CHAPTER XIV

Beneath this stone, in hopes of ZionDoth lie the landlord of the “Lion.”His son keeps on the business still,Resigned unto the heavenly will.

Vain is the search of the conscientious historian for that gem, or for its variant:

Here lies the body of Matilda Brown,Who, while alive, was hostess of the “Crown,”Resigned unto the heavenly will,Her son keeps on the business still.

It would, perhaps, be too much to say there was never such an epitaph at Upton, but certainly there is not one of the kind there now.

INGLE-NOOK, “LYGON ARMS,” BROADWAY.

A publican whose name was Pepper is commemorated by an odd epitaph in the churchyard of St. John’s, Stamford. None of the funny dogswho indulged in mortuary japes and quips and cranks could have resisted the temptation of the name “Pepper,” and thus we find:

Hot by name, but mild by nature,He brewed good ale for every creature;He brewed good ale, and sold it too,And unto each man gave his due.

In Pannal churchyard, between Wakefield and Harrogate, is the terse inscription on Joseph Thackerey, who died November 26th, 1791:

In the year of our Lord 1740I came to the “Crown”;In 1791 they laid me down.

Presumably the idea the writer here intended to convey was that this landlord of the “Crown” was “laid down” after the manner of wine in bins, to mature.

At St. John’s, Leeds, are said to be the following lines, dated 1793, that have a lilt somewhat anticipatory of theBab Balladsmetres, on one who was originally a clothier:

Hic jacet, sure the fattest manThat Yorkshire stingo made,He was a lover of his can,A clothier by his trade.His waist did measure three yards round,He weighed almost three hundred pound.His flesh did weigh full twenty stone:His flesh, I say,—he had no bone,At least, ’tis said he had none.

The next, at Northallerton, seems to be byway of warning to innkeepers at all disposed to drinking their stock:

Hic jacet Walter Gun,Sometime Landlord of the “Sun”;Sic transit gloria mundi,He drank hard upon Friday,That being a high day,Then took to his bed and died upon Sunday.

Why did he, according to the epitaph, merely “die”? Surely, from the point of view of an incorrigibly eccentric epitaph-writer, a man not only named Gun, but spelling his name with one “n,” and dying so suddenly, should have “gone off.” We are sadly compelled to acknowledge this particular wag to be an incompetent.

If Mr. Walter Gun had been more careful and abstemious, he might have emulated the subject of our next example, and completed a half-century of inn-keeping, as did John Wigglesworth, of Whalley, who, as under, seems to have been a burning and a shining light and exemplar:

Here lies the Body ofJOHN WIGGLESWORTH,More than fifty years he was the perpetual innkeeper in this Town. Notwithstanding the temptations of that dangerous calling, he maintained good order in his House, kept the Sabbath Day Holy, frequented the Public Worship with his family, induced his guests to do the same, and regularly partook of the Holy Communion. He was also bountiful to the Poor, in private, as well as in public, and by the blessings of Providence on a life so spent, died possessed of competent Wealth,Feb. 28, 1813,Aged 77 years.

Here lies the Body ofJOHN WIGGLESWORTH,

More than fifty years he was the perpetual innkeeper in this Town. Notwithstanding the temptations of that dangerous calling, he maintained good order in his House, kept the Sabbath Day Holy, frequented the Public Worship with his family, induced his guests to do the same, and regularly partook of the Holy Communion. He was also bountiful to the Poor, in private, as well as in public, and by the blessings of Providence on a life so spent, died possessed of competent Wealth,

Feb. 28, 1813,Aged 77 years.

This was written by Dr. Whittaker, the historian of Whalley, who seems, according to the last line of this tremendous effort, to have been considerably impressed by the innkeeper’s “competent wealth,” even to the extent of reckoning it among the virtues.

At Barnwell All Saints, near Oundle, Northants, we read this epitaph on an innkeeper:

Man’s life is like a winter’s day,Some only breakfast, and away;Others to dinner stay, and are full fed:The oldest man but sups, and goes to bed.Large is his debt who lingers out the day,Who goes the soonest has the least to pay.Death is the waiter, some few run on tick,And some, alas! must pay the bill to Nick!Tho’ I owed much, I hope long trust is given,And truly mean to pay all debts in heaven.

