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If he were not well prepared for its exceeding loveliness beforehand, it must have been to him a surprise as well as a delight. Comparisons are proverbially distasteful, but we can understand, if we can not wholly endorse, the rapturous verdict of John Dennis, who gives it as his opinion that the prospect from Leith Hill "surpasses at once in rural charm, pomp, and magnificence" the view of the Val d'Arno from the Apennines, or of the Campagna from Tivoli.
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We are now fairly in the Surrey Hills, and may put what some will think the very crown to these south-eastern excursions by a walk from Dorking to Farnham. Ascending by one of many lanes, shadowed (at the time of our visit) by hedges bright with hawthorn berries, and stately trees just touched with the russet and gold of early autumn, we are soon upon an upland stretch of heath and forest, still remaining in all the wildness of nature. Sometimes the path leads us between venerable trees—oak and beech and yew, whose branches form an impenetrable roof overhead, then traverses a sweep of bare hill, bright with gorse and heather, then plunges into some fairy dell, carpeted with softest moss. Many of the "stately homes of England," with their embowering trees upon the lower slopes, add a charm to the scene by their reminiscences as well as by their beauty. To the left is Wotton; made famous by the name and genius of John Evelyn, author of Sylva and the Diary—the scholar, gentleman, and Christian—pure-minded in an age of corruption, and the admiration of dissolute courtiers, who could respect what they would not imitate. It is to him that Cowley says:
"Happy art thou, whom God does bless
With the full choice of thine own happiness;
And happier yet, because thou'rt blest
With wisdom how to choose the best."
That the choice was made, for life and death, appears by the inscription which Evelyn directed to be placed on his tombstone at Wotton. "That living in an age of extraordinary events and revolution, he had learned from thence this truth, which he desired might be thus communicated to posterity: that all is vanity which is not honest, and that there is no solid wisdom but real piety."