THE BATH ROAD 69 



I have first however to pause a while at Devizes, 88| 

 miles from Hyde Park Corner, a town famous in coaching 

 days, and whose name has long been the subject of dis- 

 cussion among the learned. What however is in a name, 

 when one thinks that no less persons than Miss Burney 

 and Mrs. Thrale have been waiting for me at the famous 

 Bear Inn ever since the beginning of the chapter? 

 Coachmen remember this famous house principally for 

 its fine stables. Memoir hunters know it best probably 

 from the diary of the lady who has so long been waiting 

 for us, and from her meeting there with a young gentle- 

 man, son of the landlord, destined afterwards to be as great 

 a celebrity as her own fair self. 



To be plain, at this Bear Inn at Devizes in April, 1780, 

 Miss Burney met the future Sir Thomas Lawrence — the 

 portrait-painter of a whole generation of court beauties — 

 clothed in knickerbockers, and with a precocity for catch- 

 ing likenesses, not often found in an inn. Miss Burney 

 and her friend, in their journey from London, posting — 

 which was after all the equivalent to first-class travelling 

 in those days, coaching being the second-class compart- 

 ment of the then travelling scheme, and riding in damp 

 straw at the bottom of stage waggons drawn by six 

 horses, the third — Miss Burney and her friend, I say, 

 posting from London, stopped for the first night at 

 Maidenhead, the second at Speen Hill, and for the third 

 put up at the same Bear Inn at Devizes. Here a strange 

 series of accidents befel them, which the fair diarist 

 elaborately describes. Having observed that the inn was 

 full of books as well as paintings, drawings, and music, 

 and that their hostess, Mrs. Lawrence, seemed something 

 above her station in her inn, the two visitors, according to 

 habitual contemporary prescription, and before supper, 

 sat down to cards. I wonder, after reading our ancestors' 

 feats in this line, that aces are not found stamped on the 

 persons of all the present generation. But this is a 

 psychological digression. It is now that Miss Burney's 

 adventures at the inn began. Scarcely had she and Mrs. 