Worldly creditors might well look askance at such a resolution as that expressed in the last line, for there is no parting there.

In the churchyard of the deserted old church of Stockbridge, Hampshire, the curious may still, with some difficulty, find the whimsical epitaph of John Bucket, landlord of the “King’s Head” in that little town, who died, aged 67, in 1802:

And is, alas! poor Bucket gone?Farewell, convivial honest John.Oft at the well, by fatal stroke,Buckets, like pitchers, must be broke.In this same motley, shifting scene,How various have thy fortunes been.Now lifting high, now sinking low,To-day the brim would overflow.Thy bounty then would all supply,To fill, and drink, and leave thee dry,To-morrow sunk as in a well,Content, unseen, with Truth to dwell.But high or low, or wet or dry,No rotten stave could malice spy.Then rise, immortal Bucket, rise,And claim thy station in the skies;’Twixt Amphora and Pisces shine,Still guarding Stockbridge with thy sign.

Lawrence, the great proprietor of the “Lion” at Shrewsbury, lies in the churchyard of St. Julian, hard by his old inn, and on the south wall of the church may yet be read his epitaph: “Sacred to the memory of Mr. Robert Lawrence, for many years proprietor of the ‘Raven’ and ‘Lion’ inns in this town, to whose public spirit and unremitting exertions for upwards of thirty years, in opening the great road through Wales between the United Kingdoms, as also for establishing the first mail coach to this town, the public in general have been greatly indebted, and will long have to regret his loss. DiedIIISeptemberMDCCCVI, in theLVIIyear of his age.”

Not an innkeeper, but a brewer, was Thomas Tipper, whose alliterative name is boldly carved on his remarkable tombstone in the windy little churchyard of Newhaven. I make no sort of apology or excuse for including Tipper’s epitaph in this chapter, for if he did not, in fact, keep an inn, he at any rate kept many inns supplied with his “stingo,” and his brew was a favouritewith the immortal Mrs. Gamp, an acknowledged connoisseur in curious liquors. A “pint of the celebrated staggering ale or Real Old Brighton Tipper,” was her little whack at supper-time.

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TIPPER’S EPITAPH, NEWHAVEN.

Tipper was by way of being an Admirable Crichton, as by his epitaph, written by T. Clio Rickman, you perceive; but his claim upon the world’s gratitude was, and is, the production of good beer. Is, I say, because although Tipper himself has gone to amuse the gods with the interminable cantos ofHudibras, and to tickle them in the ribs with his own comicality, his ale is still brewed at Newhaven, by Messrs. Towner Bros., and keeps to this day that pleasantly sharp taste, which is said to come from the well whence the water for it is drawn having some communication with the sea. This sharpness conferred upon it the “stingo” title. It is, to all intents and purposes, identical with the “humming ale,” and the “nappy” strong ale, so frequently mentioned by the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.

The carving in low relief at the head of Tipper’s tombstone, with vaguely defined clouds and winged cherubs’ heads in the background, is a representation of old Newhaven Bridge, that formerly crossed the Ouse.

Attached to the church of St. Magnus the Martyr, whose tall and beautiful tower forms so striking an object in views of London Bridge, is a grim little plot of land, once a churchyard green with grass and open to the sunshine, but now only to be reached through the vestry, and hemmed in by tall buildings to such an extent that sunshine will not reach down there, and the earth is bare and dark. There stands thewell-preserved stone to the memory of Robert Preston, once “drawer”—that is to say, a “barman”—at the famous “Boar’s Head,” Eastcheap. The stone was removed from the churchyard of St. Michael, Paternoster Royal. Planted doubtlessby some sentimental person, a small vine-tree grows at the foot of the stone.

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PRESTON’S EPITAPH, ST. MAGNUS-THE-MARTYR.

Among minor epitaphs that may be noticed to persons in some way engaged in the licensed victualling trade, is that in the churchyard of Capel Curig, on the Holyhead Road, to Jonathan Jackson, who died in 1848, and was “for many years a most confidential waiter at Capel Curig inn.”

