The image, indeed, is rather a bold one, reminding us of the soliloquy in a French tragedy, commencing with the observation—‘Quel silence se fait entendre.’

While directing attention to Mr. Tuckerman’s pleasant paper on Statues, it may be worth while recording that under the Christian era sculpture was first employed by a woman, under the influence of gratitude for a manifestation of the divine mercy. The story is, indeed, only traditional, but it is ancient, and comes down to us through Eusebius. According to that historian the woman of Paneas, after having been cured of her disease, as mentioned in the Gospels, returned to her native place and set up in one of the streets there an image of the Saviour, with the figure of herself in the act of adoration. This group of statuary (the material, indeed, is not mentioned, and the word image sometimes implies picture) was the progenitor of all the effigies of God and the saints that have since been erected in public highways in order to stimulate the religious fervour of the passers by. If that alleged proto-group did not exactly effect this, the story of the grateful woman and her statuary led to the same result. It may be a mere legend; but even then the legend itself was in such case invented for the purpose of bringing about the adoption of the fashion of setting up images challenging the reverence of all who looked on them, and it was afterwards appealed to as authority, alike for the fashion and the observance.

Nowhere have statues been erected with greater effect than on Bridges. They who remember the bridge at Prague, over the Moldau, with the statues and groups of saints, St. John Neoponuck towering over all, will confirm this fact. The fashion has not been followed in our own country, where there are some relics, however, of bridge architecture said to be as old as the days of the Britons. Such are rather fondly said to be the small red stone arches spanning the streams in some of the Cornish valleys. We may rest more satisfied, however, with the triangular bridge at Croyland, which was completed in the year after the island was first called England, namely, A.D. 830. Whether we can, in the days of Queen Victoria, detect in the structure any of the stones the laying of which was watched by the curious Lincolnshire folk in the reign of King Egbert, may be reasonably doubted. The foundations rather than the superstructure of the original bridge alone remain. This bridge was of great importance to the monastery of Croyland, but indeed as much may be said of all bridges and their vicinities. To build them was a holy work. The title of ‘Pontifex’ belonged to the highest of the sacred classes of Rome. ‘Pontifex Maximus’ is a designation which the pope himself inherits from the Roman emperors, and ‘Pontificum Cœnæ’ is a phrase by which we learn from Horace that the sacred successors of those who erected the Sublician bridge were persons who, with some care for the souls and well-being of the people, had a special regard for their own bodies.

Perhaps it was because of this connection between holy men and bridges that in early English times the keeping of our bridges and of the roads leading to them was intrusted to hermits, who were in fact the original toll-takers and turnpike-keepers in England. Old London Bridge, which was commenced in 1176 and finished in 1209, which was the only bridge at London over the Thames till that of Westminster was opened in 1738, and which lasted till the new bridge was inaugurated in 1831 by William the Fourth, was the work of a holy Pontifex, Peter Colechurch, chaplain of St. Mary’s in the Poultry. The architect found fitting burial place in the crypt of the chapel of St. Thomas, which stood in the centre of the bridge itself. Thus the London Bridge which Peter built became his sepulchre and monument when Peter died.

But it is time that I should be at least as silent as Peter himself, since Mr. Tuckerman is ready and the stage prepared. The first little piece is played out, and the curtain now rises to a better sustained drama and to a finished actor—Plaudite!

J. DORAN.

INNS.

