Those days of fast coaches and slow coaches seem very remote from these railway times, when by a quick train you may reach Shrewsbury from London in three hours and thirty-five minutes, arriving, without turning a hair, at the castellated building that serves for a railway station, say, by the 2.10 p.m. train from Paddington, bringing you to the capital of the “proud Salopians” at 5.45, not too late for tea. Thus, between lunch and the afternoon cup you have accomplished what the “Wonder” at its best took fourteen hours and three-quarters to do. This forty-eight-miles-an-hour gait is, of course, not remarkable as railway travelling goes, but it would have sufficiently startled the old Shropshire squires, who thought they knew something of pace, aye, and went it themselves, in every sense.
Those were fine fellows, and their grand and beautiful old town of the Three Loggerheads still keeps an air—historic, racy, and individual—even in these levelling days. The memory of the hard-drinking, hard-swearing, and anything and everything but hard-working, Shropshire squires of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, who drank deep and left no heeltaps, “to friends all round the Wrekin,” will not readily fade. The heritages of their descendants—gout and encumbered estates—forbid the generous capacity of their forbears for old port and gambling to be forgot, and such things, however excellent they may be as vouchers for the fact that they lived their lives of old, are little desired by a generation that also desires to live and go the pace after its own ideals.
There remain in Shrewsbury many signs of this fine old free-handed way of living, when the town was not only the capital of the Marches of Wales, but resorted to for its “season” by the county families, who had their own town houses here, and came to them from their rural seats just as do their descendants to the London season. For another thing, the picturesque old town—seated so grandly within the girdle of the yellow Severn that enfolds it lovingly—is full of the queerest, quaintest inns that can be imagined; their strangely roomy and cavernous construction equalled only by their uniquely incongruous signs.
Much has already been said of the “Lion” inn, in connection with coaching, and let it now be more particularly treated, first of all with the remark that it was the foremost inn of its day. It was also the scene of some of Mytton’s mad exploits: that Jack Mytton, of Halston, who was a true pattern and faithful exemplar of the old-time Shropshire squire. They still show the window through which he leaped, for pure devilment, when he was being chaired, shoulder-high, by the enthusiastic burgesses on his return for Parliament in 1819. He sprang from the chair on that occasion, and alighted, amid a shower of broken glass, in the bar. No one was particularly surprised, for his was a freakish nature; but they would have been astonished if he had walked in, in the usual way, by the door.
It was here, too, that the adventure of the foxes, narrated by “Nimrod,” occurred. Mytton, “on going into the bar of the ‘Lion Inn’ one evening when somewhat ‘sprung’ by wine, was told there was a box in the coach-office for him, which contained two brace of foxes. He requested it might be brought to him, when, taking up the poker, he knocked the lid off it, and let the foxes out in the room in which the landlady and some of her female friends were assembled—giving a thrilling view-halloa at the time. Now it cannot be said they ‘broke cover’ in good style; but it may safely be asserted that they broke such a great quantity of bottles, glasses, and crockery-ware as to have rendered the joke an expensive one.”
It will not be matter for surprise, after this, when it is said that Jack Mytton was absolutely the most fearless and dare-devil among the courageous, reckless spirits of his time. He was always ready to risk breaking his own neck, and that of any one else who might have the misfortune to be thrown into his company while driving; and the story told of him and his nervous friend in a gig together is perfectly true. The friend gently remonstrated with him on his wild driving. “We may be upset,” said he. “Were you ever much hurt, then, by being upset in a gig?” inquired Mytton. “No, thank God!” exclaimed the friend, “for I was never upset in one.” “What!” replied the squire, “never upset in a gig? What a d—d slow fellow you must be,” and, running his near wheel up the bank, over they both went.
XXIV
The “Lion” was the hotel to which De Quincey came in 1802, when, as a youth, he was setting forth in his unpractical way for London. He had walked in from Oswestry, reaching Shrewsbury two hours after nightfall. Innkeepers in those times knew little of pedestrians who footed it for pleasure, and classed all who walked when they might have rode as tramps. Therefore, it will be allowed that De Quincey timed his arrival well, at an hour when dusty feet are not so easily seen. However, had his shoes been noticed, he was ready with a defence, for he came to the “Lion” as a passenger already booked to London by the Mail. An Oswestry friend had performed that service for him, and here he was come to wait the arrival of that conveyance.
“This character,” he says, “at once installed me as rightfully a guest of the inn, however profligate a life I might have previously led as a pedestrian. Accordingly I was received with special courtesy, and it so happened with something even like pomp. Four wax-lights carried before me by obedient mutes, these were but ordinary honours, meant (as old experience had instructed me) for the first engineering step towards effecting a lodgment upon the stranger’s purse. In fact, the wax-lights are used by innkeepers, both abroad and at home, to ‘try the range of their guns.’ If the stranger submits quietly, as a good anti-pedestrian ought surely to do, and fires no counter-gun by way of protest, then he is recognised at once as passively within range, and amenable to orders. I have always looked upon this fine of 5s. or 7s. (for wax that you do not absolutely need) as a sort of inaugural honorarium entrance-money, what in jails used to be known as smart money, proclaiming me to be a man comme il faut, and no toll in this world of tolls do I pay so cheerfully. This, meantime, as I have said, was too customary a form to confer much distinction. The wax-lights, to use the magnificent Grecian phrase επομπ ευε, moved pompously before me, as the holy-holy fire (the inextinguishable fire and its golden hearth) moved before Cæsar semper Augustus, when he made his official or ceremonial avatars. Yet still this moved along the ancient channels of glorification: it rolled along ancient grooves—I might say, indeed, like one of the twelve Cæsars when dying, Ut puto, Deus fio (It’s my private opinion that at this very moment I am turning into a god), but still the metamorphosis was not complete. That was accomplished when I stepped into the sumptuous room allotted to me. It was a ball-room of noble proportions—lighted, if I chose to issue orders, by three gorgeous chandeliers, not basely wrapped up in paper, but sparkling through all their thickets of crystal branches, and flashing back the soft rays of my tall waxen lights. There were, moreover, two orchestras, which money would have filled within thirty minutes. And, upon the whole, one thing only was wanting—viz., a throne, for the completion of my apotheosis.
“It might be seven p.m. when first I entered upon my kingdom. About three hours later I rose from my chair, and with considerable interest looked out into the night. For nearly two hours I had heard fierce winds arising; and the whole atmosphere had by this time become one vast laboratory of hostile movements in all directions. Such a chaos, such a distracting wilderness of dim sights, and of those awful “Sounds that live in darkness” (Wordsworth’s Excursion), never had I consciously witnessed.... Long before midnight the household (with the exception of a solitary waiter) had retired to rest. Two hours, at least, were left to me, after twelve o’clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflections, and the local circumstances around me deepened and intensified these reflections, impressed upon them solemnity and terror, sometimes even horror....