The “White Hart” is an inn typical of the coaching age along that western highway, and repays examination. Dark and tortuous corridors, a coffee-room decorated in barbaric colours, a capacious stable-yard, all tell of the old days of the Exeter Mail. The inn stands in the centre of the little town of narrow streets, where the Oxford and Southampton Road crosses the road to Exeter, and was thus in receipt of a very great deal of coaching business, travellers from Southampton or from Oxford changing here and waiting for the West of England coaches. Here it was, perhaps in the coffee-room, that the young clergyman who afterwards became a pervert to Rome and figured prominently as Cardinal Newman, wrote the first verses of the _Lyra Apostolica_, beginning: Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend? It was on December 2nd, 1832, while waiting for the mail to Falmouth, that he found his inspiration here. He wrote, at the same time, to his mother that he was waiting “from one till eleven” for the down Exeter mail. Ten hours! Can we imagine any one in these days waiting even half that time for a train? I think not even the most bizarre imagination could conceive such a preposterous notion. But such were the experiences of our grandfathers, travelling from branch roads to intercept the mails. With such facts before us, we may well understand how it was the inns then did such good business. [Illustration: THE “WHITE HART,” WHITCHURCH.] Since 1857, when Dinah Mulock, at the age of thirty-one, wrote that remarkably popular novel, _John Halifax, Gentleman_, the “Bell” inn at Tewkesbury has been marked down for a literary landmark. For the “Morton Bury” of that story is the Tewkesbury of fact, and a tombstone (long since disappeared) in the Abbey churchyard gave her the name of the hero. It was in 1852, on a chance drive into the town with a friend, to view the Abbey, that Miss Mulock first thought of it as the background of a story, and lunching at the “Bell” inn, close by the Abbey gates, decided her to make that house the pivot of the tale. According to the landlord of that time, it had once, before becoming an inn, been the house of a tanner; and thus we find something of the framework of the story suggested. The resemblance of the actual house to the home of Abel Fletcher, the Quaker tanner of the story, is scarce to be followed, for it is only in the mention of the bowling-green in the garden and the yew hedge, and the channels of the Severn and the Avon at the end of it that the place is to be identified at all. You find no mention of the fine old timbered front and its three gables, nor of the initials “I K 1696” that probably indicate the owner who restored the house at that date (for the building is certainly at least a hundred and fifty years older), and altogether there is in the pages of _John Halifax, Gentleman_, none of that meticulous topographical care that many later novelists have been at pains to bestow upon their works.