The old, legitimate, delightful idea of an Inn is becoming obsolete; like so many other traditional blessings, it has been sacrificed to the genius of locomotion. The rapidity with which distance is consumed obviates the need that so long existed of by-way retreats and halting-places. A hearty meal or a few hours’ sleep, caught between the arrival of the trains, is all the railway traveller requires; and the modern habit of moving in caravans has infinitely lessened the romantic probabilities and comfortable realities of a journey: the rural alehouse and picturesque hostel now exist chiefly in the domain of memory; crowds, haste, and ostentation triumph here over privacy and rational enjoyment, as in nearly all the arrangements of modern society. Old Walton would discover now but few of the secluded inns that refreshed him on his piscatorial excursions; the ancient ballads on the wall have given place to French paper; the scent of lavender no longer makes the linen fragrant; instead of the crackle of the open wood-fire, we have the dingy coal-smoke, and exhalations of a stove; and green blinds usurp the place of the snowy curtains. Not only these material details, but the social character of the inn is sadly changed. Few hosts can find time to gossip; the clubs have withdrawn the wits; the excitement of a stage-coach arrival is no more; and a poet might travel a thousand leagues without finding a romantic ‘maid of the inn,’ such as Southey has immortalized. Jollity, freedom, and comfort are no longer inevitably associated with the name; the world has become a vast procession that scorns to linger on its route, and has almost forgotten how to enjoy. Thanks, however, to the conservative spell of literature, we can yet appreciate, in imagination at least, the good old English inn. Goldsmith’s Village Alehouse has daguerreotyped its humble species, while Dr. Johnson’s evenings at the ‘Mitre’ keep vivid the charm of its metropolitan fame. Indeed, it is quite impossible to imagine what British authors would have done without the solace and inspiration of the inn. Addison fled thither from domestic annoyance; Dryden’s chair at ‘Will’s’ was an oracular throne; when hard pressed, Steele and Savage sought refuge in a tavern, and wrote pamphlets for a dinner; Farquhar found there his best comic material; Sterne opens his Sentimental Journey with his landlord, Monsieur Dessein, Calais, and his inn-yard; Shenstone confessed he found ‘life’s warmest welcome at an inn;’ Sheridan’s convivial brilliancy shone there with peculiar lustre; Hazlitt relished Congreve anew, reading him in the shady windows of a village inn after a long walk; even an old Almanac, or Annual Register, will acquire an interest under such circumstances; and a dog-eared copy of the Seasons found in such a place induced Coleridge to exclaim, ‘This is fame!’ while Byron exulted when informed that a well-thumbed volume of the English Bards had been seen, soon after its publication, at a little hostel in Albany. Elia’s quaint anecdote of the Quakers when they all ate supper without paying for it, and Irving’s ‘Stout Gentleman,’ are incidents which could only have been suggested by a country inn; and as to the novelists, from Smollett and Fielding to Scott and Dickens, the most characteristic scenes occur on this vantage-ground, where the strict unities of life are temporarily discarded, and its zest miraculously quickened by fatigue, hunger, a kind of infinite possibility of events, a singular mood of adventure and pastime, nowhere else in civilized lands so readily induced. It is, therefore, by instinct that these enchanting chroniclers lead us thither, from old Chaucer to our own Longfellow. Gil Bias acquired his first lesson in a knowledge of the world, by his encounter with the parasite at the inn of Panafleur; and Don Quixote’s enthusiasm always reaches a climax at these places of wayside sojourn. The ‘Black Bull,’ at Islington, is said to have been Sir Walter Raleigh’s mansion; ‘Dolly’s Chop-House’ is dear to authors for the sake of Goldsmith and his friends, who used to go there on their way to and from Paternoster Row. At the ‘Salutation and Cat,’ Smithfield, Coleridge and Lamb held memorable converse; and Steele often dated his Tatlers from the ‘Trumpet.’ How appropriate for Voltaire to have lodged, in London, at the ‘White Peruke’! Spenser died at an inn in King Street, Westminster, on his return from Ireland. At the ‘Red Horse,’ Stratford, is the ‘Irving room,’ precious to the American traveller; and how renowned have sweet Anne Page and jolly Falstaff made the very name of the ‘Garter Inn’! In the East a monastery, in the Desert a tent, on the Nile a boat, a hacienda in South America, a kiosk in Turkey, a caffé in Italy, but in Britain an inn, is the pilgrim’s home, and one not less characteristic. The subject, as suggestive of the philosophy of civilization, is worth investigation.

In England and in towns of Anglo-Saxon origin, where the economies of life have a natural sway, we find inns representative; in London, especially, a glance at the parlour wall reveals the class to whose convenience the tavern is dedicated: in one the portraits of actors, in another scenes in the ring and on the racecourse; here the countenance of a leading merchant, and there a military effigy, suggest the vocation of those who chiefly frequent the inn. Nor are local features less certain to find recognition: a view of the nearest nobleman’s estate, or his portrait, ornaments the sitting-room; and the observant eye can always discover an historical hint at these public resorts. Heywood, the dramatist, aptly specified this representative character of inns:—

