“More stanzas,” says Graves, “were added afterwards,” and he rightly adds that they “diminish the force” of the original thought.
The “Sunrising” inn, long since become a private mansion, and added to very largely, has no relics of Shenstone. It stands, with lovely gardens surrounding, on the very lip and verge of Edge Hill, and looks out across the great levels of Warwickshire. In recent times the hill has becomes famous, or notorious, for motor and cycle accidents, and the approach to it is heralded by a notice-board proclaiming “Great Danger. Cyclists Dismount.” But in these days of better brakes, very few obey that injunction, and ride down, safely enough.
Whistler died in 1754, when Shenstone, remorseful, wrote, “how little do all our disputes appear to us now!”
Here, then, is the original story of the famous inscription, but it does not necessarily prove that this melancholy poet did not also inscribe it at Henley-on-Thames and elsewhere, notably at the “White Swan,” at that quite different and far-distant place from the Thames-side Henley, Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire; an old-fashioned house still in existence, and claiming to date from 1358.
HENLEY-IN-ARDEN, AND THE “WHITE SWAN.”
If the story of the “Red Lion” at the Oxfordshire Henley be a myth, as it is held to be, it is one of very considerable age, and one that has not only misled uncounted myriads of writers, but will continue to do so until the end of time. There is no disabling the flying canard, no overtaking the original lie, howsoever hard you strive; and as the famous stanza really was at one time to be seen on a window of the “Red Lion” (whether written there by Shenstone or another), it really seems that there is a way out of the dilemma that probably has never until now been considered. Shenstone resided on the Shropshire border, near Henley-in-Arden, but on his journeys to and from London must often have stayed at the “Red Lion,” Henley-on-Thames, then on one of the two principal coach-routes; and it is quite probable that he was so pleased with the last stanza of “Freedom,” and so satisfied with its peculiar fitness for inn windows, that he inscribed it at both places, if not indeed at others as well:
To thee, fair Freedom! I retire,
From flattery, feasting, dice and din;
Nor art thou found in homes much higher
Than the lone cot or humble Inn.
’Tis here with boundless power I reign,
And every health which I begin,
Converts dull port to bright champagne;
For Freedom crowns it, at an Inn.
I fly from pomp, I fly from state,
I fly from falsehood’s specious grin;
Freedom I love, and form I hate,
And choose my lodgings at an Inn.
Here, waiter! take my sordid ore,
Which lacqueys else might hope to win;
It buys what Courts have not in store,
It buys me Freedom, at an Inn.
And now once more I shape my way
Through rain or shine, through thick or thin,
Secure to meet, at close of day,
With kind reception at an Inn.
Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull round,
Where’er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think how oft he found
The warmest welcome—at an Inn.
Misquotation—sometimes a vice, occasionally a great improvement upon the original—has constantly rendered the last two lines: