It is but rarely that this “well-appointed coach”—to speak after the manner of advertisements—leaves London without a full load or an admiring crowd of onlookers to witness its departure, and you feel yourself (wrongly, it may well be) an essential part of the performance, as, perched on the box-seat beside the driver, you are driven through the thronging traffic of a May morning in Piccadilly. Not until the streets of London are left behind us do the clean-limbed chestnuts of our team have the opportunity of showing their paces; but Kingston Vale is done smartly, and Kingston itself reached at 12.8. Presently we are out upon Ditton Marsh, flat and broad and sombre, and we bowl along here at a fine round pace until we reach the foot of the ascent where, outside a roadside public-house—the “Orleans Arms”—stands a huge stone post, a century old, carved with the names and distances of many towns and villages, and known as the “White Lady” milestone.
MR. WALTER SHOOLBRED.
Away to the right lies Thames Ditton, beloved of Theodore Hook and a certain “lazy minstrel,” well known to fame in these days, Mr. Ashby Sterry. There also lived at Ditton, during the early part of this present century, that eminent lawyer, Sir Edward Sugden, afterwards Lord St. Leonards, and Lord Chancellor of England. His career was an example of the rise of worth, for he was the son of a hairdresser in Duke Street, Piccadilly, and won his way by the sole aid of his own bright intellect. But, on the other hand, he remains the most dreadful example of the man who draws his own will, and thus gives rise to wasteful litigation with his testamentary incoherencies. He was also the victim of a particularly odious witticism while living here. It shall be recounted, to the perpetual infamy and dishonour of the man who uttered it. Theodore Hook and Croker were on one occasion the guests of Sir Edward Sugden at Boyle Farm. They were admiring a very beautiful vase that stood in the hall, and Sir Edward told them it was a copy of the celebrated Warwick vase. “Yes,” said Croker, “it is extremely handsome; but don’t you think a facsimile of the Barberini vase would have been more appropriate to the place?” I do not remember to have heard if Sugden kicked his unmannerly guest: if he did not, I regret the omission.
On the way to Esher, up the hillside, the coach passes the entrance-gates of Sandown Park, that most fashionable of race-courses, opened in 1870, and ever since then the “ladies’ race-course” par excellence. Those ornamental iron gates that face the road have a history: they came from Baron Albert Grant’s mansion, Kensington House, that stood where now Kensington Court faces the Gardens and the old Palace.
THE “NEW TIMES” GUILDFORD COACH.
‘ESHER’S STEEP’