Inn signs are indeed historical landmarks: in the Middle Ages, the ‘Cross Keys,’ the ‘Three Kings,’ and ‘St. Francis,’ abounded; the Puritans substituted for ‘Angel and Lady,’ the ‘Soldier and Citizen;’ the ‘Saracen’s Head’ was a device of the Crusades; and before the ‘Coach and Horses’ was the sign of the ‘Packhorse,’ indicative of the days of equestrian travel. Many current anecdotes attest the virtue of an old, and the hazards of a new inn sign; as when the loyal host substituted the head of George the Fourth for the ancient ass, which latter effigy being successfully adopted by a neighbouring innkeeper, his discomfited rival had inscribed under the royal effigy, ‘This is the real ass.’ Thackeray cites an inn sign as illustrative of Scotch egotism: ‘In Cupar-Fife,’ he writes, ‘there’s a little inn called the “Battle of Waterloo,” and what do you think the sign is? The “Battle of Waterloo” is one broad Scotchman laying about him with a broadsword.’

The coffee-room of the best class of English inns, carpeted and curtained, the dark rich hue of the old mahogany, the ancient plate, the four-post bed, the sirloin or mutton joint, the tea, muffins, Cheshire and Stilton, the ale, the coal-fire, and The Times, form an epitome of England; and it is only requisite to ponder well the associations and history of each of these items, to arrive at what is essential in English history and character. The impassable divisions of society are shown in the difference between the ‘commercial’ and the ‘coffee-room;’ the time-worn aspect of the furniture is eloquent of conservatism; the richness of the meats and strength of the ale explain the bone and sinew of the race; the tea is fragrant with Cowper’s memory, and suggestive of East India conquests; the cheese proclaims a thrifty agriculture, the bed and draperies comfort, the coal-fire manufactures; while The Times is the chart of English enterprise, division of labour, wealth, self-esteem, politics, trade, court-life, ‘inaccessibility to ideas,’ and bullyism.

The national subserviency to rank is as plainly evinced by the plates on chamber-doors at the provincial inns, setting forth that therein on a memorable night slept a certain scion of nobility. And from the visitor at the great house of a neighbourhood, when sojourning at the inn thereof, is expected a double fee. As an instance of the inappropriate, of that stolid insensibility to taste and tact which belongs to the nation, consider the English waiter. His costume is that of a clergyman, or a gentleman dressed for company, and in ridiculous contrast with his menial obeisance; perhaps it is the self-importance nourished by this costume which renders him such a machine, incapable of an idea beyond the routine of handing a dish and receiving a sixpence.

Old Hobson, whose name is proverbially familiar, went with his wain from Cambridge to the ‘Bull Inn,’ Bishopsgate Street, London. ‘Clement’s Inn’ tavern was the scene of that memorable dialogue between Shallow and Sir John; at the ‘Cock,’ in Bond Street, Sir Charles Sedley got scandalously drunk. ‘Will’s Coffee-house’ was formerly called the ‘Rose;’ hence the line—

‘Button’s,’ so long frequented by the wits of Queen Anne’s time, was kept by a former servant of Lady Warwick; and there the author of Cato fraternized with Garth, Armstrong, and other contemporary writers. Ben Jonson held his club at the ‘Devil Tavern,’ and Shakspeare and Beaumont used to meet him at the ‘Mermaid;’ the same inn is spoken of by Pope, and Swift writes ‘Stella’ of his dinner there. Beaumont thus reveals to Ben Jonson their convivial talk:—

The author of Peter Wilkins was a frequent visitor at an hostel near Clifford’s Inn, and Dr. Johnson frequented all the taverns in Fleet Street. Old Slaughter’s coffee-house, in St. Martin’s Lane, was the favourite resort of Hogarth; the house where Jeremy Taylor was born is now an inn; and Prior’s uncle kept an inn in London, where the poet was seen, when a boy, reading Horace. This incident is made use of by Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, in a very caustic manner; for, after relating it, he observes of Prior, that ‘in his private relaxations he revived the tavern, and in his amorous pedantry he exhibited the college.’

