g6 ON THE TRACK OF THE MAIL-COACH 



London at eight o'clock p.m., was due to arrive at 

 Southampton at half-past four in the morning, and 

 was continued through the Forest into Poole. There 

 is, indeed, a slightly shorter cut to Southampton from 

 Farnham, through Alton and Bishop's Waltham, by 

 which about a mile and a half may be saved ; but 

 this road omits AYinchester, leaving it as muck as 

 ten miles to the westward, and such omission did 

 not suit the department in the old days, nor w^ould it 

 do so now. 



In Southampton, in 1586, lived Chidiock Titch- 

 bourne, a member of a family which dated from 

 before the Conquest. D'Israeli, in his * Curiosities 

 of Literature,' dwells fully on the tragedy of his 

 death, but does not say precisely where he resided. 

 He could write with ' sweetness and tenderness,' says 

 D'Israeli, who had found a letter of Titchbourne's 

 in the Harleian MSS. ; but nobility of mind and a. 

 cultivated intellect only served to bring about high 

 treason (he stooped to a conspiracy against the life of 

 Elizabeth), a sacrifice to friendship, the Towner, and a 

 last scene in Lincoln's Inn Fields. 



Three hundred years later the public, as most 

 people wdll remember, were absorbed in another 

 Hampshire episode. A fraudulent claim plunged the 

 Tichborne estate into an enormously exj)ensive 

 litigation, which ended in the chief conspirator 

 suffering a long imprisonment, and capping his career 

 by publishing, in 1895, an affidavit which told the 

 world what all reasonable people must long have 



