Judge Sewall records one scene, a typically Puritanical one, and worthy of a Puritan tithing-man. It took place at the Castle Inn where he went with some other good Bostonians to shut off a “vain show.”
“Treat with Brother Wing (the landlord) about his Setting a Room in his House for a Man to shew Tricks in. He saith, seeing ’tis offensive he will remedy it. It seems the Room is fitted with Seats. I read what Dr. Ames saith of Callings, and spake as I could from this Principle, that the Man’s Practice was unlawfull, and therefore Capt. Wing could not lawfully give him an accommodation for it. Sung the 90 Ps from the 12 v to the end. Broke up.”
There is a suggestion of sober farce in this picture of those pious gentlemen reading and expounding a sermon, whipping out their psalm books, and singing a psalm to poor hospitable Landlord Wing in the parlor or taproom of his own house.
Naturally the Puritan planters, and all “true New-English men” like Sewall, did not care to have the ordinaries of their quiet towns made into places of gay resort, of what they called “the shewing of vain shews.” They deemed those hostelries places of hospitable convenience, not of lively entertainment. A contemporary poet, Quarles, thus compares human life to a stay at an inn:—
“Our life is nothing but a winter’s day,
Some only break their fast and so away;
Others stay dinner and depart full fed;
The deepest age but sups and goes to bed.
He’s most in debt who lingers out the day,
Who dies betimes, has less and less to pay.”
This somewhat melancholy view, both of life and of a public house, lingered long in the colonies, for nearly a century; we might say, with the life of the ordinary. When taverns came, their guests thought very little of dying, and paid very much attention to living.
CHAPTER II
OLD-TIME TAVERNS