There is no city in Europe where an imaginative mood can be so indefinitely prolonged as at Venice; and in the early summer, the traveller, after gliding about all day in a gondola, and thinking of Barbarossa, Faliero, Titian, and the creations of Shakspeare, Otway, Byron, and Cooper, at evening, from under the arches of St. Mark’s Square, watches the picturesque, and sometimes mysterious figures, and then, between moss-grown palaces and over lone canals, returns to his locanda to find its aspect perfectly in accordance with his reverie; at least, such was my experience at the ‘Golden Lion.’ The immense salle-à-manger was dimly lighted, and the table for two or three guests set in a corner and half surrounded by a screen; when I raised my eyes from my first dinner there, they fell on a large painting of the Death of Seneca, a print of which had been familiar to my childhood; and thus memory was ever invoked in Venice, and her dissolving views reflected in the mirror of the mind, unbroken by the interruptions from passing life that elsewhere render them so brief. The mere fact of disembarking at the weedy steps, the utter silence of the canal, invaded only by the plash of the gondolier’s oar, or his warning cry at the angle, the tessellated pavement and quaintly-carved furniture of the bedroom, and a certain noiseless step and secretive gravity observable in the attendants, render the Venetian inn memorable and distinct in reminiscence, and in perfect harmony with the place and its associations.

During the late revolutionary era in Europe, the inn tables of Germany afforded the most reliable index of political opinion; the free discussion which was there indulged brought out every variety of sentiment and theory, as it included all classes, with a due sprinkling of foreigners. From the old novel to the new farce, indeed, the extremes of public opinion and the average tone of manners, the laughable contre-temps and the delightful adventure, are made to reveal themselves at inns, so that political sects and all vocations are identified with them. To Rip Van Winkle, the most astonishing change he discovered in his native village, after his long nap, was the substitution of Washington’s likeness for that of King George on the tavern sign.

The dark staircase, rising from the mule stable of a posada, the bare chambers, wool-knotted mattresses, odour of garlic, and vegetables swimming in oil, are items of the Spanish inn not likely to be forgotten by the epicurean traveller. But good beds and excellent chocolate are to be found at the most uninviting Spanish inns; and the imaginative traveller enjoys the privilege of sojourning at the very one where Don Quixote was knighted. In highly-civilized lands, inns have not only a national, but a professional character; the sign, the pictures on the wall, and the company, have a certain individuality,—marine in sailors’ inns, pugilistic in sporting ones, and picturesque in those haunted by artists; the lines of demarcation are as visible as those which separate newspapers and shops; in the grand division of labour that signalizes modern life, the inn also has thus become an organ and a symbol. Even their mottoes and symbols give traditional suggestions, or emblazon phases of opinion; natural history has been exhausted in supplying effigies; mythology has yielded up all her deities and institutions; heroes and localities are kept fresh in the traveller’s imagination by their association with ‘creature comforts.’ Thus he dreams of Cromwell at the ‘Tumble-down Dick,’ and of the Stuarts at the ‘King Charles in the Oak,’ the days of chivalry at the ‘Star and Garter’ or the ‘Croix de Malta,’ of brilliant campaigns at the ‘Wagram and Montmorency,’ of woman’s love at the ‘Petrarch and Laura,’ and of man’s at the ‘Freemasons’ Tavern.’[1]

My host at Ravenna had been Byron’s purveyor during the poet’s residence there; and he was never weary of descanting upon his character and the incidents of his sojourn; in fact, upon discovering my interest in the subject, he forgot the landlord in the cicerone, and gave no small part of a day to accompanying me to the haunts of the bard. Our first visit was to the Guiccioli Palace, and here he described his lordship’s dinners with the precision and enthusiasm of an antiquarian certifying a document or medal; then he took me to the Pine Forest, and pointed out the track where Byron used to wheel his horse at full gallop, and discharge his pistol at a bottle placed on a stump—exercises preparatory to his Grecian campaign. At a particular flagstone, in the main street, my guide suddenly paused; ‘Signore,’ said he ‘just as milord had reached this spot one evening, he heard the report of a musket, and saw an officer fall a few rods in advance; dismounting, he rushed to his side, and found him to be a familiar acquaintance, an agent of the government, who had thus become the victim to private vengeance. Byron had him conveyed to his own apartment and placed on a bed, where in half an hour he expired. This event made a deep impression on his mind; he was dispirited for a week, and wrote a description of death from a shot, which you will find in his poems, derived from this scene.’ With such local anecdotes my Byronic host entertained me so well, that the departed bard ever since has seemed to live in my remembrance rather than my fancy.

