The prettiest town Cobbett ever saw.--Semaphores and the THING.--The Road on the Ridge.--Newlands Corner.--The Father of the Forest.--Pilgrims to St. Martha's.--A quiet churchyard.--Mr. Allnutt's poem.--St. Catherine's and the Hammer.--Worplesdon.--Sutton Place.--The Weston Rebus.--Lady Susan, the Tame Wild Sow.--The earliest mention of Cricket. Cobbett's is the most attractive description of Guildford and its environs. "The town of Guildford," he writes in _Rural Rides_, "taken with its environs I, who have seen so many, many towns, think the prettiest, and, taken all together, the most agreeable and most happy-looking that I ever saw in my life. Here are hill and dale in endless variety. Here are the chalk and the sand, vieing with each other in making beautiful scenes. Here is a navigable river and fine meadows. Here are woods and downs. Here is something of everything but _fat marshes_ and their skeleton-making _agues_. The vale all the way down to Chilworth from Reigate is very delightful." He has as many praises for the neighbourhood on the other side. "Everybody that has been from Godalming to Guildford knows that there is hardly another such a pretty four miles in all England. The road is good; the soil is good; the houses are neat; the people are neat; the hills, the woods, the meadows, all are beautiful. Nothing wild or bold, to be sure, but exceedingly pretty; and it is almost impossible to ride along these four miles without feelings of pleasure, though you have rain for your companion, as it happened to be with me." Would the scenery have pleased Cobbett better if it had been "wild or bold"? Probably not, since he calls Hindhead "the most villainously ugly spot on God's Earth." Cobbett liked smiling pastures and well grown crops. His prettiness is good timber and clean farming. In Cobbett's time, there were no suburbs to Guildford; to-day the suburbs grow. Pewley Hill, south-east of the town, which old pictures of Guildford show you bare downland, is hardly so much spotted as hidden by undistinguished villas and dreary brick. Perhaps it would please Cobbett as well as it pleased him ninety years ago. Pewley Hill in his day stood naked to the wind, except for the semaphore and its buildings, and Cobbett deeply hated the semaphore. To us, who have the telephone and telegram, there seems nothing hateful in it (unless we hate the telephone), but to Cobbett the line of semaphore towers between London and Portsmouth stood for all that was dreadful in war, debt, jobbery and alarums. He could see nothing attractive in the cleverness and despatch of a system which enabled news to be sent from London to Portsmouth in a few seconds. (It took three-quarters of a minute to signal the hour of one o'clock from Greenwich to Portsmouth and back again to Greenwich). All he saw was bloody war and money wrongly spent. Thus, of one of the line:--