INNS WITH ODD PRIVILEGES

Here and there, scattered in the byways of the country, rather than situated in towns, inns may be found that have some attribute out of the common, in the way of privileges conferred or usurped. Thus, the licence of the “White Hart” inn at Adwalton, near Drighlington, Yorkshire, has, or had, the unusual privilege of holding the charter for the local fair, granted by Queen Elizabeth in 1576 to John Brookes, the then landlord, who under that charter held the exclusive right to levy tolls and direct the entire conduct of the gathering.

This royal grant recalls a once-celebrated inn on a road in Derbyshire greatly travelled in the coaching age. In a now lonely position on that very bleak and elevated highway, the road between Ashbourne and Buxton, stands the inn known as “Newhaven House.” A haven of some sort was sorely wanted there in coaching days, and accordingly this great building was ordained by the Duke of Rutland, one of those two overawing noble landlords of the district, who had merely to say, in their off-hand manner, “Let it be done,” for almost anything to be done, forthwith.

It was in the flamboyant days of George the Fourth that the “Newhaven” inn arose, and his Majesty himself stayed one night “under its roof,” as the guide-books carefully say, lest perhaps we might suspect him of sleeping on the tiles. Those were the days when travelling Majesties still did picturesque things, more or less in the manner of the Caliphs in theArabian Nights; and the great George, by some mysterious exercise of kingly prerogative, granted the house a perpetual licence, by way of signifying his content with the entertainment provided. That perpetual licence must once have been a very valuable asset of the Manners family, for the house was, in the merry days of the road, one of the best-appointed and most thriving posting and coaching establishments of the age; but in these times it is very quiet and very empty, save for the great Newhaven horse- and cattle-fairs, in spring and autumn, now the two red-letter days of the year for the once-busy hostelry.

From a perpetual licence to a licence for one day in every year is a curious extreme, afforded by the village of King’s Cliffe, Northants, where any householder, under the terms of a charter granted in the reign of King John, may, if he so pleases, on the day of the annual autumn fair, sell beer; provided that a branch of a tree is suspended over the doorway, after the manner of the “bush” anciently displayed by the ale-stakes.

Among London suburban inns demolished in recent times and rebuilt is the “White Hart,” onHackney Marshes: that sometime desolate and remote place of footpads and swamps. To-day “Hackney Marshes” is merely a name. Little in the actual appearance of the place, unless it be in midst of some particularly mild and wet winter, suggests a marsh, and the broad level stretch of grass is, in fact, in process of becoming a conventional London park. Through the midst of the Marsh flows the river Lea, and the several “cuts” that have been at different times made for commercial purposes divide up the surrounding wastes with foul, canal-like reaches.

“NEWHAVEN” INN.

A very ancient cut indeed, and one now little better than a ditch, is that of the Temple stream, made for the purpose of the Temple Mills, so called from the manor having anciently belongedto the Knights Templars. The site of the mills is still pointed out by the “White Hart.” The old inn was said to have been built in 1514, and in after years was a reputed haunt of Dick Turpin, that phenomenally ubiquitous highwayman who, if all those legends were true, must have been no single person, but a syndicate, and a large one at that. The house, which bore no evidence of sixteenth-century antiquity on its whitewashed, brick-built face, was a favourite resort of holiday-making East Enders, and, with its long, white front and cheerful old red-tiled roof, seemed a natural part of the scenery, just as the still-extant “White House” or “Old Ferry House” inn, half a mile distant, does to this day. It was, however, wantonly rebuilt in 1900, and replaced by a dull, evil-looking public-house that looks very much down on its luck. The appearance of the old house suggested festivity in the open-air tea and watercresses style; the new is suggestive only of drinking across a bar.

But a long-existing privilege still belongs to the property, the landlord being the proprietor of a private toll-bridge leading across the Temple stream to Leyton. He exercises that right in virtue of some predecessor having long ago repaired the broken-down passage when three parishes whose boundaries meet here disputed and declined the liability. Accordingly, although foot-passengers pass freely, a penny is levied upon a bicycle, and upon each head of sheep or cattle, and twopence for carts, carriages, motor-cars, ormotor-bicycles, at the little hut where the tollkeeper lounges in a very bored manner. Well may he look so, for although, in exceptional times of holiday, the toll has been known to yield, once or twice, so much as a pound in a day, five shillings is a more usual sum, and there are many days in winter when threepence has been the sum-total of the day’s revenue.