Whoever has eaten trout caught in the Arno at the little inn at Tivoli, or been detained by stress of weather in that of Albano, will not forget the evidences the walls of both exhibit that rollicking artists have felt at home there. Such heads and landscapes, caricatures and grotesque animals, as are there improvised, baffle description.

A well is the inn of the desert. ‘The dragoman usually looks out for some place of shelter,’ says the author of Over the Lebanon to Balbek; ‘the shadow of a ruin or the covering of a grove of fig-trees is the most common, and, if possible, near a well or stream. The first of all considerations is to reach a spot where you can get water; so that throughout the East the well answers to the old English “Half-way House,” and road-side “Accommodation for Man and Beast,” which gave their cheerful welcome to the “Tally Ho” and “Red Rover” that flourished before this age of iron.’

The pedestrian in Wales sometimes encounters a snug and beautifully-situated hostel (perhaps the ‘Angler’s Rest’), where five minutes beside the parlour fire, and a chat with the landlady or her pretty daughter, give him so complete a home feeling that it is with painful reluctance he again straps on his knapsack; at liberty to muse by the ever-singing tea-kettle if the weather is unpropitious, stroll out in view of a noble mountain or a fairy lake in the warm sunset, or hear the news from the last wayfarer in the travellers’ room; and there is thus mingled a sense of personal independence, comfort, and solitude, which is rarely experienced even in the most favoured domain of hospitality. An equally winsome but more romantic charm holds the roaming artist who stops at Albano or Volterra, where the dreamy campagna or Etruscan ruins alternate with groups of sunburnt contadini, lighted up by the charcoal’s glow in a way to fascinate Salvator, before his contented gaze; his portfolio fills up with miraculous rapidity; and the still life is agreeably varied by the scenic costumes and figures which grace the vintage or a festa. Some humble Champollion could easily add to the curiosities of literature by a volume gleaned among inn inscriptions—from the marble tablet announcing the sojourn of a royal personage, to the rude caricature on the whitewashed wall, and the sentimental couplet on the window-pane; to say nothing of the albums which enshrine so many tributes to Etna and the White Mountains—the heirlooms of Abbaté, the famous padrone of Catania, and Crawford of the Notch.

Sicily is famous for the absence of inns, and the intolerable discomfort of those that do exist; but mine host of Catania was the prince of landlords. A fine specimen of manly beauty, and with the manners of a gentleman, he seemed to think his guests entitled to all the courtesy which should follow an invitation; he made formal calls upon them, and gave sage advice as to the best way to pass the time; fitted them out with hospitable skill and experienced counsels for the ascent of Etna, and brought home choice game from his hunting excursions, as a present to the ‘stranger within his gates.’ His discourse, too, was of the most bland and entertaining description; he was ‘a fellow of infinite wit, of most excellent fancy;’ and these ministrations derived a memorable charm from a certain gracefulness and winsome cordiality. No wonder his scrap-book is filled with eulogiums, and that the traveller in Sicily, by the mere force of contrast, records in hyperboles the merits of the ‘Corona d’Oro.’ Alas for the mutability of inns and their worthy hosts! Abbaté was killed by an accidental shot, during an émeute in Catania, in 1848.

