or, as an American might more tersely put it, “Gulp your drink and git!” That, shorn of frills, is really the sentiment. It is not hospitable; it is not kindly; it would be even unwise did those who read as they run proceed to think as well.
THE “GATE” INN, DUNKIRK.
To catalogue the many “Gate” signs would be a lengthy and an unprofitable task. There must be quite a hundred of them. Two widely sundered houses bearing the name, each picturesque in its own way, are illustrated here: the one, a rustic wayside inn near Dunkirk, on the Dover Road; the other, picturesque rather in its situation than in itself, nestling under the great Castle Rock in the town of Nottingham. The Nottingham inn is a mere tavern: a shabby enough building, and more curious than comfortable. Its cellars, and the kitchen itself, are hewn out of the rock, the kitchen being saved from reeking with damp only by having a roaring fire continually maintained. The shape of the room is not unlike that of a bottle, in which a shaft, pierced through the rock to the upper air, represents the neck. This extraordinary apartment is said to have formerly been an oubliette dungeon of the Castle. An adjoining inn, similarly situated, has the odd sign of the “Trip to Jerusalem,” with a thirteenth-century date.
THE “GATE HANGS WELL,” NOTTINGHAM.
The exiled Duke of As You Like It, who, in the Forest of Arden, found moral maxims by the way, “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones,” and so forth, would scarcely have gone the length of hostelries; but there are stranger things in the world than even moralising exiles dream of, and among the strangest are the admonitory inscriptions not uncommon upon inns, where one would rather look to find exhortations to drink and be merry while you may. Among these the most curious is a Latin inscription carved, with the date 1636, upon an oak beam outside the older portion of that fine old inn, the “Four Crosses,” at Hatherton, near Cannock:
Fleres si scires unum tua me’sem,
Rides cum non sit forsitan una dies;
or, Englished:
Thou would’st weep if thou knewest thy time to be one month: thou laughest when perchance it may be not one day.