landed here in 1101, bent on an argument with his brother Henry as to who should wear the crown. Henry however elected to wear the crown and avoid the argument, in which I think he was wise. Richard the First gave the town its first charter; and at Portsmouth in 1290 the first oranges were landed in England by a Spanish vessel as a present for the Castilian wife of Edward the First.

Besides these royalties already mentioned, Henry the Eighth was at Portsmouth once or twice. Edward the Sixth came here in 1552, not in the best of moods, and remarked that the bulwarks of the town were "chargeable, massy, and ramparted" (whatever that may mean), "but ill-fashioned, ill-flanked, and set in remote places (which is more clear); after which he left for London; and left Elizabeth to correct the faults he had pointed out; and James the Second to inclose Gosport within its present lines.

I have described enough scenes of blood in the seventyone miles seven furlongs from London, it seems to me, to suit the most sanguinary taste, and a great deal more than suits my own. But still I cannot leave Portsmouth, the terminus even of the road, without reminding my readers that at what was in 1628 the Spotted Dog Inn, and what is now a gabled house known as 12 High Street, Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the Steenie of King James, was assassinated by John Felton, a discontented half-pay officer, just as the Duke was about to sail to the relief of La Rochelle, then being besieged by Richelicu. Lingard has written the history of the episode; and the great Dumas, in the Three Musketeers, has written its romance; and the subject has been too well treated by both writers in their different styles to make a subject for me. It remains for me to remark that the journey of Felton to London, where he was hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn, was accomplished amid scenes of extraordinary and many-sided excitement; and coming, as it does, before a similarly mournful expedition over the same

ground on the part of the Duke of Monmouth, seems to me to cast a characteristic gloom over the annals of a road not remarkable for coaching anecdotes or coaching records-which has been called Royal, and rightly perhaps enough, but which has yet witnessed, so far as its historical side is concerned, and so far as my knowledge goes, gloomier and more tragic scenes than any other of the great thoroughfares out of London.

A PECULIAR flavour of the Regency lingers about the record of the Brighton Road. It is a record, as I read it, of bucks, with stupendous stocks, and hats with brims weirdly curly, casting deathly glances at lone maidens perambulating haplessly by the wayside; a record of "The Fancy," as I see it drawn for me in the classic pages of Boxiana-thronging in their thousands, and in almost as many different kinds of conveyances to witness one of the many great battles decided on Crawley Down or Blindley Heath; a record finally of the great George himself, repairing to the health resort which his royal pene

tration had discovered, and repairing there in a coach and four, driven by his own royal hands, at the rate of fiftysix round miles in four hours and a half.

Indeed it seems to me that the Brighton Road might almost be called the Regent's Road. For where without the Regent would its terminus have been? Why, it would have been nowhere; or it might have been at St. Leonards, Eastbourne, or anywhere else. When once however the Regent has discovered that the air of Brighton tended to benefit his health, he made a centre of fashion out of a small health-resort, almost before he had time to finish the Pavilion ; and one of the finest of the coaching roads of England out of an uncertain track, often impassable.

For before the Pavilion was, Brighton was about as easy to get at as Cranmere Pool in the middle of Dartmoor, the moon, the North Pole, the special exits in case of fire at our principal theatres, or anything else on earth totally inaccessible. When in 1750 the genial Doctor Russell, of Lewes, found himself better for a trip to the small fishing village, and induced some of his fair hypochondriacs to go there too; how they were to get there, considering the state of the roads-if they could be called roads-was the conundrum which they generally proposed. And I have no doubt that Doctor Russell of Lewes prescribed oxen as a means of transit ; for oxen were about the only beasts of burden which could cope, at the time I speak of, with the country's wickedly deep ruts. People got into coaches to go to Brighton and only got out of them when they were overturned. Princes on Royal progresses sat fourteen hours at a stretch in state carriages, without being able to get an atom of refreshment into their royal jaws. In 1749 Horace Walpole cursed the curiosity which had tempted him to tour in a country in which he found neither road, conveniences, inns, postillions, nor horses! What did he find in Sussex? one is tempted to ask. Why, he found that "the whole country had a Saxon air" (which