The waxed floor, light curtains, and gay paper of a Parisian bedroom, however cheerful, are the reverse of snug; but in the provincial inns of the Continent, with less of comfort there is often more historical interest than in those of England; the stone staircases and floors, and the scanty furniture are forlorn; and the exuberance of the host’s civility is often in ludicrous contrast with the poverty of his larder. An hour or two in the dreary salle-à-manger of a provincial French inn on a rainy day is the acme of a voyageur’s depression. The restaurant and café have superseded the French inns, of whose gastronomic renown and scenes of intrigue and violence we read in Dumas’s historical novels; romance and tragedy, the convivial and the culinary associations, are equally prominent. ‘Suburban cabarets,’ observes a popular writer, ‘were long dangerous rendezvous for Parisians;’ before and during the Grand Monarque’s reign the French taverns were representative, the army, court, men of letters, and even ecclesiastics having their favourite haunt: Molière went to the ‘Croix de Lorraine,’ and Racine to the ‘Mouton Blanc;’ the actors met at ‘Les Deux Faisans;’ one of the last of the old-school Parisian landladies—she who kept the ‘Maison Rouge’—is celebrated in Béranger’s Madame Gregoire; Ravaillac went from a tavern to assassinate Henry the Fourth; and fashionable orgies were carried on in the ‘Temple Cellars.’ It is not uncommon to find ourselves in a friar’s dormitory, the large hotels in the minor towns having frequently been erected as convents; and in Italy, such an inn as that of Terracina, with its legends of banditti and its romantic site, the waves of the Mediterranean moaning under its lofty windows, infallibly recalls Mrs. Radcliffe. In the cities many of the hotels are palaces where noble families have dwelt for centuries, and about them are perceptible the traces of decayed magnificence and the spell of traditional glory and crime. To an imaginative traveller these fanciful attractions often compensate for the absence of substantial merit, and there is something mysterious and winsome in the obsolete architecture and fallen grandeur of these edifices;—huge shadows glide along the high cornices, the mouldy frescoes look as if they had witnessed strange vicissitudes, and the imagination readily wanders through a series of wonderful experiences of which these old palazzi have been the scene. Here, as elsewhere in the land, it is the romantic element, the charm of antiquity, that is the redeeming feature. For picturesque beauty of situation, neatness, and rural comfort, some of the inns of Switzerland are the most delightful on the Continent, inviting the stranger to linger amid the clear, fresh, and glorious landscape, and relish the sweet butter, white bread, and unrivalled honey and eggs, served so neatly every morning by a fair mountaineer with snowy cap and gay bodice.

I am a lover of the woods, and sometimes cross the bay, with a friend, to Long Island, and pass a few hours in the strip of forest that protected our fugitive army at the Battle of Flatbush; there are devious and shadowy paths intersecting it, and in spring and autumn the wild flowers, radiant leaves, and balmy stillness cheer the mind and senses, fresh from the dust and bustle of the city. Often after one of these woodland excursions we have emerged upon a quiet road, with farm-houses at long intervals, and orchards and grain-fields adjacent, and followed its course to a village, whose gable-roofed domicile and ancient graveyard indicate an old settlement; and here is a little inn which recalls our idea of the primitive English alehouse. It has a little Dutch porch, a sunny garden, the liquor is served from the square bottles of Holland, the back parlour is retired and neat, and the landlady sits all day in the window at her sewing, and, when a little acquainted, will tell you all about the love-affairs of the village; the cheese and sour-krout at dinner suggest a Flemish origin.

The old sign that hangs at the road-side was brought to this country by an English publican, when the fine arts were supposed to be at so low a stage as to furnish no Dick Tinto equal to such an achievement. It represents the arms of Great Britain, and doubtless beguiled many a trooper of his Majesty when Long Island was occupied by the English; no sooner, however, had they retreated, than the republican villagers forced the landlord to have an American eagle painted above the king’s escutcheon. Indeed, it is characteristic of inns that they perpetuate local associations: put your head into an Italian boarding-house in New York, and the garlic, macaroni, and red wine lead you to think yourself at Naples; the snuff, dominoes, and gazettes mark a French café all the world over; in Montreal you wake up in a room like that you occupied at Marseilles; and at Halifax the malt liquor is as English as the currency.

