Of three dull nicknames, stuck like burrs on the mantles of Dorking's prophets, the dullest and prosiest has stuck to the richest. "Conversation" is a pretty severe burden for a man named plain Richard Sharp to carry; the hideousness of the baulked elision of "Sylva" Evelyn sets the teeth on edge (he developed into "Sylvie" as well as "Silver" Evelyn, poor man); "Capability" Brown, the gardener, must have been buttonholed by a thousand bores; but "Anastasius" Hope is beyond tolerance. How should such a name be endured? Thomas Hope endured it. He was the owner of Deepdene, the great house and garden and park a mile west of Dorking, property that once belonged to the Howards, and in particular to the ninth Duke of Norfolk. His father was a vastly wealthy Amsterdam merchant, he himself a patron and a critic of art. He gave Thorwaldsen his first commission in marble, and Thorwaldsen celebrated the day of the order every year of his life. But he owed his name to a romance, _Anastasius or Memoirs of a Modern Greek_, which he wrote at his leisure, and which places him, as Mr. John Timbs, promenading around Dorking in 1824, assures us, "in the highest list of eloquent writers and superior men." The _Edinburgh Reviewer_ was not less effusive. Until _Anastasius_ was published he had known Mr. Hope merely as the author of an essay on _Household Furniture and Interior Decoration_. In _Anastasius_ was the change from the upholsterer to the epicurean. Deepdene still holds statues and pictures, of which Mr. Bright, in his history of Dorking, gives a long list. Such a list belongs rightly to a history; but since the pictures can no longer be seen, other pages need but note that permission is occasionally granted to walk in the park. Aubrey's engaging description of the garden as he saw it late in the seventeenth century, a hundred years before Mr. Thomas Hope, belongs to his century and ours:-- "Near this place the Honourable Charles Howard of Norfolk hath very ingeniously contrived a long Hope (_i.e._, according to Virgil, _Deductus Vallis_) in the most pleasant and delightful solitude for house, gardens, orchards, boscages etc., that I have seen in England: It deserves a Poem and was a subject worthy of Mr. Cowley's Muse. The true name of this Hope is Dibden (quasi Deep Dene).