THE “VINE TAVERN,” MILE END ROAD.

A similar right is said to belong to the “White House,” where a substantial timber bridge spans the Lea itself, but it lies only on a little-used bridle-path, and the right does not appear to be exercised. The scene here has elements of picturesqueness, and could be made a good subject in colour.

In October, 1903, the “Vine,” the old inn that had stood so long and so oddly on “Mile End Waste,” was demolished. Although it had stood there for three hundred years, there was not the slightest trace about the building of any architectural embellishment, the front of it being merely an extremely unlovely and ill-cared-for example of a London public-house, while the back Was a weather-boarded relic of the vanished rural days of the Mile End Road.

Like the fly in amber,

The thing itself was neither rich nor rare:We only wondered how the devil it got there.

The manner of it may be guessed. In the old, easy-going days some impudent squatter sat down on that wide selvedgeof open space beside the road and built the primeval hovel from which the “Vine” sprang, and in the course of time, by the mere lapse of twenty-one years, acquired a title to the site. Hence the isolated building, standing in advance of the general line of houses. But, if the illustration be carefully scanned, it will be noted that at some very much later period the then owner, much more impudent than the original grabber of public, or “waste” land, seems to have stolen an additional piece. This is evident enough, not only in the different styles and periods of the building, but in the manner in which the little attic windows in the roof are obscured by the addition.

INNS IN LITERATURE

Inns occupy a very large and prominent place in the literature of all ages. A great deal of Shakespeare is concerned with inns, most prominent among them the “Boar’s Head,” in Eastcheap, scene of many of Falstaff’s revels; while at the “Garter,” at Windsor, Falstaff had “his chamber, his house, his castle, his standing bed and truckle-bed,” and his chamber was “painted about with the Story of the Prodigal, fresh and new.”

It is difficult to see what the old dramatists could have done without inns. In Farquhar’sBeaux’ Stratagemwe find some of the best dialogue to be that at the inn at Lichfield, between Boniface, the landlord, and Aimwell.

“I have heard your town of Lichfield much famed for ale,” says Aimwell: “I think I’ll taste that.”

“Sir,” replies the landlord, “I have now in my cellar ten tun of the best ale in Staffordshire; ’tis smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber, and strong as brandy, and will be just fourteen years old the fifth day of next March, old style.”

“You’re very exact in the age of your ales.”

“As punctual, sir, as in the age of mychildren. I’ll show you such ale. Here, tapster, broach number 1706, as the saying is. Sir, you shall taste myanno domini. I have lived in Lichfield, man and boy, above fifty years, and, I believe, have not consumed eight-and-fifty ounces of meat.”

“At a meal, you mean, if one may guess your sum by your bulk.”

“Not in my life, sir; I have fed freely upon ale. I have ate my ale, drank my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.”

Izaak Walton, going a-fishing in the river Lea, was not ashamed to call at the “Swan,” Tottenham High Cross, and drink ale, and call it “nectar.”

The history of the inns at which Pepys stayed would form an interesting subject of inquiry. Few men of his time were better informed than he on the subject of inns: large, small, dear, cheap, comfortable and uncomfortable: they are all set forth in detail in hisDiary. He more than once patronised the “Red Lion” at Guildford, a far more important house then than now. At that time it possessed very fine and extensive orchards and gardens, and, according to Aubrey, could make up fifty beds, and owned stables for two hundred horses. Imagination can easily picture Mr. Pepys, during his stay in 1661, cutting asparagus for supper: “the best that ever I ate in my life.”

Those gardens were long since abolished, and Market Street stands on the site of them.

On June 10th, 1668, we find him sleeping at the “George,” Salisbury, in a silk bed. He notes that he had “very good diet, but very dear,” and had probably, overnight, when sleeping in that silk bed, been visited with gruesome thoughts of the bill to follow the luxury. The bill was, as he expressed it, “exorbitant.”

Insatiable curiosity in that old Pepys. Something, too, of childlike wonder, infantile artlessness, and a fear of strange things, and the dark. His inquisitiveness took him to the lonely giant ramparts of Old Sarum, “prodigious, so as to fright me”; and thereabouts he and his party of three ladies riding pillion found, and stayed at, a rustic inn, where a pedlar was turned out of bed in order that our Samuel might turn in. The party found the beds “lousy.” Strangely enough, this was a discovery “which made us merry.” Every man to his taste in merriment.

And so, enjoying the full savour of life, he goes his way, as appreciative of good music as of a good dinner, and a connoisseur alike of sermons and of a pretty face. Did he ever outlive his lusts, and know all things to be vanities, before his natural force had abated? or did the end surprise him in midst of his worldly activities?

A transition from Pepys to Sir Roger de Coverley is easy and natural. The old servant in Sir Roger’s family, retiring from service and taking an inn, is one of Addison’s most pleasing pictures. To do honour to his master, the old retainer had Sir Roger’s portrait painted and hungit out as his sign, under the title of the “Knight’s Head.”

As soon as Sir Roger was acquainted with it, finding that his servant’s indiscretion proceeded wholly from affection and good-will, he only told him that he made him too high a compliment; and when the fellow seemed to think that could hardly be, added, with a more decisive look, that it was too great an honour for any man under a duke; but told him, at the same time, that it might be altered with a very few touches, and that he himself would be at the charge of it. Accordingly, they got a painter, by the Knight’s directions, to add a pair of whiskers to the face, and, by a little aggravation of the features, to change it into the “Saracen’s Head.”

According to Pope, in hisMoral Essays, it was at an inn that the witty and sparkling debauchee, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, “the most accomplished man of the age, in riding, dancing, and fencing,” died in his fifty-ninth year, in 1687:

In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung,The floors of plaster and the walls of dung,On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw,The George and Garter dangling from that bedWhere tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,Great Villiers lies—alas! how changed from him,That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim.

A most complete picture of retribution in a moral essay, set forth in the most denunciatory lines.

In the whole range of poetry there is nothing that so well lends itself to a cold, calculated vituperation as the heroic couplet. You can pile detail upon detail, like an inventory-clerk, so long as rhymes last; and thus an impeachment of this sort has a very formidable air.

HOUSE WHERE THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM DIED, KIRKBY MOORSIDE.

But it has been denied that the profligate Duke ended in such misery. However that may be, he maintained his peculiar reputation to the last; for, according to Dr. Lowth, Bishop of London, he “died between two common girls,” at the house of one of his tenants in the Yorkshire village of Kirkby Moorside. That house is still wearily pointed out to the insistent stranger by the uninterested Kirkby Moorsiders, who, as Yorkshiremen with magnificent thirsts, are uninterested,chiefly by reason of its being no longer an inn; and, truth to tell, its old-time picturesque features, if it ever had any, are wholly overlaid by furiously ugly modern shop-fronts. Now, if it were only the “Swan,” some little way up the street, still, in the midst of picturesque squalor, dispensing drink of varied sorts to all and sundry, for good current coin of the realm, one might conceive some local historic and literary enthusiasm. The “Swan,” however, has no associations, and is merely, with its projecting porch, supported upon finely carved but woefully dilapidated seventeenth-century Renaissance pillars, a subject for an artist. The odd, and ugly, encroachment of an adjoining hairdresser’s shop is redeemed, from that same artistic point of view, by that now unusual object, a barber’s pole, projecting across.

The robust pages of Fielding and Smollett are rich in incidents of travel, and in scenes at wayside inns, where postboys, persecuted lovers, footpads, and highwaymen mingle romantically. The “Three Jolly Pigeons,” the village ale-house of Goldsmith’sShe Stoops to Conquer, must not be forgotten, while the “Black Bear” in Sir Walter Scott’sKenilworth, is prominent. Marryat, Theodore Hook, Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever, Bulwer Lytton, all largely introduced inns into their novels. Dickens, of course, is so prolific in his references to inns and taverns that he requires special chapters. Thackeray’s inns are as the poles asunder from those of Dickens, and are superior places, the resorts of superior people,and of people who, if not superior, endeavour to appear so. In short, in their individual treatment of inns, Dickens and Thackeray are thoroughly characteristic and dissimilar. Thackeray’s waiters and the waiters drawn by Dickens are very different.Thackeray could never have imagined the waiter at the “Old Royal,” at Birmingham, who, having succeeded in obtaining an order for soda-water from Bob Sawyer, “melted imperceptibly away”; nor the preternaturally mean and cunning waiters at Yarmouth and at the “Golden Cross,” inDavid Copperfield—own brothers to the Artful Dodger. I don’t think there could ever have existed such creatures.