‘The sports of the inn yards’ are noted often in the memoirs of Elizabeth’s reign. In a late biography of Lord Bacon, his brother Anthony is spoken of as ‘having taken a house in Bishopsgate Street, near the famous “Ball Inn,” where plays are performed before cits and gentlemen, very much to the delight of Essex and his jovial crew.’ And in allusion to the Earl’s conspiracy, the lower class of inns then and there are thus described: ‘From kens like the “Hart’s Horn” and the “Shipwreck Tavern,” haunts of the vilest refuse of a great city, the spawn of hells and stews, the vomit of Italian cloisters and Belgian camps, Blount, long familiar with the agents of disorder, unkennels in the Earl’s name a pack of needy ruffians eager for any device that seems to promise pay to their greed or licence to their lust.’ It has been justly remarked by Letitia Landon, that ‘after all, the English hostel owes much of its charm to Chaucer; our associations are of his haunting pictures—his delicate prioress, his comely young squire, with their pleasant interchange of tale and legend:’ still less remote and more personal associations endear and identify these landmarks of travel and sojourn in Great Britain. Scarcely a pleasant record of life or manners, during the last century, is destitute of one of these memorable resorts. Addison frequented the ‘White Horn,’ at the end of Holland House Lane. When Sir Walter Scott visited Wordsworth, he daily strolled to the ‘Swan,’ beyond Grasmere, to atone for the plain fare of the bard’s cottage. ‘We four,’ naïvely writes the Rev. Archibald Carlyle, speaking of his literary comrades, ‘frequently resorted to a small tavern at the corner of Cockspur Street, the “Golden Ball,” where we had a frugal supper and a little punch, as the finances of none of the company were in very good order; but we had rich enough conversation on literary subjects, enlivened by Smollett’s agreeable stories, which he told with peculiar grace.’ And his more than clerical zest for such a rendezvous is apparent in his notice of another favourite inn: ‘It was during this assembly that the inn at the lower end of the West Bow got into some credit, and was called the “Diversorium.” Thomas Nicholson was the man’s name, and his wife’s Nelly Douglas. Nelly was handsome, Thomas a rattling fellow.’ Here often met Robertson the historian, Horne the dramatist, Hume, Jardine, and other notable men of the Scotch metropolis. To facilitate their intercourse when in London, they also ‘established a club at a coffee-house in Saville Row, and dined together daily at three with Wedderburn and Jack Dalrymple.’ By the same candid autobiographer we are informed that, at a tavern ‘in Fleet Street, a physicians’ club met, had original papers laid before them, and always waited supper for Dr. Armstrong to order.’ These casual allusions indicate the essential convenience and social importance of the inn, before clubs had superseded them in Britain, and cafés on the Continent. A writer, whose Itinerary is dated 1617, thus describes entertainment at the English inns of his day: ‘As soone as a passenger comes to an inne, the servants run to him, and one takes his horse and walkes him about till he is cool, then rubs him down and gives him feed; another servant gives the passenger his private chamber, and kindles his fire; the third pulls off his bootes and makes them cleane; then the host and hostess visit him, and if he will eate with the hoste, or at a common table with the others, his meale will cost him sixpence, or, in some places, fourpence; but if he will eate in his own chamber, he commands what meat he will, according to his appetite; yea, the kitchen is open to him to order the meat to be dressed as he likes beste. After having eaten what he pleases, he may with credit set by a part for next day’s breakfast. His bill will then be written for him, and should he object to any charge, the host is ready to alter it.’ An Italian nobleman of our own day,[2] his appreciation of free discussion quickened by political exile, was much impressed with the influence and agency of the English inn in public affairs. ‘Taverns,’ he writes, ‘are the forum of the English; it was here that arose the triumph of Burdett when he left the Tower, and the curses of Castlereagh when he descended into the tomb; it is here that begins the censure or the approval of a new law.’

Charles Lamb delighted to smoke his pipe at the old ‘Queen’s Head,’ and to quaff ale from the tankard presented by one Master Cranch (a choice spirit) to a former host, and in the old oak-parlour where tradition says ‘the gallant Raleigh received full souse in his face the contents of a jolly black-jack from an affrighted clown, who, seeing clouds of tobacco smoke curling from the knight’s mouth and nose, thought he was all on fire.’

‘A relic of old London is fast disappearing,’ says a journal of that city—‘the “Blue Boar Inn,” or the “George and Blue Boar,” as it came to be called later, in Holborn. For more than two hundred years this was one of the famous coaching-houses, where stages arrived from the Northern and Midland counties. It is more famous still as being the place—if Lord Orrery’s chaplain, Morrice, may be credited—where Cromwell and Ireton, disguised as troopers, cut from the saddle-flap of a messenger a letter which they knew to be there, from Charles the First to Henrietta Maria.’

The ‘Peacock,’ at Matlock on the Derwent, was long the chosen resort of artists, botanists, geologists, lawyers, and anglers; and perhaps at no rural English inn of modern times has there been more varied and gifted society than occasionally convened in this romantic district, under its roof.

The ‘Hotel Gibbon,’ at Lausanne, suggests to one familiar with English literature the life of that historian, so naïvely described by himself, and keeps alive the associations of his elaborate work in the scene of its production; and nightly colloquies, that are embalmed and embodied in genial literature, immortalize the ‘sky-blue parlour’ at Ambrose’s ‘Edinburgh Tavern.’

