There are a few literary associations in Marlow town, and by journeying from the riverside and along the lengthy High Street, to where that curious building, the old Crown Hotel, stands, facing down the long thoroughfare, you may come presently to the houses that enshrine them. Turning here to the left you are in West Street, otherwise the Henley road, and passing the oddly named “Quoiting Square,” there in the quaintly pretty old Albion House next door to the old Grammar School, lived Shelley in 1817. A tablet on the coping, like a tombstone, records the fact. He divided his time between writing the _Revolt of Islam_, and in visiting the then degraded, poverty-stricken lower orders of the town and talking nonsense to them. As no report of his conversations survives, we can only wonder if they were as bad as the turgid nonsense of that poem. Does any one nowadays ever read the _Revolt of Islam_, or know why Islam did it, or if, in so doing, it succeeded? In short, it will take a great deal of argument to convince the world that Shelley was not the Complete Prig of his age, and in truth the house is much more delightful and interesting for itself than for this association. In Shelley’s time it was very much larger than now, and comprised the two or three other small houses which have been divided from it. At “Beechwood” lived Smedley, author of _Frank Fairleigh_ and _Valentine Vox_, and on the Oxford road resided G. P. R. James, romantic novelist, whose romances were said, by the satirists of his methods, generally to commence with some such formula as— “As the shades of evening were falling upon Deadman’s Heath, three horsemen might have been observed,” etc. Marlow Weir is, to oarsmen not intimately acquainted with this stretch of the river, the most dangerous on the Thames, so it behoves all to give the weir-stream a wide berth in setting out again from Marlow Bridge; that suspension-bridge, built in 1831, which, like the neighbouring church, looks its best at a considerable distance. River-gossipers will never let die that old satirical query, “Who ate puppy-pie under Marlow Bridge?” the taunt being directed, according to tradition, against the bargees of long ago, who, accustomed to raid the larder of a waterside hotel at Marlow, were punished admirably by the landlord, who, having drowned a litter of puppies, caused them to be baked in a large pie, and the pie to be placed where it could not fail to attract the attention of the raiders, who stole it, and consumed it with much satisfaction, under the bridge. [Illustration: COOKHAM LOCK.] Two miles below Marlow, past Spade Oak ferry, is Bourne End, on the Buckinghamshire side; a modern collection of villas clustered around a delightful backwater known as Abbotsbrook, and by the outlet of the river Wye—the “bourne” which ends here and gives rise to the place-name. It comes down from Wycombe, to which also it gives a name, and Loudwater.