ho spent so much money on the Castle, spent very little
on himself. A tiny room, almost a cell, is shown as the chamber in which
he spent hours in prayer, and in the extreme corner is a stone couch, on
which he slept when he allowed himself sleep. He had but one full meal a
day, he never warmed himself at a fire, he never married, he was never
ill, and was found dead on his bed one morning, at the ripe age of
eighty-seven. Starved to death, you are told; the hint is almost of
suicide.

Izaak Walton knew Morley, and stayed with him at the castle. He wrote
his Lives of Hooker and Herbert under the Bishop's roof, possibly added
something to his Life of Donne; the room is shown. I like to think of
him sitting through a sunny morning writing gently about the
shortcomings of Mrs. Hooker, how she made her poor husband tend the
sheep and rock the cradle; or setting down the superb last sentences of
the Life, and then taking down his fishing rod and wandering down by the
Wey after trout and chub. Perhaps, indeed, he could get a salmon. Among
the dues collected by the Bailiffs of the Borough early in the
seventeenth century I find the following----

"Of every fishmonger that selleth ffish at his window in the lent to
paye at good ffriday a good lb. of samon or of the beast ffish they
have then leaft."

The salmon, presumably, swam with the other "beast ffish" in the Wey.

[Illustration: _Cobbett's Birthplace at Farnham._]

Farnham's greatest man was not an ecclesiastic, but a politician.
William Cobbett, soldier, farmer, Radical, editor of _Peter Porcupine_
and the _Weekly Political Register_, and author of a diary unequalled of
its kind in English writing, was born at Farnham on March 9, 1762. The
house in which he was born, once a farmhouse and now the Jolly Farmer
inn, stands on the outskirts of the town near the Wey, conspicuous with
a white gable. As a boy, he must have been one of the busiest on any
farm in the neighbourhood. His father used to boast that he had four
boys, of whom the eldest was only fifteen years old--William Cobbett was
the third--and yet that they would do as much work as any three men in
Farnham. "When I first trudged a field," you read in the _The Life of
William Cobbett, by Himself_, "with my satchel swung over my shoulder, I
was hardly able to climb the gates and stiles, and at the close of day,
to reach home was a task of infinite difficulty." He was taught the
beginnings of farming