Few historical novelists have more completely mastered the details of costume, architecture, and social habits in the old times of England, than James; and his description of the inns of Queen Anne’s day is as elaborate as it is complete: ‘Landlords in England at that time—I mean, of course, in country towns—were very different in many respects, and of a different class, from what they are at present. In the first place, they were not fine gentlemen; in the next place, they were not discharged valets-de-chambre or butlers, who, having cheated their masters handsomely, and perhaps laid them under contribution in many ways, retire to enjoy the fat things at their ease in their native town. Then, again, they were on terms of familiar intercourse with two or three classes, completely separate and distinct from each other—a sort of connecting link between them. At their door, the justice of the peace, the knight of the shire, the great man of the neighbourhood, dismounted from his horse, and had his chat with mine host. There came the village lawyer, when he gained a cause, or won a large fee, or had been paid a long bill, to indulge in his pint of sherry, and gossiped as he drank it of all the affairs of his clients. There sneaked in the doctor to get his glass of eau-de-vie, or plague-water, or aqua mirabilis, or strong spirits, in short, of any other denomination, and tell little dirty anecdotes of his cases and his patients. There the alderman, the wealthy shopkeeper, and the small proprietor, or the large farmer, came to take his cheerful cup on Saturdays, or on market-day. But, besides these, the inn was the resort—though approached by another door—of a lower and a poorer class, with whom the landlord was still upon as good terms as with the others. The wagoner, the carter, the lawyer’s and the banker’s clerk, the shopman, the porter even, all came there; the landlord was civil, and familiar, and chatty with them all.’

Geoffrey Crayon’s ‘Shakspearian Research’ culminated at the ‘Boar Head,’ Eastcheap; his story of the ‘Spectre Bridegroom’ was appropriately related in the kitchen of the ‘Pomme d’Or,’ in the Netherlands; and he makes Rip’s congenial retreat from his virago spouse, the ‘coin of vantage’ in front of the village inn. Irving’s own appreciation of these vagabond shrines and accidental homes is emphatic; he commends the ‘honest bursts of laughter in which a man indulges in that temple of true liberty, an inn,’ and quotes zestfully the maxim that ‘a tavern is the rendezvous, the exchange, the staple of good fellows.’ His personal testimony is characteristic: ‘To a homeless man there is a momentary feeling of independence, as he stretches himself before an inn fire: the arm-chair is his throne, the poker is his sceptre, and the little parlour his undisputed empire.’ How little did the modest author imagine, when he thus wrote, that the poker with which he stirred the fire in the parlour-grate of the ‘Red Lion’ would become a sacred literary relic wherewith his partial countrymen are beguiled of extra fees, while the bard of Avon and the gentleman of Sunnyside mingle in the reverie of fond reminiscence.

‘I went by an indirect route to Lichfield,’ writes Hawthorne, in his English sketches, ‘and put up at the “Black Swan.” Had I known where to find it, I would rather have established myself at the inn kept by Mr. Boniface, and so famous for its ale in Farquhar’s time.’ Gossip and gaiety, the poor man’s arena and the ‘breathing-time of day’ of genius, thus give to the inn a kind of humane scope. Beethoven, wearied of his palace-home and courtly patronage, and the ‘stately houses open to him in town and country, often forsook all for solitude in obscure inns, escaping from all conventionalities to be alone with himself.’ ‘Nous voyons,’ says Brillat-Savarin, ‘que les villageois font toutes les affaires au cabaret;’ Rousseau delighted in the frugal liberty thereof; and the last days of Elia are associated with the inn which was the goal of his daily promenade. ‘After Isola married,’ writes one of his friends, ‘and Mary was infirm, he took his lonely walk along the London road, as far as the “Bell of Edmonton;” and one day tripped over a stone and slightly wounded his forehead; erysipelas set in, and he died.’ Somewhat of the attractiveness of the inn to the philosopher is that its temporary and casual shelter and solace accord with the counsel of Sydney Smith, ‘to take short views,’ and Goëthe’s, to ‘cast ourselves into the sea of accidents;’ and a less amiable reason for the partiality has been suggested in ‘the wide capability of finding fault which an inn affords.’ A genial picture of one is thus drawn by a modern poet:—

As a contrast to this, take Longfellow’s ‘Wayside Inn,’ at Sudbury, Massachusetts:—