‘The sports of the inn yards’ are noted often in the memoirs of Elizabeth’s reign. In a late biography of Lord Bacon, his brother Anthony is spoken of as ‘having taken a house in Bishopsgate Street, near the famous “Ball Inn,” where plays are performed before cits and gentlemen, very much to the delight of Essex and his jovial crew.’ And in allusion to the Earl’s conspiracy, the lower class of inns then and there are thus described: ‘From kens like the “Hart’s Horn” and the “Shipwreck Tavern,” haunts of the vilest refuse of a great city, the spawn of hells and stews, the vomit of Italian cloisters and Belgian camps, Blount, long familiar with the agents of disorder, unkennels in the Earl’s name a pack of needy ruffians eager for any device that seems to promise pay to their greed or licence to their lust.’ It has been justly remarked by Letitia Landon, that ‘after all, the English hostel owes much of its charm to Chaucer; our associations are of his haunting pictures—his delicate prioress, his comely young squire, with their pleasant interchange of tale and legend:’ still less remote and more personal associations endear and identify these landmarks of travel and sojourn in Great Britain. Scarcely a pleasant record of life or manners, during the last century, is destitute of one of these memorable resorts. Addison frequented the ‘White Horn,’ at the end of Holland House Lane. When Sir Walter Scott visited Wordsworth, he daily strolled to the ‘Swan,’ beyond Grasmere, to atone for the plain fare of the bard’s cottage. ‘We four,’ naïvely writes the Rev. Archibald Carlyle, speaking of his literary comrades, ‘frequently resorted to a small tavern at the corner of Cockspur Street, the “Golden Ball,” where we had a frugal supper and a little punch, as the finances of none of the company were in very good order; but we had rich enough conversation on literary subjects, enlivened by Smollett’s agreeable stories, which he told with peculiar grace.’ And his more than clerical zest for such a rendezvous is apparent in his notice of another favourite inn: ‘It was during this assembly that the inn at the lower end of the West Bow got into some credit, and was called the “Diversorium.” Thomas Nicholson was the man’s name, and his wife’s Nelly Douglas. Nelly was handsome, Thomas a rattling fellow.’ Here often met Robertson the historian, Horne the dramatist, Hume, Jardine, and other notable men of the Scotch metropolis. To facilitate their intercourse when in London, they also ‘established a club at a coffee-house in Saville Row, and dined together daily at three with Wedderburn and Jack Dalrymple.’ By the same candid autobiographer we are informed that, at a tavern ‘in Fleet Street, a physicians’ club met, had original papers laid before them, and always waited supper for Dr. Armstrong to order.’ These casual allusions indicate the essential convenience and social importance of the inn, before clubs had superseded them in Britain, and cafés on the Continent. A writer, whose Itinerary is dated 1617, thus describes entertainment at the English inns of his day: ‘As soone as a passenger comes to an inne, the servants run to him, and one takes his horse and walkes him about till he is cool, then rubs him down and gives him feed; another servant gives the passenger his private chamber, and kindles his fire; the third pulls off his bootes and makes them cleane; then the host and hostess visit him, and if he will eate with the hoste, or at a common table with the others, his meale will cost him sixpence, or, in some places, fourpence; but if he will eate in his own chamber, he commands what meat he will, according to his appetite; yea, the kitchen is open to him to order the meat to be dressed as he likes beste. After having eaten what he pleases, he may with credit set by a part for next day’s breakfast. His bill will then be written for him, and should he object to any charge, the host is ready to alter it.’ An Italian nobleman of our own day,[2] his appreciation of free discussion quickened by political exile, was much impressed with the influence and agency of the English inn in public affairs. ‘Taverns,’ he writes, ‘are the forum of the English; it was here that arose the triumph of Burdett when he left the Tower, and the curses of Castlereagh when he descended into the tomb; it is here that begins the censure or the approval of a new law.’
Charles Lamb delighted to smoke his pipe at the old ‘Queen’s Head,’ and to quaff ale from the tankard presented by one Master Cranch (a choice spirit) to a former host, and in the old oak-parlour where tradition says ‘the gallant Raleigh received full souse in his face the contents of a jolly black-jack from an affrighted clown, who, seeing clouds of tobacco smoke curling from the knight’s mouth and nose, thought he was all on fire.’
‘A relic of old London is fast disappearing,’ says a journal of that city—‘the “Blue Boar Inn,” or the “George and Blue Boar,” as it came to be called later, in Holborn. For more than two hundred years this was one of the famous coaching-houses, where stages arrived from the Northern and Midland counties. It is more famous still as being the place—if Lord Orrery’s chaplain, Morrice, may be credited—where Cromwell and Ireton, disguised as troopers, cut from the saddle-flap of a messenger a letter which they knew to be there, from Charles the First to Henrietta Maria.’
The ‘Peacock,’ at Matlock on the Derwent, was long the chosen resort of artists, botanists, geologists, lawyers, and anglers; and perhaps at no rural English inn of modern times has there been more varied and gifted society than occasionally convened in this romantic district, under its roof.
The ‘Hotel Gibbon,’ at Lausanne, suggests to one familiar with English literature the life of that historian, so naïvely described by himself, and keeps alive the associations of his elaborate work in the scene of its production; and nightly colloquies, that are embalmed and embodied in genial literature, immortalize the ‘sky-blue parlour’ at Ambrose’s ‘Edinburgh Tavern.’
