[Illustration:  The Star Inn, Afriston Sussex.  Fred Roe, 16 Sep 97]

Many of the inns once famous in the annals of the road have now “retired from business” and have taken down their signs.  The First and Last Inn, at Croscombe, Somerset, was once a noted coaching hostel, but since coaches ceased to run it was not wanted and has closed its doors to the public.  Small towns like Hounslow, Wycombe, and Ashbourne were full of important inns which, being no longer required for the accommodation of travellers, have retired from work and converted themselves into private houses.  Small villages like Little Brickhill, which happened to be a stage, abounded with hostels which the ending of the coaching age made unnecessary.  The Castle Inn at Marlborough, once one of the finest in England, is now part of a great public school.  The house has a noted history.  It was once a nobleman’s mansion, being the home of Frances Countess of Hereford, the patron of Thomson, and then of the Duke of Northumberland, who leased it to Mr. Cotterell for the purpose of an inn.  Crowds of distinguished folk have thronged its rooms and corridors, including the great Lord Chatham, who was laid up here with an attack of gout for seven weeks in 1762 and made all the inn-servants wear his livery.  Mr. Stanley Weyman has made it the scene of one of his charming romances.  It was not until 1843 that it took down its sign, and has since patiently listened to the conjugation of Greek and Latin verbs, to classic lore, and other studies which have made Marlborough College one of the great and successful public schools.  Another great inn was the fine Georgian house near one of the entrances to Kedleston Park, built by Lord Scarsdale for visitors to the medicinal waters in his park.  But these waters have now ceased to cure the mildest invalid, and the inn is now a large farm-house with vast stables and barns.

It seems as if something of the foundations of history were crumbling to read that the “Star and Garter” at Richmond is to be sold at auction.  That is a melancholy fate for perhaps the most famous inn in the country—­a place at which princes and statesmen have stayed, and to which Louis Philippe and his Queen resorted.  The “Star and Garter” has figured in the romances of some of our greatest novelists.  One comes across it in Meredith and Thackeray, and it finds its way into numerous memoirs, nearly always with some comment upon its unique beauty of situation, a beauty that was never more real than at this moment when the spring foliage is just beginning to peep.

The motor and changing habits account for the evil days upon which the hostelry has fallen.  Trains and trams have brought to the doors almost of the “Star and Garter” a public that has not the means to make use of its 120 bedrooms.  The richer patrons of other days flash past on their motors, making for those resorts higher up the river which are filling the place in the economy of the London