When it was known that he was well enough to leave Bath, and would lie a night at the Castle Inn at Marlborough, his suite requiring twenty rooms, even that great hostelry, then reputed one of the best, as it was certainly the most splendid in England, and capable, it was said, of serving a dinner of twenty-four covers on silver, was in an uproar.

The landlord, who knew the tastes of half the peerage, and which bin Lord Sandwich preferred, and which Mr.Rigby, in which rooms the Duchess or Lady Betty liked to lie, what Mr.Walpole took with his supper, and which shades the Princess Amelia preferred for her card-table--even he, who had taken his glass of wine with a score of dukes, from Cumberland the Great to Bedford the Little, was put to it; the notice being short, and the house somewhat full.
Fortunately the Castle Inn, on the road between London and the west, was a place of call, not of residence.

Formerly a favourite residence of the Seymour family, and built, if tradition does not lie, by a pupil of Inigo Jones, it stood--and for the house, still stands--in a snug fold of the downs, at the end of the long High Street of Marlborough; at the precise point where the route to Salisbury debouches from the Old Bath Road.

A long-fronted, stately mansion of brick, bosomed in trees, and jealous of its historic past--it had sheltered William of Orange--it presented to the north and the road, from which it was distant some hundred yards, a grand pillared portico flanked by projecting wings.

At that portico, and before those long rows of shapely windows, forty coaches, we are told, changed horses every day.