The way to this derelict haunt of eighteenth-century gaiety lies down the yard of the inn, and up a fine broad stone stairway, now much chipped, dirty, and neglected. On the ground floor is the billiard-room of the present day, formerly the coach dining-room. In crepuscular apartments adjoining, in these times given over to forgotten lumber, the curious may find the deserted kitchens of a bygone age, with the lifts and hatches to upper floors that once conveyed their abundant meals to a vanished generation of John Bulls.
This portion of the house is seen to advantage at the end of the cobble-stoned yard, passing the old coach-office remaining there, unchanged, and proceeding to the other end, where the yard passes out into a steep and narrow lane called Stony Bank. Looking back, the great red-brick bulk of the ball-room, with the stone effigy of a lion on the parapet, is seen; the surrounding buildings giving a very powerful impression of the extensive business done here in days of old.
[Illustration: YARD OF THE "OLD ANGEL," BASINGSTOKE.]
The "Old Angel," Basingstoke, associated with Jane Austen's early days, has for close upon thirty years ceased from being an inn, and is now quite unrecognisable as a modern "temperance hotel." In the rear, approached nowadays through the yard of a livery-stable, the old Assembly Rooms where she danced with the _élite_ of the county families of her day, may with some difficulty be found by climbing a crazy staircase and pushing through the accumulated cobwebs of years. There, on a spacious upper floor, is the ball-room of a hundred years ago, now deserted, or but seldom used as a corn-store.
The great "Royal George" hotel at Knutsford is associated with that finest of Mrs. Gaskell's works, _Cranford_, and the "White Hart" at Whitchurch, on the Exeter Road, has reminiscences of Newman.
The "White Hart" is an inn typical of the coaching age along that western highway, and repays examination. Dark and tortuous corridors, a coffee-room decorated in barbaric colours, a capacious stable-yard, all tell of the old days of the Exeter Mail. The inn stands in the centre of the little town of narrow streets, where the Oxford and Southampton Road crosses the road to Exeter, and was thus in receipt of a very great deal of coaching business, travellers from Southampton or from Oxford changing here and waiting for the West of England coaches. Here it was, perhaps in the coffee-room, that the young clergyman who afterwards became a pervert to Rome and figured prominently as Cardinal Newman, wrote the first verses of the _Lyra Apostolica_, beginning: