o longer required for the
accommodation of travellers, have retired from work and converted
themselves into private houses. Small villages like Little Brickhill,
which happened to be a stage, abounded with hostels which the ending
of the coaching age made unnecessary. The Castle Inn at Marlborough,
once one of the finest in England, is now part of a great public
school. The house has a noted history. It was once a nobleman's
mansion, being the home of Frances Countess of Hereford, the patron of
Thomson, and then of the Duke of Northumberland, who leased it to Mr.
Cotterell for the purpose of an inn. Crowds of distinguished folk have
thronged its rooms and corridors, including the great Lord Chatham,
who was laid up here with an attack of gout for seven weeks in 1762
and made all the inn-servants wear his livery. Mr. Stanley Weyman has
made it the scene of one of his charming romances. It was not until
1843 that it took down its sign, and has since patiently listened to
the conjugation of Greek and Latin verbs, to classic lore, and other
studies which have made Marlborough College one of the great and
successful public schools. Another great inn was the fine Georgian
house near one of the entrances to Kedleston Park, built by Lord
Scarsdale for visitors to the medicinal waters in his park. But these
waters have now ceased to cure the mildest invalid, and the inn is now
a large farm-house with vast stables and barns.

It seems as if something of the foundations of history were crumbling
to read that the "Star and Garter" at Richmond is to be sold at
auction. That is a melancholy fate for perhaps the most famous inn in
the country--a place at which princes and statesmen have stayed, and
to which Louis Philippe and his Queen resorted. The "Star and Garter"
has figured in the romances of some of our greatest novelists. One
comes across it in Meredith and Thackeray, and it finds its way into
numerous memoirs, nearly always with some comment upon its unique
beauty of situation, a beauty that was never more real than at this
moment when the spring foliage is just beginning to peep.

The motor and changing habits account for the evil days upon which the
hostelry has fallen. Trains and trams have brought to the doors almost
of the "Star and Garter" a public that has not the means to make use
of its 120 bedrooms. The richer patrons of other days flash past on
their motors, making for those resorts higher up the river which are
f