The maze of Much Park Street, Earl Street, and High Street, brings one to the centre of Coventry at the intersection of that last-named thoroughfare with Hertford Street, Broadgate, and Smithford Street, and directly opposite the “King’s Head,” once a famous old coaching inn, but rebuilt these later years. The great Duke of Wellington breakfasted in the old house, November 28th, 1823, on returning from a shooting party at Beaudesert, the Staffordshire seat of the Marquis of Anglesey, with whom he had been at shooting parties of a very different character, in the Peninsula and at Waterloo. XLI One sees the city perhaps to best advantage from the Warwick road, or from the rising ground at Stivichall, close by. There below lies Coventry, the famous trinity whence comes the familiar name of the City of the Three Spires, silhouetted against the calm evening sky. The view recalls that eloquent passage where Ruskin, speaking with enthusiasm of the old coaching age that he had known, paints the joy of the traveller who from the long-hoped-for turn in the dusty perspective of the causeway, saw for the first time the towers of some famed city, faint in the rays of sunset, and came to his appointed inn after “hours of peaceful and thoughtful pleasure, for which the rush of the arrival in the railway station is perhaps not always, or to all men, an equivalent.” [Illustration: THE THREE SPIRES.] Those three spires still advise the stranger, to whose ears by some strange chance the fame of ancient Coventry has not come, that he is indeed about to enter, not merely the great home of the cycle-making industry, but a city that has for centuries been famous for its religious houses, and was indeed a place notable in this wise before ever the Battle of Hastings was fought, to bring England under a Norman domination. Its very name, whence the present form has been evolved, is held by some to have been originally “Conventre,” or Convent Town, and it came in after years to own, not three, but seven spires. The other four went down in the days of spoliation that came in with Harry VIII. Earl Leofric, the pious founder of the original Greyfriars monastery around whose religious buildings secular Coventry first arose, must have been a hard man, if legends tell truth, for his grinding taxation aroused the pity of his Countess, the immortal Godiva. Those must have been no slight hardships that could have earned the compassion of a Saxon gentlewoman, whose times and training alike could only have made her look upon the miseries of the lower orders as incidental to their lot. They were chiefly churls; men and women of bondage, and mere chattels, who had, it is true the accidental advantages of speech and a modicum of understanding; but, for the rest, were of no account. Tennyson has “shaped the city’s ancient legend” into verse, and reveals the circumstances that led to his doing so, in the opening lines:—