160 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



proved upon this performance, but still failed to beat 

 the Rocket by half an hour. 



Besides these once familiar names must be chronicled 

 the Hero, from the Spread Eagle, Gracechurch Street, 

 which left the city daily at 8 A.M. and arrived at the 

 Blue Post, Portsmouth, at 6 P.M. ; from the same house 

 the Night Post Coach, 7 P.M. from London, getting 

 its passengers to the same inn at Portsmouth, sick no 

 doubt of an all-night journey, but just in time for a 

 good breakfast ; and finally several light post 

 coaches from the Bolt in the Tun, the Spread Eagle, 

 and other well-known inns, which ran no further than 

 Godalming, taking about five hours to compass the 

 thirty-three miles. 



Leaving the town by any of these coaches (if we did 

 not meet one Jerry Abershawe, whose name now, like 

 many others of ephemeral celebrity, awakes no echo in 

 our breasts, but who was in his day a noted highwayman 

 much revered and feared, greatly given to robbing 

 travellers to Portsmouth, and to drinking at a road-side 

 house called the Bald-Faced Stag, now no more to be 

 seen on earth) — leaving Kingston and this digression 

 behind us, I say, we should soon in the old coaching 

 days have covered the four miles to the pretty village of 

 Esher, and stopped of course at the Bear. 



And at Esher the Portsmouth Road is connected with 

 another great historical character, who lived near here in a 

 fine, damp house picturesquely situated on the banks of 

 the river Mole ; and must, one is tempted to think, have 

 often travelled from his country seat to Westminster sur- 

 rounded with all the pomp and circumstance which he 

 so particularly affected, in an age remarkable perhaps 

 above all others in our history for splendour and 

 pageant. 



But to suppose this would be, I regret to say, an 

 historical error; for in I 529 when Wolsey was ordered 

 to retire to Esher, he was ordered to retire there because 

 his royal master was bilious ; and when Henry the 



