Great Britain -- Description and travel; Great Britain -- Rural conditions
It looked like rain on Saturday morning, we therefore sent our horses on
from Godalming to Ripley, and took a post-chaise to convey us after
them. Being shut up in the post-chaise did not prevent me from taking a
look at a little snug house stuck under the hill on the road side, just
opposite the old chapel on St. Catherine's-hill, which house was not
there when I was a boy. I found that this house is now occupied by the
family Molyneux, for ages the owners of Losely Park, on the out-skirts
of which estate this house stands. The house at Losely is of great
antiquity, and had, or perhaps has, attached to it the great manors of
Godalming and Chiddingfold. I believe that Sir Thomas More lived at
Losely, or, at any rate, that the Molyneuxes are, in some degree,
descended from him. The estate is, I fancy, theirs yet; but here they
are, in this little house, while one Gunning (an East Indian, I
believe) occupies the house of their ancestors. At Send, or Sutton,
where Mr. Webb Weston inhabited, there is a Baron somebody, with a De
before his name. The name is German or Dutch, I believe. How the Baron
came there I know not; but as I have read his name amongst the _Justices
of the Peace_ for the county of Surrey, he must have been born in
England, or the law has been violated in making him a Justice of the
Peace, seeing that no person not born a subject of the king, and a
subject in this country too, can lawfully hold a commission under the
crown, either civil or military. Nor is it lawful for any man born
abroad of Scotch or Irish parents, to hold such commission under the
crown, though such commissions have been held, and are held, by persons
who are neither natural-born subjects of the king, nor born of English
parents abroad. It should also be known and borne in mind by the people,
that it is unlawful to grant any pension from the crown to any foreigner
whatever. And no naturalization act can take away this disability. Yet
the Whigs, as they call themselves, granted such pensions during the
short time that they were in power.
When we got to Ripley, we found the day very fine, and we got upon our
horses and rode home to dinner, after an absence of just one month,
agreeably to our original intention, having seen a great deal of the
country, having had a great deal of sport, and having, I trust, laid in
a stock of health for the winter, sufficient to enable us to withstand
the suffocation of this smoking and stinking Wen.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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