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Miss Vesta Swan to the Thalia and Erato Press.

Dear Sirs,-Several persons have told me lately that they have looked in vain in the literary papers ever since White Pinings was published, for any adver tisement of it, and they have found none. Many of the books of the day are, I notice, advertised very freely, with, I have no doubt, good results-Mr. Hall Caine's last novel, for example. Curiously enough, one of my poems ("An Evening Reverie," page 76), contains very much the same moral as his book. Could you not intimate that fact to the public in some way? Please send me twelve more copies. Yours truly, Vesta Swan.

Miss Vesta Swan to the Thalia and Erato Press.

Dear Sirs,-In the report in the papers this morning of the Bishop of London's address on the reconcilement of the Letter and the Spirit, there is a most curious anticipation of a statement of mine in the poem, "Let us ponder awhile," on page 132 of White Pinings. I think that the enclosed paragraph mentioning the coincidence might be sent to the Athenæum. I am told that all the other papers would then copy it.

Yours truly,

Vesta Swan.

LIX.

Miss Vesta Swan to the Thalia and Erato Press. (Extract.)

A friend of mine got out of the train and asked at all the bookstalls between London and Manchester for W. P., and not one had it. Is not this a scandal? Something ought to be done to raise the tone of railway reading. Please send me six more copies.

LXVIII.

Miss Vesta Swan to the Thalia and Erato Press. (Extract.)

I am told that a few years ago a volume of poems was advertised by sandwichmen in the London streets. Could not White Pinings be made known in this way?

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In 1826 the famous roadmaker and engineer Telford crowned his life's work by the mighty suspension bridge which lifted his new Holyhead mail road across the Menai Straits and completed the link between London and Ireland for a fast service. Thousands gathered at the opening ceremony when the first coach from the metropolis, carrying the Royal mails, slowed down from its regulation pace of eleven and a half miles an hour and rolled triumphantly over the yawning chasm. As a combination of engineering skill and rapid communication it seemed, no doubt, to the cheering crowds below, a final achievement of human ingenuity. Yet a short twenty years later the son of George Stephenson was to commence that other bridge, alongside of this first one, destined to carry locomotion of a kind which by comparison put the people who had so recently cheered the Holyhead coach almost on a par with the Romans whose chariots and tumbrils had rolled along the Causeway from Chester to Carnarvon nearly two thousand years before. There is assuredly no spot in Great Britain more calculated to deter one from prophetic flights as to the limitations of science than the one which commands a view of these two significant viaducts.

But the decline of the coach road and the coaching inu was, of course, gradLIVING AGE. 1361

VOL. XXVI.

ual and sectional. Palatial hostelries like the grand old Hertford mansion at Marlborough had closed their doors at once. The Castle Inn, so artistically dealt with by Mr. Stanley Weyman in a recent work, had for some time been the nucleus of a now famous public school before the coaches ceased to run over considerable sections of the Bath road. The increasing railroad activity

of the 'sixties, perhaps, marks the final collapse of the rural highway into the somnolence, and here and there the literally grass-grown trance, from which it was quite recently awakened by the once despised bicycle. Many of us now in middle age may peradventure remember the stricken appearance of the forsaken coaching inn only recently left high and dry at some bleak cross road; more woe-begone then, I think, than after it had adapted itself to its changed conditions, or gone out of business altogether and into private life. Some of us may recall how these dismal haunts of ancient revelry, with their creaking signboards, seized on our childish imagination, if we possessed one, and became the background for all the tales of wayside horror and mystery that fell in our way. As for me, some of these old inns have provided the stage furniture on such literary excursions for life; defying time, climate, space, and the most antagonistic environments. It

XVII.

The Thalia and Erato Press to

Miss Vesta Swan.
(Telegram.)

Too late. Error unimportant.

[Several letters omitted.]

XXIII.

Miss Vesta Swan to the Thalia and Erato Press. (Extract.)

And you will please be sure to send a copy with the author's compliments to Mr. Andrew Lang, as I hear he is so much interested in new poets?

[From a vast correspondence the following six letters have been selected.]

XXXI.

Miss Vesta Swan to the Thalia and Erato Press. (Extract.)

My friends tell me that they have great difficulty in buying White Pinings. A letter this morning says that there is not a book-shop in Birmingham that has heard of it.

XLV.

Miss Vesta Swan to the Thalia and Erato Press.

Dear Sirs,-Several persons have told me lately that they have looked in vain in the literary papers ever since White Pinings was published, for any adver tisement of it, and they have found none. Many of the books of the day are, I notice, advertised very freely, with, I have no doubt, good results-Mr. Hall Caine's last novel, for example. Curiously enough, one of my poems ("An Evening Reverie," page 76), contains very much the same moral as his book. Could you not intimate that fact to the public in some way? Please send me twelve more copies. Yours truly, Vesta Swan.

