And so forth, for twelve more verses; when, having exhausted all possible rhymes to “Mog,” he concludes, not before we are heartily tired of him and Molly too.
The ballad was composed in the company of Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, the four friends whiling away the dull hours of a rainy day at the inn by capping verses in praise of Molly, “with pluvial patter for refrain.”
The verses were supposed to be the lament of the love-lorn young Squire of Arborfield, the last of the Standens, who died through an unrequited affection for her.
The beautiful Molly lived to the age of sixty-seven, and died a spinster, in 1766. It should be added that the present “Rose” inn at Wokingham, although itself of great age, and not unpicturesque, and an inn centuries before coy Molly herself was thought of, has only in modern times adopted the sign. The old “Rose” is the plain red-brick house opposite, now occupied partly as an ironmonger’s shop.
Another Mary, maid—barmaid—of the inn, is sung in the modern song, “The Belle of the ‘Rose and Crown’”; but no one would accuse that of being poetry. How does it go?—
I’m saving ’em all for Mary, she shall have ev’ry one,
I’m saving ’em all for Mary, she shall have lots of fun.
They know me well at the County Bank,
Cash is better than fame or rank.
So, happy-go-lucky, I’ll marry my ducky,
The Belle of the “Rose and Crown.”
Let us hope, in all charity, that purse-proud bounder and the barmaid married, and lived happily ever after.
Inns figure in various ways in literature. Daniel De Foe wrote a part of Robinson Crusoe at the “Rose and Crown” at Halifax, and at the “Royal Hotel,” at Bideford, Charles Kingsley wrote Westward Ho! During a wakeful night at the “Burford Bridge Hotel,” near Dorking, Robert Louis Stevenson imagined a highway romance in the tapping of an outside shutter by some chance wayfarer at dead o’ night, and there Keats composed Endymion.
The “Royal” is in many respects a notable house. The earliest portion, dating from 1688, is the old mansion of one of Bideford’s merchant princes, who flourished so bravely in the remote times when distance had not been annihilated by mechanical invention and when each port had its own rich and self-contained trade. The house compares well with the “Star” Hotel at Yarmouth, whose history closely matches it. Here, at Bideford, a finely carved oak staircase leads to rooms magnificently panelled and furnished with moulded plaster ceilings designed in wreaths of fruits and flowers, ascribed to Italian workmanship. The Drawing-room, in which Westward Ho! or a portion of it, was written, has an exceptionally fine ceiling, of this type.
The great “Lion” inn on Wyle Cop, Shrewsbury, forms the scene of one of De Quincey’s mystical rhapsodies. It is the house to which he came in 1802, when, as a youth, he was setting forth in his unpractical way for London. He had walked in from Oswestry, reaching Shrewsbury two hours after nightfall. Innkeepers in those times knew little of pedestrians who footed it for pleasure, and classed all who walked when they might have rode as tramps. Therefore, it will be allowed that De Quincey timed his arrival well, at an hour when dusty feet are not so easily seen. However, had his shoes been noticed, he was ready with a defence, for he came to the “Lion” as a passenger already booked to London by the Mail. An Oswestry friend had performed that service for him, and here he was come to await the arrival of that conveyance.