whom books and ballads are written; and there is an old picture of him in the room."

At Woolhampton, a little over ten miles from Reading still stands all that is left of the Angel, a celebrated old posting inn, with a most curious sign, and three miles five furlongs further on is Thatcham. Here the passengers by the "New Company's elegant light four inside post coaches," which in the palmy days of coaching did the hundred and five miles from Bath to London in twelve hours and a half, used to dine at the King's Head. Here prodigies in the way of taking in provisions were performed in half an hour. The attack on the table must have been tremendous, and the tables were well fortified for the attack. These were the days, be it remembered, when English cookery was English cookery, unpolluted as yet with

"Art, with poisonous honey stolen from France."

The distinguished author of Tancred and the Treaty of Berlin has described the half hour for dinner at such an inn as the King's Head with much spirit.

"The coach stops here half an hour, gentlemen: dinner quite ready.'

"Tis a delightful sound. And what a dinner! What a profusion of substantial delicacies! What mighty and iris-tinted rounds of beef! What vast and marbleveined ribs! What gelatinous veal pies! What colossal hams! Those are evidently prize cheeses! And how invigorating is the perfume of those various and variegated pickles! Then the bustle emulating the plenty; the ringing of bells, the clash of thoroughfare, the summoning of ubiquitous waiters, and the all-pervading feeling of omnipotence from the guests, who order what they please to the landlord, who can produce and execute everything they can desire. 'Tis a wondrous sight!"

Three miles further on and we are at Newbury, or

D

rather at Speenhamland, a kind of suburb of inns and posting houses which connected it with the Bath Road; and at Newbury, and indeed right on to Hungerford, we

are on historic ground. It is out of my province to describe in detail the rise and fall of the fortunes of the fight during those two tremendous days, September 16th, 1643, and October 27th, 1644, when the best blood of England was poured out like water on Speen Hill, and the cause of Charles the First was upheld by an uncertain triumph; nor have I space to do more than make passing

mention of the famous personages in the world of history, romance and letters, whose memories throng the road as far as Hungerford, and indeed beyond it," thick as leaves in Vallombrosa." I see Charles the First dressing in the bow window of the drawing-room of Shaw House on the morning of the battle, and the divinity that hedges a king turning aside the rebel bullet; and the gallant Carnarvon measuring the gateway with his sword to see how Essex

horns could pass through when they should lead him in as prisoner (Carnarvon's dead body came into Newbury

the same evening stretched across a horse); and Sunderland dying sword in hand at twenty-three; and Falkland the blameless, who foresaw much misery to his country,

riding into the battle in the belief that he would be out of that misery before night; I see the travellers on the Bath Road smacking their lips over the Pelican dinners, and losing their colour over the Pelican bill, each equally notorious at that great house.

"The famous inn in Speenhamland

That stands below the hill,
May well be called the Pelican
From its enormous bill,"

as Quin sang of it. On the 16th of June, 1668, Mr. Samuel Pepys came to "Newberry," as he spells it, and there dined "and

musick a song of the old courtier of Queene Elizabeth's, and how he was changed upon the coming in of the King did please me mightily, and I did cause W. Hewer to write it out. Then comes the reckoning (forced to change gold), 8s. 7d. servants, and poor IS. 6d. So out and lost our way; but come into it again." I do not see Chaucer writing the Canterbury

Tales under the oak named after him in Donnington Park, because, in spite of the tradition that says he did so, the Park did not come into the family's possession till eighteen years after the poet's death, but I can see Burke, and Johnson, and Goldsmith,