THE “BLACK SWAN,” KIRKBY MOORSIDE.

Thackeray’s waiters are not figments of the imagination; they are drawn from the life, as, for example, John, the old waiter inVanity Fair, who, when Dobbin returns to England, after ten years in India, welcomes him as if he had been absent only weeks, and supposes he’ll have a roast fowl for dinner.

But in the amazing quantity of drink they consume, the characters of Dickens and Thackeray are on common ground. Mr. Pickwick could apparently begin drinking brandy shortly after breakfast, and continue all day, without being much the worse for it; and inPendenniswe read how Jack Finucane and Mr. Trotter, dining at Dick’s Restaurant with Mr. Bungay, drank with impunity what would easily suffice to overthrow most modern men.

Washington Irving thought as highly of inns as did Dr. Johnson. “To a homeless man, who has no spot on this wide world which he can truly call his own,” he says, in a memorable passage, “there is a momentary feeling of something like independence and territorial consequence when, aftera weary day’s travel, he kicks off his boots, thrusts his feet into slippers, and stretches himself before an inn fire. Let the world without go as it may; let kingdoms rise or fall, so long as he has the wherewithal to pay his bill, he is, for the time being, the very monarch of all he surveys. The armchair is his throne, the poker his sceptre, and the little parlour, some twelve feet square, his undisputed empire. It is a morsel of certainty, snatched from the midst of the uncertainties of life; it is a sunny moment gleaming out kindly on a cloudy day; and he who has advanced some way on the pilgrimage of existence knows the importance of husbanding even morsels and moments of enjoyment. ‘Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?’ thought I, as I gave the fire a stir, lolled back in my elbow-chair, and cast a complacent look about the little parlour of the ‘Red Horse,’ at Stratford-on-Avon.”

He was very speedily answered, No! for at that instant the chimes preluded the stroke of midnight, and at the same time “a gentle tap came at the door, and a pretty chambermaid, putting in her smiling face, inquired, with a hesitating air,” whether that momentary monarch of all he surveyed had rung. Of course she knew perfectly well he had not rung, and the humbled autocrat of those twelve square feet was quite correct when he “understood it as a modest hint that it was time to retire.” The Emperor of the Inn Parlour accordingly abdicated immediately,lest a worse thing—i.e., the possible turning off the gas at the meter—should befall; and, his dream of absolute dominion at an end, went off to bed, like a good boy, rather than the Crowned Head he had fancied himself.

WASHINGTON IRVING’S “THRONE” AND “SCEPTRE.”

The “Red Horse”—the name is taken from the Vale of Red Horse in which the town of Stratford-on-Avon stands—is still in being, and the “Washington Irving Room” is even yet a shrine, of sorts. A shrine, however, none too easy for the casual worshipper of heroes, or the amateur of literary landmarks, to come to, for it is generally used as a private sitting-room; and not the most sympathetic and easy-going of guests who has hired it for that purpose is content to receive all day a stream of strangers bubbling over with real, or affected, interest. It is a small room, measuring some ten feet by fifteen, looking out upon Bridge Street. Nowadays the walls of it are hung with portraits of Irving himself, of Longfellow, and others, together with old views of the town; and a framed letter written by Irving, and a silhouette of “Sally Garner,” daughterof the landlord of that time, bring the place closely into touch with theSketch Book. The “Sexton’s Clock” stands beside the door, with a suitably inscribed brass plate; but no longer may you wield that poker which was Irving’s “sceptre,” nor sit in the chair that was, in his fancy, a throne; for the poker is kept in the office of the hotel, and the chair, also with an inscribed brass plate, is locked within a cupboard, through whose glass doors you may see where it is jealously retired from touch. In short, every thing that will harbour an inscription has one, not excepting the poker itself, which has been engraved with the legend, “Geoffrey Crayon’s Sceptre.”

