Thence, o’er wide shrubby heaths, and furrowed lanes, We come, where Thames divides the meads of Staines. We ferried o’er; for late the Winter’s flood Shook her frail bridge, and tore her piles of wood. That would probably have been about the year 1720. In 1791 an Act of Parliament authorised the building of a new bridge, and accordingly a stone structure was begun, and eventually opened in 1797. This had to be demolished, almost immediately, owing to a failure of one of its piers, and an iron bridge was built in its stead, presently to meet with much the same fate. This, then, gave place to the existing bridge. The ‘Vine Inn,’ which once stood by the bridge and was a welcome sight to travellers, has disappeared, together with most of the old hostelries that once rendered Staines a town of inns. Gone, too, is the ‘Bush,’ and others, although not demolished, have either retired into private life, or are disguised as commonplace shops. The ‘Angel’ still remains, but not the ‘Blue Boar,’ kept, according to Dean Swift, by the quarrelsome couple, Phyllis and John. Phyllis had run away from home on her wedding morn with John, who was her father’s groom, and a good-for-naught. At the inn they were installed at last, John as the drunken landlord, Phyllis as the kind landlady:-- They keep at Staines the Old Blue Boar, Are cat and dog-- and other things unfitted for ears polite. The church is without interest, but there lies in its churchyard, among the other saints and sinners, Lady Letitia Lade, the foul-mouthed cast-off _chère amie_ of the Prince Regent, who married her off to John Lade, his coachman, whom he knighted for his complaisance. XIV [Sidenote: _RUNEMEDE_] Staines is no sooner left behind than we come to Egham, once devoted almost wholly to the coaching interest, then the scene of suburban race-meetings, and now that those blackguardly orgies have been suppressed, just a dead-alive suburb--dusty, uninteresting. The old church has been modernised, and the old coaching inns either mere beer-shops or else improved away altogether. The last one to remain in its old form--the ‘Catherine Wheel’--has recently lost all its old roadside character, and has become very much up-to-date.