The Bath Road. By Charles G. Harper. (Chapman and Hall.
168.) —Mr. Harper has published three books about the great coaching roads (Brighton, Portsmouth, and Dover), and he is to follow up this with a fifth on the Exeter Road. The Bath Road was, par excellence, as he remarks, the most "literary and fashionable." The city, indeed, suffered something like an eclipse when coaches gave way to railways, and has not long emerged from it. There is some preliminary matter common to coaches and roads in general, the tragical fate, for instance, of a grinner who, having survived the storm of Trincomalee and the wreck of a frigate, was killed by the coach upsetting at Reading. The road itself has a' very curious history. It was evidently a favourite haunt for highwaymen. Hounslow and Maidenhead Thicket were among the most notorious spots in all the South of England for these gentry. (The writer of this notice has heard an old lady describe how in her youth she and her father were stopped in the Thicket by highwaymen.) Further on we come to. Reading, to Hungerford, and Newbury, the latter especially famous in history, to Littlecote, the abode of Wild Dayrell, and afterwards the rendezvous of the magnates who, in 1688, invited the Prince of Orange. Not many miles after this we reach the beautiful region of Savernake, preserved beyond all expectation for the House of Ailesbury. Savernake takes us almost into Marlborough, where the headquarters of the College are in what was once the famous Castle Hotel. Avebury, with its marvellous " Druidic remains," succeeds, and some way past Avebury, Box, with its great tunnel, the monument of Brunets extravagant genius. It cost half-a-million, and might have been avoided. It gave occasion for a curious instance of clerical perversity. A man who belonged to the night gang of navvies was to marry a girl of the village. There is a legal obligation to sleep so many nights in the parish. The vicar objected to perform the ceremony because the man, who lodged in the village, slept during the day. This is an eminently readable book, and handsomely illustrated.
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