Review of Waylen’s History of Marlborough. 129 
the Seasons, was among her invited guests. Her energetic inter- 
ference at court in behalf of Richard Savage, when convicted of 
murder, is well known through the medium of Johnson’s Lives of 
the Poets. Dr. Watts was one of her constant correspondents, 
and Alexander Pope; her Apollo. The gardens of the castle were 
much improved by her, and she makes frequent mention of their 
beauties in her correspondence. On her decease in 1754, however, 
the mansion was converted into an inn, which continued to be its 
destination up to a very recent date. It is singular that Lady 
Hertford’s bosom friend, Lady Pomfret, died in 1761 at this inn, 
where perhaps the memory of her beloved friend had led her to 
take up her residence in her last illness. 
Among the eminent natives and inhabitants of Marlborough in 
this age, may be honourably mentioned Sir Michael Foster, one of 
the judges of the King’s Bench, noted for his integrity and 
independence. The latter character he had an opportunity of con- 
spicuously exhibiting when presiding at the celebrated trial at the 
Surrey Assizes, in 1758, the result of which secured a right of way 
for the public through Richmond Park. Mr. Waylen quotes the 
well known letter written by Mr., afterwards Lord Chancellor, 
Thurlow on this occasion to Mr. Ewen, nephew of Mr. Justice 
Foster, in which the behaviour of the presiding judge at the trial 
is related with its due meed of approval. “It gave me,” concludes 
the writer, ‘who am a stranger to him, great pleasure to find that 
we have one English judge whom nothing can tempt or frighten, 
ready and able to uphold the laws of his country as a great shield 
of the rights of the people.” In these days it would be difficult 
to imagine any judge acting otherwise, but it was not so in the 
middle of the last century, when the claims of the prerogative 
were occasionally put forward (as on this occasion) in a manner 
which made resistance to them almost as perilous as it would be 
at the present time in many of the other states of Europe. 
We have no space left to follow Mr. Waylen in his amusing 
narrative of still more recent events connected with Marl- 
borough and its neighbourhood—how Lord Bruce formed and 
S 