The chambermaid who so obliquely suggested that it was time to go to bed, and no doubt preceded him to Number 15, with candle and warming-pan, was, we are told, “pretty Hannah Cuppage,” and we wish he had told us more about her, instead of writing so much very thin description of antiquities.

Poets—Southey apart, with his tragicalMary, the Maid of the Inn—have not sung so frequently as might have been expected of the fair maids at inns. Of this type of minstrelsy, Gay’s ballad on Molly Mog, daughter of the landlord at the “Rose,” Wokingham, is best known:

Says my Uncle, I pray you discoverWhat hath been the cause of your woes;Why you pine and you whine like a lover?—I have seen Molly Mog, of the “Rose.”O Nephew! your grief is but folly,In town you may find better prog;Half a crown there will get you a Molly,A Molly much better than Mog.

But he will not hear anything of the kind:

I know that by wits ’tis recitedThat women are best at a clog:But I am not so easily frightedFrom loving of sweet Molly Mog.

And so forth, for twelve more verses; when, having exhausted all possible rhymes to “Mog,” he concludes, not before we are heartily tired of him and Molly too.

The ballad was composed in the company of Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, the four friends whiling away the dull hours of a rainy day at the inn by capping verses in praise of Molly, “with pluvial patter for refrain.”

The verses were supposed to be the lament of the love-lorn young Squire of Arborfield, the last of the Standens, who died through an unrequited affection for her.

The beautiful Molly lived to the age of sixty-seven, and died a spinster, in 1766. It should be added that the present “Rose” inn at Wokingham, although itself of great age, and not unpicturesque, and an inn centuries before coy Molly herself was thought of, has only in modern times adopted the sign. The old “Rose” is the plain red-brick house opposite, now occupied partly as an ironmonger’s shop.

Another Mary, maid—barmaid—of the inn, issung in the modern song, “The Belle of the ‘Rose and Crown’”; but no one would accuse that of being poetry. How does it go?—

I’m saving ’em all for Mary, she shall have ev’ry one,I’m saving ’em all for Mary, she shall have lots of fun.They know me well at the County Bank,Cash is better than fame or rank.So, happy-go-lucky, I’ll marry my ducky,The Belle of the “Rose and Crown.”

Let us hope, in all charity, that purse-proud bounder and the barmaid married, and lived happily ever after.

Inns figure in various ways in literature. Daniel De Foe wrote a part ofRobinson Crusoeat the “Rose and Crown” at Halifax, and at the “Royal Hotel,” at Bideford, Charles Kingsley wroteWestward Ho!During a wakeful night at the “Burford Bridge Hotel,” near Dorking, Robert Louis Stevenson imagined a highway romance in the tapping of an outside shutter by some chance wayfarer at dead o’ night, and there Keats composedEndymion.

The “Royal” is in many respects a notable house. The earliest portion, dating from 1688, is the old mansion of one of Bideford’s merchant princes, who flourished so bravely in the remote times when distance had not been annihilated by mechanical invention and when each port had its own rich and self-contained trade. The house compares well with the “Star” Hotel at Yarmouth, whose history closely matches it. Here, at Bideford, a finely carved oak staircase leads torooms magnificently panelled and furnished with moulded plaster ceilings designed in wreaths of fruits and flowers, ascribed to Italian workmanship. The Drawing-room, in whichWestward Ho!or a portion of it, was written, has an exceptionally fine ceiling, of this type.

The great “Lion” inn on Wyle Cop, Shrewsbury, forms the scene of one of De Quincey’s mystical rhapsodies. It is the house to which he came in 1802, when, as a youth, he was setting forth in his unpractical way for London. He had walked in from Oswestry, reaching Shrewsbury two hours after nightfall. Innkeepers in those times knew little of pedestrians who footed it for pleasure, and classed all who walked when they might have rode as tramps. Therefore, it will be allowed that De Quincey timed his arrival well, at an hour when dusty feet are not so easily seen. However, had his shoes been noticed, he was ready with a defence, for he came to the “Lion” as a passenger already booked to London by the Mail. An Oswestry friend had performed that service for him, and here he was come to await the arrival of that conveyance.

