Regarding the country through which the road passes, between Kensington, Egham, Sunningdale, Virginia Water, and Bagshot, Cobbett has some characteristic things to say. Between Hammersmith and Egham it is ‘as flat as a pancake,’ and the soil ‘a nasty stony dirt upon a bed of gravel.’ Sunninghill and Sunningdale, ‘all made into “grounds” and gardens by tax-eaters,’ are at the end of a ‘blackguard heath,’ and are ‘not far distant from the Stock-jobbing crew. The roads are level, and they are smooth. The wretches can go from the “‘Change” without any danger to their worthless necks.’ There are now, sad to say, after the lapse of nearly eighty years, a great many more of the ‘crew’ here, and they journey to and from Capel Court with even less danger to their necks, bad luck to them! Egham Hill surmounted, the Holloway College for Women is a prominent object on the left-hand side of the road, the fad of Thomas Holloway, whose thumping big fortune was derived from the advertising enterprise which lasted wellnigh two generations, and during the most of that period rendered the advertisement columns of London and provincial papers hideous with beastly illustrations of suppurating limbs, and the horrid big type inquiry, ‘Have you a Bad Leg?’ Pills and ointments, what sovereign specifics you are--towards the accumulation of wealth! All-powerful unguents, how beneficent--towards the higher education of woman! [Sidenote: _VIRGINIA WATER_] No less a sum than £600,000 was expended on the building and equipment of this enormous range of buildings, opened in 1887, and provided royally with everything a college requires except students, whose number yet falls far short of the three hundred and fifty the place is calculated to house and teach. A fine collection of the works of modern English painters is to be seen here, where study is made easy for the ‘girl graduates’ by the provision of luxuriously appointed class-rooms and shady nooks where ‘every pretty domina can study the phenomena’ of integral calculus and other domestic sciences. It seems a waste of good money that, although a sum equal to £500 a year for each student is expended on the higher education of women here, no prophetess has yet issued from Egham with a message for the world; and that, consequently, Mr. Thomas Holloway and his medicated grease have as yet missed that posthumous fame for which so big a bid was made.