Come and breakfast at the neat white inn, of yore
a posting-house of fame. The stables are now turned into cottages;
and instead of a dozen spruce ostlers and helpers, the last of the
postboys totters sadly about the yard and looks up eagerly at the
rare sight of a horse to feed. But the house keeps up enough of its
ancient virtue to give us a breakfast worthy of Pantagruel's self;
and after it, while we are looking out our flies, you can go and chat
with the old postboy, and hear his tales, told with a sort of
chivalrous pride, of the noble lords and fair ladies before whom he
has ridden in the good old times gone by--even, so he darkly hints,
before 'His Royal Highness the Prince' himself. Poor old fellow, he
recollects not, and he need not recollect, that these great posting-
houses were centres of corruption, from whence the newest vices of
the metropolis were poured into the too-willing ears of village lads
and lasses; and that not even the New Poor Law itself has done more
for the morality of the South of England than the substitution of the
rail for coaches.
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