“This character,” he says, “at once installed me as rightfully a guest of the inn, however profligate a life I might have previously led as a pedestrian. Accordingly I was received with special courtesy, and, it so happened, with something even like pomp. Four wax-lights carried before me by obedient mutes, these were butordinary honours, meant (as old experience had instructed me) for the first engineering step towards effecting a lodgment upon the stranger’s purse. In fact, the wax-lights are used by innkeepers, both abroad and at home, to ‘try the range of their guns.’ If the stranger submits quietly, as a good anti-pedestrian ought surely to do, and fires no counter-gun by way of protest, then he is recognised at once as passively within range, and amenable to orders. I have always looked upon this fine of 5s.or 7s.(for wax that you do not absolutely need) as a sort of inauguralhonorariumentrance-money, what in jails used to be known assmartmoney, proclaiming me to be a mancomme il faut, and no toll in this world of tolls do I pay so cheerfully. This, meantime, as I have said, was too customary a form to confer much distinction. The wax-lights, to use the magnificent Grecian phrase επομπ ευε moved pompously before me, as the holy-holy fire (the inextinguishable fire and its golden hearth) moved before CæsarsemperAugustus, when he made his official or ceremonialavatars. Yet still this moved along the ancient channels of glorification: it rolled along ancient grooves—I might say, indeed, like one of the twelve Cæsars when dying,Ut puto, Deus fio(It’s my private opinion that at this very moment I am turning into a god), but still the metamorphosis was not complete.Thatwas accomplished when I stepped into the sumptuous room allotted to me. It was a ball-room of noble proportions—lighted,if I chose to issue orders, by three gorgeous chandeliers, not basely wrapped up in paper, but sparkling through all their thickets of crystal branches, and flashing back the soft rays of my tall waxen lights. There were, moreover, two orchestras, which money would have filled within thirty minutes. And, upon the whole, one thing only was wanting—viz., a throne, for the completion of myapotheosis.

“It might be seven p.m. when first I entered upon my kingdom. About three hours later I rose from my chair, and with considerable interest looked out into the night. For nearly two hours I had heard fierce winds arising; and the whole atmosphere had by this time become one vast laboratory of hostile movements in all directions. Such a chaos, such a distracting wilderness of dim sights, and of those awful ‘sounds that live in darkness’ (Wordsworth’sExcursion), never had I consciously witnessed.... Long before midnight the household (with the exception of a solitary waiter) had retired to rest. Two hours, at least, were left to me, after twelve o’clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflections, and the local circumstances around me deepened and intensified these reflections, impressed upon them solemnity and terror, sometimes even horror....

“The unusual dimensions of the rooms, especially their towering height, brought up continually and obstinately, through natural links of associated feelings or images, the mighty vision of Londonwaiting me, afar off. An altitude of nineteen or twenty feet showed itself unavoidably upon an exaggerated scale in some of the smaller side-rooms—meant probably for cards or for refreshments. This single feature of the rooms—their unusual altitude, and the echoing hollowness which had become the exponent of that altitude—this one terrific feature (for terrific it was in its effect), together with the crowding and evanescent images of the flying feet that so often had spread gladness through these halls, on the wings of youth and hope, at seasons when every room rang with music—all this, rising in tumultuous vision, whilst the dead hours of the night were stealing along, all around me—household and town—sleeping, and whilst against the windows more and more the storm was raving, and to all appearance endlessly growing, threw me into the deadliest condition of nervous emotion under contradictory forces, high over which predominated horror recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in London into which I was now so wilfully precipitating myself.”

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 feature of the twomusic-galleries and the chandeliers are still there, together with the supper-room at one end divided off from the greater saloon, and therefore 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, and has a fine oak dancing-floor, but it more commonly serves, throughout the year, that of a commercial traveller’s 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 lanecalled 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.

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 theéliteof 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” atWhitchurch, 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 theLyra Apostolica, beginning:

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