But guests at “Chapel House” no more knew the inn as the “Shakespeare’s Head” than travellers on the Exeter Road would have recognised “Winterslow Hut” by its proper title of the “Pheasant.” And now the great coaching- and posting-inn has gone the way of all those other inns and taverns where Doctor Johnson--that greatest of Samuels since the patriarch--genuinely dined and supped and drank. Sad it is to think that all the festive shrines frequented by him to whom a tavern chair was “the throne of human felicity” have disappeared, and that only inns that were contemporary with him, and _would_ have Johnsonian associations had he ever entered them, survive to trade on that slender thread of might-have-been. As usual with the fine old roadside hostelries of this class, the coming of the railway spelled ruin for it. The great house shrank, as it were, into itself; its fires of life burnt low, the outer rooms became empty of furniture, of carpets, of everything save memories. The stable-yards grew silent; grass sprouted between the cobbles, spiders wreathed the windows in webs; the very rats, with tears in their eyes for the vanished days of plenteous corn and offal, were reduced to eating one another, and the last representative died of starvation, with “sorrow’s crown of sorrow”--which we know to be the remembrance of happier days--embittering his last moments. Why did not some student of social changes record intimately the last lingering days of the “Chapel House” inn: why did no artist make a pictorial record of it for us? It decayed, just as, centuries earlier, the “Chapel” had done from which its name derived, stone by stone and brick by brick, and there was none to record, in literature or in art, the going of it. All we know is that it ceased in 1850 to be an inn, that the remains of the house long stood untenanted; that the dependent buildings became labourers’ cottages, and that the stables have utterly vanished. [Illustration: “CHAPEL HOUSE” INN.] What is “Chapel House” to-day? You come along the lonely road, across the ridge of the downs, from Oxford, and find, just short of the cross-roads to Stratford-on-Avon and Birmingham, to Banbury or Cirencester, past where a milestone says “Oxford 18, Stratford-on-Avon 21, and Birmingham 43 miles,” a group of some ten stone-built cottages, five on either side of the road, with the remains of the inn itself on the right, partly screened from observation by modern shrubberies. A porticoed doorway is pointed out as the former entrance to the tap, and the present orchard in the rear is shown as the site of the greater part of the inn, once extending over that ground in an L-shape. The house is now in use as a kind of country boarding-house, where “paying-guests,” who come for the quiet and the keen, bracing air of these heights, are received.