154 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



don Roads, and since the days of the Gibbons has been 

 successively inhabited by Mr. Wood, Sir John Shelley, 

 and the Duke of Norfolk. These be good tenants, but 

 I prefer the Gibbons myself. I like to think of Edward 

 in his young days at Putney, a fat, heavy, and huge- 

 headed boy, voted by his neighbours uncommonly slow, 

 but with his precocious brain already working — not on 

 consuls and legions, and emperors and bishops, and all 

 the rest of the gorgeous paraphernalia with which he 

 was one day to make his name immortal- — but on that 

 large appreciation of creature comforts, of the good 

 things of this good earth which his dawning intelligence 

 felt about his father's house, and which he has thus in his 

 autobiography so whimsically described — 



" My lot might have been that of a slave, a savage, or 

 a peasant ; nor can I reflect without pleasure on the 

 bounty of Nature, which cast my birth in a free and 

 civilised country, in an age of science and philosophy, in 

 a family of honourable rank, and decently endowed with 

 the gifts of fortune. From my birth I have enjoyed the 

 rights of primogeniture ; but I was succeeded by five 

 brothers — and one sister — all of whom were snatched 

 away in their infancy. My five brothers, whose names 

 may be found in the parish register at Putney, / shall not 

 pretend to lament." 



Happy eldest son, I say. Proper predilection for 

 primogeniture's enjoyable rights ! 



To finish with Putney and its celebrities (for I must 

 be getting forward to Portsmouth as quickly as local 

 celebrities and legends will permit) — at Bowling Green 

 House, on the east side of Putney Heath, lived, and on 

 the twenty-third of January, 1806, died, William Pitt, 

 broken-hearted at the news of Austerlitz, confident that 

 the map of Europe would be needed no more. And not 

 far off the house where the great statesman lay dying, 

 still stands the small inn where the wire-pullers of both 

 parties put up their horses, while they made inquiries 

 couched in a true spirit of Christian and political 



