"Vnder thy feate interrd is here A native born in Oxfordsheere, First, Life and Learning Oxford gaue; Surry to him his death, his graue. He once a HILL was, fresh and GREENE; Now wither'd is not to bee seene. Earth in Earth shovel'd up is shut, A HILL into a Hole is put. But darkesome earth by powre divine Bright at last as ye Sonne may shine." A mile further west, beyond Wallington, which in spite of embracing villadom still keeps an old inn and a pretty, shaded green, is Carshalton. Carshalton begins magnificently. In the spacious days of King George the First there was designed for Carshalton Park a superb dwelling, which Leoni was to have built for the lord of the manor (he built the Onslow house in Clandon Park). But the house was never built. The gates remain. They formerly guarded the green glades of a deer park. Now they stand forlornly cheek by jowl with new yellow brick. Actaeon, from one great pillar, gazes on less divine pictures than a goddess bathing; Artemis, on the other pillar, drapes herself for unseeing eyes. A papered notice-board lolls against the superb ironwork of the gates. Hunter and huntress, pillars and wrought iron, are for sale. Few villages in Surrey are prettier to-day than they were forty years ago. Carshalton is hardly a village, but is it less pretty than it used to be? Let Ruskin decide, from the opening of _The Crown of Wild Olive_. "Twenty years ago" (he writes in 1870) "there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more pathetic, in the world, by its expression of sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the sources of the Wandel, and including the low moors of Addington, and the villages of Beddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang with constant lips of the hand which 'giveth rain from heaven'; no pastures ever lightened in spring-time with more passionate blossoming; no sweeter homes ever hallowed the heart of the passer-by with their pride of peaceful gladness,--half-hidden--yet full-confessed. The place remains (1870) nearly unchanged in its larger features; but with deliberate mind I say, that I have never seen anything so ghastly in its inner tragic meaning,--not in Pisan Maremma--not by Campagna tomb,--not by the sand-isles of the Torcellan shore,--as the slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, over the delicate sweetness of the English scene: nor is any blasphemy or impiety, any frantic saying, or godless thought, more appalling to me, using the best power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope, than the insolent defiling of those springs by the human herds that drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself