I beg leave to inform the public that I have fitted up the Castle at Marlborough in the most genteel and commodious manner and opened it as an inn where the nobility and gentry may depend on the best accommodation and treatment, the favour of whose company will always be gratefully acknowledged by their most obedient servant George Smith, late of the Artillery Ground. Neat postchaises. [Illustration: THE “CASTLE” INN, MARLBOROUGH.] “The quality” loved to linger here on their way to or from “the Bath,” for the inn, with its pictures, much of its old furniture, and its splendid cuisine, was more like a private house than a house of public entertainment. Every one who was any one, and could afford the luxury of the gout and the inevitable subsequent cure of “the Bath,” stayed at the “Castle” on the way to or from their cure: and there was scarce an eighteenth-century name of note whose owner did not inscribe it in the Visitors’ Book of this establishment. Horace Walpole, curiously examining the winding walks the Arcadian Lady Hertford had caused to be made spirally up the sides of the poor old Mound; Chesterfield, meditating polite ways of going to the devil; in short, every great name of that great, but very material, time. Greater than all others was the elder Pitt, Earl of Chatham, and of his greatness and importance he was not only himself adequately aware, but was determined at all costs that others, too, should be fully informed of it. It was in 1762, travelling to London, that he came this way, suffering torments from the gout that all the waters of Bath had failed to cure, and roaring with apprehension whenever a fly buzzed too near his inflamed toes. He was either in no haste to reach home, or else his gout was too severe to prevent him being moved, for he remained for many weeks at the “Castle.” That prolonged stay seems, however, to have been premeditated, for he made it a condition of his staying that the entire staff of the inn should be clothed in his livery, and that he should have the whole place at his own disposal. That was exclusiveness, if you like, and the modern traveller who secures a first-class compartment wholly to himself cuts a very poor, ineffectual figure beside the intolerance of company shown by the great statesman. The proprietor of the “Castle” must have required a large sum, thus to close his house to other custom for so long a time, and to possibly offend more regular patrons. In fact, the fortunes of the “Castle” as an inn ebbed and flowed alarmingly even before the coaching age and coaching inns were threatened with extinction by railways. Early in the ’20’s, the innkeeper was Thomas Cooper, who found the undertaking of maintaining it too much for him, and so removed to Thatcham, where he became proprietor of the “Cooper Company” coaches. Cooper, however, was not a fortunate man, and coaching eventually landed him in the Bankruptcy Court. He lived his last