Page:Surrey Archaeological Collections Volume 1.djvu/77

 The lover of ecclesiastical architecture will, equally as the investigator of ancient customs, manorial residences, or castellated fortresses, find in Surrey ample scope for his observation. Some of its conventual and sacred edifices vie with any in the kingdom for beauty and renown:—The Church of St. Mary Overie, rich in its lingering Norman relics, and in

the resting place of the poets Gower, Fletcher, Massinger,—with the fading page of its early priory, and singular crypt,—placed in a neighbourhood, wherein each step we take is on past honoured dust; Croydon, "the mitred, as I may call it, irradiated not by the titles only, but by the charitable deeds and pious munificence of Chicheley, Grindall, Shelden, and Whitgift; Guildford, whose church, caverns, castle, hospital, demand each a separate narrative replete with archival interest: palaces, abbeys, and manorial residences, crowd upon our survey, until

A host of associations awake at the mere enumeration of such residences as Beddington, Nonsuch, Lambeth, Loseley, Sutton, Sheen, fraught with the memory of the

Inexhaustible materials lie before the judicious observation of a society, whose zeal has already enabled it to welcome among its members many who stand pre-