m, in the years between 1797 and 1835, when Sharp lived there, must
have been visited by more distinguished poets, authors, politicians,
wits, scholars and artists than any other house in Surrey. Wordsworth
came there, and Scott, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey and Moore; he talked
painting with Lawrence, and sculpture with Chantrey; Macaulay talked
with him "about everything and everybody," and so did Grote and Mill and
Lockhart and Jeffrey; Porson was there, and perhaps had his favourite
porter for breakfast; and the politicians were without number--Brougham,
Sheridan, Grattan, Talleyrand, Huskisson, and almost a link with to-day,
Lord John Russell. Macaulay has left a few sentences which greater men
than Sharp might not deserve as an epitaph: "One thing I have observed
in Sharp, which is quite peculiar to him among town-wits and diners-out.
He never talks scandal. If he can say nothing good of a man, he holds
his tongue." Yet with all his virtues and all his conversation, Sharp
lacks his Boswell.

A little further towards Dorking the road crosses the Mole at Burford
Bridge. The inn at Burford Bridge, a sort of Swindon of the Dorking
Road, where everybody stops to have lunch or dinner, perhaps will again
welcome a great admiral and finish a great poem. Nelson stayed there
before leaving to command at Trafalgar; Keats came there to finish
_Endymion_. His visit, he writes to his friend Benjamin Bailey, is "to
change the scene--change the air, and give me a spur to wind up my poem,
of which there are wanting about 500 lines." Night on the hill inspired
him; in another letter he shows the way for other poets: "I went up Box
Hill this evening after the moon--'you a' seen the moon'--came down and
wrote some lines." And it is of the inn at Burford Bridge that the story
is told, by Mortimer Collins, in his "Walk through Surrey," of Keats and
the waiter. Keats was reciting _Endymion_:--

"For wine, for wine we left our kernel tree;
For wine we left our heath and yellow brooms,
And cold mushrooms;"

The waiter heard, and obeyed, bringing mushrooms uncooked on a plate and
a decanter of sherry. But that story is a little too artificial.

Still, _Endymion_ owes a good deal to the trees and the solitude of the
hill above Burford Bridge. It was with the woods in his memory that
Keats wrote something very like a description of Box Hill, with the Mole
below it:--

"Where shall our dwelling be? Under the brow