There are several excellent inns, supported by the surrounding' farmers,
which are much to be preferred to more fashionable hotels. The roast geese
to be found at the farmers' ordinaries on market days about Michaelmas time,
are worthy of commendation; and the farmers themselves, being of a jovial and
hospitable turn of mind, render these dinners pleasanter to a stranger who
can dine at an unfashionable hour, than the eternal "anything you please,
sir; steak or chop, sir," in a solitary box, which haunts us for our sins in
the coffee-rooms of English hotels.
Warwick deserves a long journey, if it were only for the sake of the fine
woodland scenery which surrounds it for ten miles, but the castle is the
especial object of attraction,--a castle which realizes almost more than any
other those romantic ideas of a feudal abode which were first put into
circulation by the "Castle of Otranto," and became part of the education of
our youth under the influence of the genius of Sir Walter Scott.
The castle rises upon the brink of the river, which foams past over the weir
of an ancient mill, where once the inhabitants of the borough were bound by
feudal service to grind all their corn.
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