studies which have made Marlborough College one of the great and
successful public schools. Another great inn was the fine Georgian
house near one of the entrances to Kedleston Park, built by Lord
Scarsdale for visitors to the medicinal waters in his park. But these
waters have now ceased to cure the mildest invalid, and the inn is now
a large farm-house with vast stables and barns.

It seems as if something of the foundations of history were crumbling
to read that the "Star and Garter" at Richmond is to be sold at
auction. That is a melancholy fate for perhaps the most famous inn in
the country--a place at which princes and statesmen have stayed, and
to which Louis Philippe and his Queen resorted. The "Star and Garter"
has figured in the romances of some of our greatest novelists. One
comes across it in Meredith and Thackeray, and it finds its way into
numerous memoirs, nearly always with some comment upon its unique
beauty of situation, a beauty that was never more real than at this
moment when the spring foliage is just beginning to peep.

The motor and changing habits account for the evil days upon which the
hostelry has fallen. Trains and trams have brought to the doors almost
of the "Star and Garter" a public that has not the means to make use
of its 120 bedrooms. The richer patrons of other days flash past on
their motors, making for those resorts higher up the river which are
filling the place in the economy of the London Sunday and week-end
which Richmond occupied in times when travelling was more difficult.
These changes are inevitable. The "Ship" at Greenwich has gone, and
Cabinet Ministers can no longer dine there. The convalescent home,
which was the undoing of certain Poplar Guardians, is housed in an
hotel as famous as the "Ship," in its days once the resort of Pitt and
his bosom friends. Indeed, a pathetic history might be written of the