Thus, Bill Sikes and Oliver, trudging from London to Chertsey, where the burglary was to be committed, and occasionally getting a lift on the way, are set down from a cart at the end of Brentford. At length they came to a public-house called the “Coach and Horses”; a little way beyond which another road appeared to turn off. And here the cart stopped.

THE “COACH AND HORSES,” ISLEWORTH.

One finds the “Coach and Horses,” sure enough, at the point where Brentford ends and Isleworth begins, by the entrance to Sion Park, and near the spot where the road branches off to the left. The “Coach and Horses” is not a picturesque inn. It is a huge, four-square lump of a place, and wears, indeed, rather a dour and forbidding aspect. It is unquestionably the house of which Dickens speaks, and was built certainly not later than the dawn of the nineteenth century. In these latter days the road here has been rendered somewhat more urban by the advent of the electric tramway; but I have in my sketch of the scene taken the artistic licence of omitting that twentieth-century development, and, to add an air of verisimilitude, have represented Sikes and Oliver in the act of approaching. The left-hand road beyond leads to a right-hand road, as in the story, and this in due course to Hampton.

The most interesting Dickensian inn, outside the pages of Pickwick, is the “Maypole,” in Barnaby Rudge.

There never existed upon this earth an inn so picturesque as that drawn, entirely from his imagination, by Cattermole, to represent the “Maypole.” You may seek even among the old mansions of England, and find nothing more baronial. The actual “Maypole”—when found—is a sad disappointment to those who have cherished the Cattermole ideal, and there is wrath and indignation among pilgrims from over-seas when they come to it. This, although natural enough, is an injustice to this real original, which is one of the most picturesque old inns now to be found, and is not properly to be made little of because it cannot fit an impossible artistic fantasy.

I have hinted above that the “Maypole” requires some effort to find, and that is true enough, even in these days when the England of Dickens has been so plentifully elucidated and mapped out and sorted over. The prime cause of this incertitude and boggling is that there really is a “Maypole” inn, but at that very different place, Chigwell Row, two miles distant from Chigwell and the “King’s Head.” Many years ago, the late James Payn wrote an amusing account—as to whose entire truth we cannot vouch—of his taking a party of enthusiastic American ladies in search of this scene of Barnaby Rudge. They drove about the forest seeking (such was their ignorance) the “Maypole,” and not the “King’s Head”; and found it, in a low and ugly beerhouse from which drunken beanfeasters waved inviting pots of beer. Eventually they left the forest convinced that the inn Dickens described was a sheer myth.

If the “King’s Head” of fact—“such a delicious old inn opposite the churchyard,” as Dickens wrote of it to Forster—is not so wonderful an old house as the “Maypole” of fiction and of Cattermole’s picturesque fancy, we must, at any rate, excuse the artist, who was under the necessity of working up to the fervid description of it with which the story begins: “An old building, with more gable-ends than a lazy man would care to count on a sunny day; huge zig-zag chimneys, out of which it seemed as though even smoke could not choose but come in more than naturally fantastic shapes, imparted to it in its tortuous progress; and vast stables, gloomy, ruinous, and empty. The place was said to have been built in the days of King Henry the Eighth; and there, was a legend, not only that Queen Elizabeth had slept there one night while upon a hunting excursion, to wit, in a certain oak-panelled room with a deep bay-window, but that next morning, while standing upon a mounting-block before the door, with one foot in the stirrup, the virgin monarch had then and there boxed and cuffed an unlucky page for some neglect of duty.”

THE “KING’S HEAD,” CHIGWELL, THE “MAYPOLE” OF BARNABY RUDGE.