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 advertisement of it, and they have found noue. 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? 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, gradVOL. XXVI. 1361 LIVING AGE. ual and sectional. Palatial hostelrieslike 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 by the score to share and celebrate her fantastic diversions. The poet Thomson was one of these, but he offended his patroness mortally by a marked preference for his lordship's good cheer over her ladyship's Arcadian posings and poetical efforts. Dr. Watts was another, and apparently he behaved himself with perfect propriety. Thomson, however, is said to have written his "Spring" at Marlborough, and he certainly dedicated it to his offended hostess. All this was about 1740, and in ten years the stately mansion had passed to the Northumberland family and become an inn! In 1751 Lady Vere tells us how she lay at the "Castle Inn opened a fortnight since," and describes it with fervent admiration, "a prodigious large house." She is indignant with the Northumberlands for putting it to such ignoble use, and still less can she forgive them for selling many good old pictures to the landJord, including one of Henry VI. in kingly robe and gown. What would the old Duke of Somerset say, she observes, if he could know that his granddaughter put his house to such a use as this? "Lady Betty does not dare to write to the Duke of Dorset an account of this house, for fear it should put him in mind that Knowle might make as convenient an inn for Tonbridge as this does for Bath." In the "Salisbury Journal” of August 17, 1752, occurs this announcement: "I beg leave to inform the publick that I have fitted up the Castle at Marlborough in the most genteel and commodious manner and opened it as an inn where the nobility and gentry may depend on the best accommodation and treatment, the favor of whose company will be always gratefully acknowledged by their most obedient servant George Smith, late of the Artillery Ground. Neat postchaises!" What a noble hostelry this must have been needs no effort of imagination, for no material alteration occurred when sixty years ago it once more became the seat of classical aspirations far more serious than Lady Hertford's dallyings. And it may be seen to-day much as it was in all the glory of oak panelling and galleries and broad staircases, of stately chambers and mellow brickwork, of lawn and terrace, of grove and stream. For ninety years the Castle Inn stood on the high road between London and Bath. The postchaise business, when all the world went to the Western Spa, helped to support it, and later on, when forty coaches daily pulled up at its doors, its supremacy was beyond question. People of quality made a point of “lying at Marlborough" for what we should now call the week-end. The cuisine was admirable, the gardens delightful, and a local band discoursed music every Sunday from the top of the mound up which Lady Hertford had cut a winding walk. Almost every famous man or woman who lived in the time of the second, third, or fourth George must have slept or eaten within the great old hostelry. And, indeed, one might say almost as much of houses now buried away in obscure parts of the country. At the Hand, in Llangollen, for instance, every Irishman of note through a stirring period must have toasted his toes or broken bread again and again. Chatham was detained at the Castle Inn, at a critical period in the debate on the Stamp Act, for a fortnight. "Inaccessible and invisible," according to Walpole, "though surrounded by a crowd of domestics that occupied the whole inn and gave the appearance of a little Court.". Seventy years later the Duke of Wellington spent a night here on his way to a wedding at the Duke of Beaufort's, delayed by the reports of sixteen feet of snow on the bleak road over the downs to Devizes. Starting next day, the Duke's carriage became hopelessly lodged in a snowdrift. Fortunately the road surveyor with his gang was close by, and rescued the illustrious soldier from his dilemma and piloted him across country till they came to a sound-bottomed road. Three By 1839, however, the Great Western railroad had reached Twyford. years later it was at Swindon, and the lease of the Castle Inn was running out. No one had the temerity to seek another, for the handwriting on the wall was by this time plain enough, At this time the founders of what became Marlborough College were casting about for a house in which to commence operations. In an auspicious moment for that school, the Castle Inn was in the market and fell fortuitously, as it were, into their hands. That it is only the nucleus of whole blocks of buildings is true, but the old house still remains apart and intact, the gardens and grounds secluded and unencroached upon by modern builders, and in all human probability secured for ever in its ancient peace and old-world atmosphere. Such is the strange story of one of the great coaching inns of England, and there are doubtless many more only less remarkable. 1 The recent revival in their fortunes and the social revolution which has accompanied it can hardly be said to have seriously set in before the beginning of the 'nineties. For I do not think that the high bicycle, which heroic if not very aristocratic youths bestrode through the previous decade or two, did much to cheer the material depression of the highway, though it added a sensational factor to its waning traffic. The acrobats, too, who mostly rode these awesome machines were not usually of the type who had 1 For a fuller account of the famous house see A. C. Champneys' chapters in the "History of Marlborough College." (Murray.) much money, or for that matter much manners, to spare for mine host of the Red Lion. While far from receiving any meed of admiration for their daring, they contrived to raise a social prejudice against the wheel which died hard. It would have died much harder if, encouraged by the comparative security of the "safety," Society had not developed a sudden and short-lived craze for ambling round Battersea Park in the mornings on its new toy: a proceeding which to the seasoned rider of 1904 may seem somewhat fatuous in the retrospect, but was of real value at this crisis. For the average Briton, we are told every day, is at heart a snob. He is undoubtedly timid, not physically, but socially. And henceforward, with comparatively little risk of breaking his neck and none whatever of injuring his dignity, he could embark on an exhilarating, inexpensive pastime, that was destined to become something much more, and almost to revolutionize country life. Above all there was no fear any longer of being called "a cad on castors." But the highways had acquired some animation; those leading out of London, at any rate, two or three years before the Battersea Park season and the Capitulation of Society. Still, though the "Safety" had "arrived," it was for some time the mode to sniff at its patrons as something of a nulsance on the road. One must not forget the brief popularity of the tricycle which preceded the Safety and pneumatic tyre. In the last of the 'eighties and early 'nineties it had found considerable favor with men and women past their first youth, and had reached some perfection, solid rubber tyres notwithstanding. The shops were full of them for hire or sale. They were profoundly respectable, too, and did not share the odium of the high two-wheeler. The lowpitched, modest, if clumsy attitude of |