258 COACHING DAYS AND COACHING WAYS 



Sittingbourne is not exactly the sort of place now, in 

 spite of its august past, to make a weary traveller dance, 

 and sing, and rejoice, and play the lute — as Mr. Chadband 

 would have it. Far from it, if the truth must be told. 

 It is indeed depressing to a distinct degree, and was the 

 birthplace of a once celebrated critic. Here Theobald 

 was born towards the end of the seventeenth century. 

 He edited Shakespeare, and said nasty things of Pope, 

 who marked, learned, and inwardly digested them, and 

 thus in the Dunciad remembers him kindly. 



" Here to her chosen all her works she shows," 



sings the little man of Twickenham, describing a pastime 

 of the great goddess Dulness. 



" Prose swell'd to Verse, verse loitering into Prose : 

 How random thoughts now meaning chance to find, 

 Now leave all memory of sense behind : 

 How Prologues into prefaces decay, 

 And these to notes are frittered quite away : 

 How index-learning turns no student pale. 

 Yet holds the eel of science by the tail ; 

 How, with less reading than makes felons 'scape, 

 Less human genius than God gives an ape, 

 Small thanks to France, and none to Rome or Greece, 

 A past, vamp'd future, old, revised, new piece, 

 'Twixt Plautus, Fletcher, Shakespeare, and Corneille, 

 Can make a Cibber, Tibbald, or Ozell." 



Which last, though far from a good rhyme, enshrines, 

 I fear, our critic's name for ever. For by " Tibbald," 

 I much regret to say, Theobald is meant. And when 

 Theobald read it, I've no doubt he wished that Sitting- 

 bourne had never- seen him. 



After leaving which town, forward the long reaches of 

 the Dover Road stretch past Bapchild, past Radfield, past 

 Green Street, where in the days of the Road at the Swan 

 the London coaches changed horses ; when all such 

 coaching rites were celebrated as " throat-lashing," " tak- 

 ing out the leaders," &c, &c, &c. And so on to Ospringe, 

 where at the Red Lion horses were also kept, and a Camera 



