RUNEMEDE

Staines is no sooner left behind than we come to Egham, once devoted almost wholly to the coaching interest, then the scene of suburban race-meetings, and now that those blackguardly orgies have been suppressed, just a dead-alive suburb—dusty, uninteresting. The old church has been modernised,{87} and the old coaching inns either mere beer-shops or else improved away altogether. The last one to remain in its old form—the ‘Catherine Wheel’—has recently lost all its old roadside character, and has become very much up-to-date.

Here we are upon the borders of Windsor Great Park, and a road turning off to the right hand leads beside the Thames to Old Windsor, past Cooper’s Hill and within sight of Runemede and Magna Charta island, where the ‘Palladium of our English liberties’ was wrung from the unwilling King John. A public reference to the ‘Palladium’ used unfailingly to ‘bring down the house,’ but it has been left to the present generation to view the very spot where it was granted, not only without a quickening of the pulse, but with the suspicion of a yawn. You cannot expect reverence from people who possibly saw King John as the central and farcical figure of last year’s pantomime, with a low-comedy nose and an expression of ludicrous terror, handing Magna Charta to baronial supers armoured with polished metal dish-covers for breastplates and saucepans for helmets. ‘Nothing is sacred to a sapper,’ is a saying that arose in Napoleon’s campaigns. Let us, in these piping times of peace, change the figure, and say, ‘Nothing is sacred to a librettist.’

Long years before Egham ever became a coaching village, in the dark ages of road travel, when inns were scarce and travellers few, the &............