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In 1826 the famous roadmaker and engineer Telford crowned his life's work by the mighty suspension bridge which lifted his new Holyhead mail road across the Menai Straits and completed the link between London and Ireland for a fast service. Thousands gathered at the opening ceremony when the first coach from the metropolis, carrying the Royal mails, slowed down from its regulation pace of eleven and a half miles an hour and rolled triumphantly over the yawning chasm. As a combination of engineering skill and rapid communication it seemed, no doubt, to the cheering crowds below, a final achievement of human ingenuity. Yet a short twenty years later the son of George Stephenson was to commence that other bridge, alongside of this first one, destined to carry locomotion of a kind which by comparison put the people who had so recently cheered the Holyhead coach almost on a par with the Romans whose chariots and tumbrils had rolled along the Causeway from Chester to Carnarvon nearly two thousand years before. There is assuredly no spot in Great Britain more calculated to deter one from prophetic flights as to the limitations of science than the one which commands a view of these two significant viaducts.

But the decline of the coach road and the coaching inu was, of course, gradLIVING AGE. VOL. XXVI. 1361

ual and sectional. Palatial hostelries like the grand old Hertford mansion at Marlborough had closed their doors at once. The Castle Inn, so artistically dealt with by Mr. Stanley Weyman in a recent work, had for some time been the nucleus of a now famous public school before the coaches ceased to run over considerable sections of the Bath road. The increasing railroad activity of the 'sixties, perhaps, marks the final collapse of the rural highway into the somnolence, and here and there the literally grass-grown trance, from which it was quite recently awakened by the once despised bicycle. Many of us now in middle age may peradventure remember the stricken appearance of the forsaken coaching inn only recently left high and dry at some bleak cross road; more woe-begone then, I think, than after it had adapted itself to its changed conditions, or gone out of business altogether and into private life. Some of us may recall how these dismal haunts of ancient revelry, with their creaking signboards, seized on our childish imagination, if we possessed one, and became the background for all the tales of wayside horror and mystery that fell in our way. As for me, some of these old inns have provided the stage furniture on such literary excursions for life; defying time, climate, space, and the most antagonistic environments. It

is a positive shock if perchance I wander down their way nowadays to find some dismal old Solitary who has thus served my fancy as a sort of chamber of horrors-no longer dismal, but with a smiling face and a befurbished front and a line of bicycles and a motor outside the door.

་་་

But let us turn for a moment, before taking stock of present conditions, to the actual story of one of the more famous of these old hostelries, and none has a stranger one than the Castle Inn at Marlborough already referred to. Placed within a stone's throw of one of the largest of those prehistoric mounds which are the despair of the antiquary, and on the site of a royal castle where AngloNorman kings held courts and parliaments, our inn started life with some distinction. The castle had been a ruin long before Cromwell battered the church towers of Marlborough, and with the rangership of the adjacent forest of Savernake had passed into the family of the Protector Somerset and that Seymour lady who married Henry VIII. in a barn on the forest's edge that quite recently, at any rate, was still standing. In the time of William III. the castle was still in the hands of that branch of the family represented by the Duke of Somerset, who, on the site of the decayed fortress, built the noble mansion which, retaining its old name of The Castle, became later on the Castle Inn. Celia Fiennes, the enterprising lady who rode about England on horseback and left her impressions of all she saw, watched it building. She describes the new or rather the rebuilt and greatly enlarged house (for a smaller one had preceded it), with the gardens in detail, and the old town stretching its broad and picturesque street from the gates as we see it now, "the Kennet winding below and turning many mills." In 1723 the Castle or Seymour

House was very much what we see now in the beautiful Queen Anne mansion which forms the main building of Marlborough College. Under the sway, however, of the somewhat famous Countess of Hertford, afterwards Duchess of Somerset, it became one of the best-known country houses in England. Her ladyship was not only a social luminary, but an enthusiastic follower of the Arcadian cult which peopled the surrounding country with Corydons and Chloes and made shepherds and milkmaids of their guests from court and capital. Lady Hertford had good material for her extravagant fancies. The limpid streams of the Kennet slipped down the meadows of perennial green from mill to mill. The ridge above was crowned with the northern fringe of the royal forest of Savernake. The old gardens were laid out in terraces and bowling greens. Rills of clear water were brought from the Kennet and forced into a mimic fury wholly strange to the waters of Wiltshire, but suggestive to these early Georgian poseurs of the classic fountains where their nymphs and swains lounged and loved. Groves of limes were planted, which have now since living memory been towering rookeries. Yews were trimmed into deep hedges surmounted with domes and cupolas, and thus survive endeared to all who love the place. Rocks were imported and strewn about, of which no trace remains on the velvety turf which spreads to-day over the lawns and slopes and terraces that time still continues to mellow. Lady Hertford's modish imagination succeeded in transforming Wiltshire into Italy, and, yet greater feat, the Wiltshire rustic of that dark period into the piping shepherd of the classics: and she has left in writing the measure of her delusions. She built a grotto into the old tumulus in imitation of Pope's at Twickenham, and imported celebrities

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