“All the mails in the kingdom,” he continues, “with one solitary exception (that of Liverpool), were so arranged as to reach London early in the morning. Between the hours of four and six a.m., one after the other, according to their station upon the roll, all the mails from the N[orth]—the E[ast]—the W[est]—the S[outh]—whence, according to some curious etymologists, comes the magical word NEWS—drove up successively to the post-office and rendered up their heart-shaking budgets; none earlier than four o’clock, none later than six. I am speaking of days when all things moved slowly. The condition of the roads was then such, that, in order to face it, a corresponding build of coaches, hyperbolically massive, was rendered necessary; the mails were, upon principle, made so strong as to be the heaviest of all carriages known to the wit or the experience of man; and from these joint evils of ponderous coaches and roads that were quagmires, it was impossible for even the picked breed of English coach-horses, all bone and blood, to carry forward their huge tonnage at a greater rate than six and a half miles an hour. Consequently, it cost eight-and-twenty massy^[4] hours for us, leaving Shrewsbury at two o’clock in the dead of night, to reach the General Post-office, and faithfully to deposit upon the threshing-floors of Lombard Street all that weight of love and hatred which Ireland had found herself able to muster through twenty-four hours in the great depÔt of Dublin, by way of donation to England.”

No apology, it will be conceded, is necessary for having quoted De Quincey at this length, especially as these passages are omitted from many editions, and so are little known. The eloquence that thus gives expression to the morbid imagination of this forerunner of modern neurotics is well employed here, and so largely has mind usurped dominion over matter in later years that few of the present generation will altogether fail to sympathise with his nocturnal terrors.

The circumstance that led to his being shown into the ball-room of the “Lion,” was that of the house being under repair. That room is still in existence, and a noble and impressive room it is, occupying the upper floor of a two-storeyed building, added to the back of the older house perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago. Lofty, as he describes it, and lighted by tall windows, the features of the two music-galleries and the chandeliers are still there, together with the supper-room at one end, divided off from the greater saloon, and so disproportionately lofty. The ball-room is additionally lighted from the ceiling by a domed skylight. The moulded plaster decorations on walls and ceiling, in the Adams style—that style which so beautifully recast classic conventions—are exquisite, and even yet keep their delicate colouring, as do the emblematic figures of Music and Dancing painted on the door-panels. At rare intervals the room is used for its original purpose, but it more commonly serves, throughout the year, that of a commercial travellers’ stock-room.

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.

The “Lion” suffered severely when the railway was opened to Shrewsbury, and the more so because its position, from being the most favourable, was suddenly changed into the most unfavourable; the railway-station lying at the other end of the town, and travellers no longer passing as a matter of necessity by Wyle Cop.

For many years the “Lion” has therefore been all too large for present needs, and its upper floors unfurnished and given over to rats, mice and spiders. But it has had better fortune than befell the “Talbot.”

The “Talbot,” in Market street, was the great rival of the “Lion.” It was the house to which came John Jobson to set up the “Nimrod,” and be generally a thorn in the side of Isaac Taylor, of the “Lion” yard. Although much else is lost, fugitive memories still remain of Mrs. Jobson’s turban, hinting that she must have been a remarkable person. Why has not some diarist of that time left us an intimate account of all these things?

After the coaching age and Jobson were both simultaneously snuffed out, in 1842, the “Talbot” was taken by E. Wheeler and Son, followed shortly by one Peters, who had been a coachman on the “Nimrod.” It is to be feared he found it anything but a lucrative speculation, for the house was shortly closed. Some little while later, it was taken by the Post Office. The building still exists, little altered, although the lower part is a fancy warehouse, and the upper floors let out as offices, by the name of “Talbot Chambers.” It is a great square unbeautiful red-brick structure, with the sign, an effigy of that old English hound, the Talbot, still surmounting the entrance.

The “Raven and Bell,” frequently mentioned in the rivalries of the old coach-proprietors, is not to be confounded with the “Raven” in Castle Street, but was situated on Wyle Cop. The “Raven,”—a favourite sign in Shropshire and Staffordshire—and almost exclusively confined to these two counties, derives from the old heraldic coat of the Corbets, that ancient Shropshire family whose ancestral acres are situated at Moreton Corbet, and is an ancient play upon the family name, by way of corbeau, the French for raven. Indeed, not only the Corbets of Moreton, but most others of the same name, bear one or more ravens as their heraldic cognizance.

Wyle Cop is still a place of inns. There are the beautiful old “Unicorn,” half-timbered and gabled, and that oddly conjoined “Lion and Pheasant”; and many another to be found throughout the town.