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.