THE BATH ROAD 55 



artificially formed, it pleased her to scatter about the 

 castle grounds with a lavish and pastoral hand. With 

 what divine anger must she have confronted the guilty 

 pair — both their wigs off by reason of the heat — drink- 

 ing punch in her pet cave ! That divine anger proved 

 at all events too enduring for Thomson's powers of 

 pacification. It was in vain that he piped off — 



" Hertford, fitted or to shine in courts 

 With unaffected grace, or walk the plain 

 With Innocence and Meditation joined 

 In soft assemblage." 



In vain ! In vain ! The lady declined to listen to 

 his song, " which her own season painted ' (the season 

 was spring by the by, but surely under the circumstance 

 it ought to have been winter), and the unfortunate bard 

 had to pack his portmanteau and leave the castle for ever, 

 with a flea in his ear. So much for poets who prefer iced 

 punch to the streams of Helicon, and so much also for 

 the great Frances's connection with the castle. The 

 family seat of the Seymours became an inn soon after 

 this, being leased by the Northumberlands (who also 

 found Marlborough slow, and preferred Alnwick) to Mr. 

 Cotterell, and an inn the old place remained, with the 

 reputation for being the best in England almost to the 

 time when it closed its doors in 1843 and was turned 

 into a public school. 



And it was an inn in the best sense of the word, an 

 inn such as Macaulay describes, whose equal was not to 

 be found on the Continent, whose " innkeeper, too, was 

 not like other innkeepers." It was of this sort of place 

 that Johnson was thinking when he declared that a chair 

 in it was the throne of human felicity, though it was not 

 at the Castle, Marlborough, that he spoke his great 

 speech on taverns, but at the celebrated Chapel House, 

 Cold Norton, in Oxfordshire, on the North-Western 

 Road. But the Castle, Marlborough, might quite as 

 justly have earned the advertisement. Not that i* 



