At length they were immortalised by Hood, the elder, in a quite serious poem:—
Where erst two haughty maidens used to be,
In pride of plume, where plumy Death hath trod,
Trailing their gorgeous velvet wantonly,
Most unmeet pall, over the holy sod;
There, gentle stranger, thou may’st only see
Two sombre peacocks. Age, with sapient nod,
Marking the spot, still tarries to declare
How once they lived, and wherefore they are there.
Alas! that breathing vanity should go
Where pride is buried; like its very ghost,
Unrisen from the naked bones below,
In novel flesh, clad in the silent boast
Of gaudy silk that flutters to and fro,
Shedding its chilling superstition most
On young and ignorant natures as is wont
To haunt the peaceful churchyard of Bedfont!
If any one can unravel the sense from the tangled lines of the second verse,—as obscure as some of Browning’s poetry—let him account himself clever.
The ‘Black Dog,’ once the halting-place of the long extinct ‘Driving Club,’ of which the late Duke of Beaufort was a member, has recently been demolished. A large villa stands on the site of it, at the corner of the Green, as the village is left behind.
STAINES
The flattest of flat, and among the straightest of straight, roads is this which runs from East Bedfont into Staines. That loyal bard, John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet,’ was along this route on his way to the Isle of Wight in 1647. He started from the ‘Rose,’ in Holborn, on Thursday, 19th October, in the Southampton coach:—
We took one coach, two coachmen, and four horses,
And merrily from London made our courses,
We wheel’d the top of the heavy hill call’d Holborn
(Up which hath been full many a sinful soul borne),
And so along we jolted to St. Giles’s,
Which place from Brentford six, or nearly seven, miles is,
To Staines that night at five o’clock we coasted,
Where, at the Bush, we had bak’d, boil’d, and roasted.
XIII
Staines, where the road leaves Middlesex and crosses the Thames into Surrey, is almost as commonplace a little town as it is possible to find within the home counties. Late Georgian and Early Victorian stuccoed villas and square, box-like, quite uninteresting houses struggle for numerical superiority over later buildings in the long High Street, and the contest is not an exciting one. Staines, sixteen miles from London, is, in fact, of that nondescript—‘neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor good red-herring’—character that belongs to places situated in the marches of town and country. Almost everything of interest has vanished, and although the railway has come to Staines, it has not brought with it the life and bustle that are generally conferred by railways on places near London. But, of course, Staines is on the London and South-Western Railway, which explains everything.