Few historical novelists have more completely mastered the details of costume, architecture, and social habits in the old times of England, than James; and his description of the inns of Queen Anne’s day is as elaborate as it is complete: ‘Landlords in England at that time—I mean, of course, in country towns—were very different in many respects, and of a different class, from what they are at present. In the first place, they were not fine gentlemen; in the next place, they were not discharged valets-de-chambre or butlers, who, having cheated their masters handsomely, and perhaps laid them under contribution in many ways, retire to enjoy the fat things at their ease in their native town. Then, again, they were on terms of familiar intercourse with two or three classes, completely separate and distinct from each other—a sort of connecting link between them. At their door, the justice of the peace, the knight of the shire, the great man of the neighbourhood, dismounted from his horse, and had his chat with mine host. There came the village lawyer, when he gained a cause, or won a large fee, or had been paid a long bill, to indulge in his pint of sherry, and gossiped as he drank it of all the affairs of his clients. There sneaked in the doctor to get his glass of eau-de-vie, or plague-water, or aqua mirabilis, or strong spirits, in short, of any other denomination, and tell little dirty anecdotes of his cases and his patients. There the alderman, the wealthy shopkeeper, and the small proprietor, or the large farmer, came to take his cheerful cup on Saturdays, or on market-day. But, besides these, the inn was the resort—though approached by another door—of a lower and a poorer class, with whom the landlord was still upon as good terms as with the others. The wagoner, the carter, the lawyer’s and the banker’s clerk, the shopman, the porter even, all came there; the landlord was civil, and familiar, and chatty with them all.’
Geoffrey Crayon’s ‘Shakspearian Research’ culminated at the ‘Boar Head,’ Eastcheap; his story of the ‘Spectre Bridegroom’ was appropriately related in the kitchen of the ‘Pomme d’Or,’ in the Netherlands; and he makes Rip’s congenial retreat from his virago spouse, the ‘coin of vantage’ in front of the village inn. Irving’s own appreciation of these vagabond shrines and accidental homes is emphatic; he commends the ‘honest bursts of laughter in which a man indulges in that temple of true liberty, an inn,’ and quotes zestfully the maxim that ‘a tavern is the rendezvous, the exchange, the staple of good fellows.’ His personal testimony is characteristic: ‘To a homeless man there is a momentary feeling of independence, as he stretches himself before an inn fire: the arm-chair is his throne, the poker is his sceptre, and the little parlour his undisputed empire.’ How little did the modest author imagine, when he thus wrote, that the poker with which he stirred the fire in the parlour-grate of the ‘Red Lion’ would become a sacred literary relic wherewith his partial countrymen are beguiled of extra fees, while the bard of Avon and the gentleman of Sunnyside mingle in the reverie of fond reminiscence.
‘I went by an indirect route to Lichfield,’ writes Hawthorne, in his English sketches, ‘and put up at the “Black Swan.” Had I known where to find it, I would rather have established myself at the inn kept by Mr. Boniface, and so famous for its ale in Farquhar’s time.’ Gossip and gaiety, the poor man’s arena and the ‘breathing-time of day’ of genius, thus give to the inn a kind of humane scope. Beethoven, wearied of his palace-home and courtly patronage, and the ‘stately houses open to him in town and country, often forsook all for solitude in obscure inns, escaping from all conventionalities to be alone with himself.’ ‘Nous voyons,’ says Brillat-Savarin, ‘que les villageois font toutes les affaires au cabaret;’ Rousseau delighted in the frugal liberty thereof; and the last days of Elia are associated with the inn which was the goal of his daily promenade. ‘After Isola married,’ writes one of his friends, ‘and Mary was infirm, he took his lonely walk along the London road, as far as the “Bell of Edmonton;” and one day tripped over a stone and slightly wounded his forehead; erysipelas set in, and he died.’ Somewhat of the attractiveness of the inn to the philosopher is that its temporary and casual shelter and solace accord with the counsel of Sydney Smith, ‘to take short views,’ and Goëthe’s, to ‘cast ourselves into the sea of accidents;’ and a less amiable reason for the partiality has been suggested in ‘the wide capability of finding fault which an inn affords.’ A genial picture of one is thus drawn by a modern poet:—
‘This cosy hostelrie a visit craves;
Here will I sit awhile,
And watch the heavenly sunshine smile
Upon the village graves.
Strange is this little room in which I wait,
With its old table, rough with rustic names.
’Tis summer now; instead of blinking flames,
Sweet-smelling ferns are hanging o’er the grate.
With curious eyes I pore
Upon the mantel-piece, with precious wares;
Glazed Scripture prints, in black, lugubrious frames,
Filled with old Bible lore:
The whale is casting Jonah on the shore;
Pharaoh is drowning in the curly wave;
And to Elijah, sitting at his cave,
The hospitable ravens fly in pairs,
Celestial food within their horny beaks;
On a slim David, with great pinky cheeks,
A towered Goliath stares.
Here will I sit at peace,
While, piercing through the window’s ivy veil,
A slip of sunshine smites the amber ale;
And as the wreaths of fragrant smoke increase,
I’ll read the letter which came down to-day.’[3]
As a contrast to this, take Longfellow’s ‘Wayside Inn,’ at Sudbury, Massachusetts:—