surpass Thorpe for richness of peace of ancient homes and quiet brooding over the past. Enter Thorpe from the north by the fields, and you will walk by lanes over which a hundred years have passed without adding a tile or a tree to cottages or cottage gardens; and in Thorpe itself you can sit near the church on the edge of a stone stile, and look round at walls and roofs which might surely have sheltered Sir John Denham himself, walking by Thorpe to Chertsey. The stile stands across an ancient right of way, which crosses the fields; a straight line from the churchyard to Chertsey. John de Rutherwyk, doubtless, often walked or rode that lonely byway; perhaps it was he who raised the level path dry and well-drained out of the swampy, snipe-haunted meadows that lay between the little church and the great Abbey.