‘The taverns served also as places for marketing. During most of the winter they were filled every night with farmers, who had brought their pork, butter, grain, seeds, and poultry to market. Most families supplied themselves through these opportunities, and purchased the best articles at moderate prices.
‘Landlords could not grow rich very fast on country custom. The travelling farmer brought all his food for himself in a box, and that for his horse in a bag. He therefore paid only twelve cents for his bed, and as much for horse-keeping. It was not uncommon to have six days’ expenses amount only to two dollars. Auctions, theatricals, legerdemain, caucuses, military drills, balls, and dancing-schools, all came in place at the tavern. Especially, sleigh-riding parties found them convenient.’[5]
‘You will not go into one,’ wrote Brissot in 1788, ‘without meeting with neatness, decency, and dignity. The table is served by a maiden, well-dressed and pretty, by a pleasant mother whose age has not effaced the agreeableness of her features, and by men who have that air of respectability which is inspired by the idea of equality, and are not ignoble and base, like the greater part of our own tavern-keepers.’ In 1792, Wansey, the commercial traveller already cited, tells us he lodged at the ‘Bunch of Grapes,’ in Boston, and paid five shillings a day, including a pint of Madeira. He had an interview with Citizen Genet and Dr. Priestley at the ‘Tontine,’ near the Battery in New York; and saw Frenchmen with tricolour cockades at the ‘Indian Queen,’ on the Boston road;—trivial data for his journal then, and yet now suggestive of the political and economical condition of the land, whereof even tavern bills and company are no inadequate test. A sagacious reminiscent informs us that ‘the taverns of Boston were the original business exchanges: they combined the Counting-house, the Exchange-office, the Reading-room, and the Bank; each represented a locality. To the “Lamb Tavern,” called by the sailors “sheep’s baby,” people went to “see a man from Dedham”—it was the resort of Norfolk County; the old “Eastern Stage-house,” in Ann Street, was frequented by “down-easters,” captains of vessels, formerly from the Penobscot and Kennebec; there were to be seen groups of sturdy men seated round an enormous fireplace, chalking down the price of bark and lumber, and skippers bringing in a vagrant tarpaulin to “sign the articles.” To the “Exchange Coffee-house” resorted the nabobs of Essex County; here those aristocratic eastern towns, Newburyport and Portsmouth, were represented by shipowners and shipbuilders, merchants of the first class. Dealers in butter and cheese went to the “City Tavern,” in Brattle Street—a favourite sojourn of “members of the General Court,”—its court-yard crowded with teams loaded with the best pork from Vermont and Western Massachusetts, and the “wooden notions” of Yankee rustics. The last of the old Boston taverns was the once famous “Elm-street House,” a rendezvous of stage-coaches, teams, and transient boarders, which was kept up in the old style until fairly drawn from the field by “modern improvements.”’ Indeed, this slight mention of the functions and fortunes of inns in the New England metropolis hints, more than a volume of statistics, the progress of her growth and the cause of her social transitions; locomotion has completely done away with the local affinities of the past, and emigration modified the individuality of class and character which of old gave such special interest to the inn; we are too gregarious, luxurious, and hurried to indulge in these primitive expedients.
At the old ‘Raleigh Tavern,’ in Virginia—not long since destroyed by fire,—Patrick Henry lodged when he made his memorable début, as a patriotic orator, in the House of Burgesses; and it was in a chamber of this inn that he prepared his speeches, and that the great leading men of the Revolution, in that State, assembled to consult. Some of the inns in Canada are named after the Indian chiefs mentioned in the earliest records of exploration by Cartier. At the ‘Frauncis Tavern,’ in New York, Washington took leave of his officers, and the ‘Social Club,’ still famous in the annals of the city, met. Military men appreciate good inns; Washington wrote to Frauncis, and Lafayette praised him. One of the latest of memorable associations connected with the inns of New York, is that which identifies the ‘City Hotel’ with the naval victories of the last war with England. No one who listened to the musical voice of the late Ogden Hoffman, as he related to the St. Nicholas Society at their annual banquet his personal memories of that favourite hotel, will fail to realize the possible dramatic and romantic interest which may attach to such a resort, even in our unromantic times and in the heart of a commercial city. Visions of naval heroes, of belles in the dance, witty coteries and distinguished strangers, political crises and social triumphs, flitted vividly before the mind as the genial reminiscent called up the men, women, fêtes, and follies there known. A recent English traveller in the United States, in alluding to the resemblance he discovered to what was familiar at home, speaks of one relic which has caught the eye of few as suggestive of the old country. ‘There is,’ he observes, ‘in Baltimore an old inn, with an old sign, standing at the corner of Eutaw and Franklin streets, just such as may still be seen in the towns of Somersetshire; and before it are to be seen old wagons, covered and soiled and battered, about to return from the city to the country, just as the wagons do in our own agricultural counties.’[6]
How near to us the record of ‘baiting at an inn’ brings the renowned! ‘After dinner,’ writes Washington in the diary of his second visit to New England, ‘through frequent showers we proceeded to the tavern of a Mrs. Haviland, at Rye, who keeps a very neat and decent inn.’ Mendelssohn, ideal as was his tone of mind, wrote zestfully to his sister:—‘A neat, civil Frenchwoman keeps the inn on the summit of the Simplon; and it would not be easy to describe the sensation of satisfaction caused by its thrifty cleanliness, which is nowhere to be found in Italy.’ Lockhart, when an assiduous Oxford scholar, found his choicest recreation in ‘a quiet row on the river, and a fish-dinner at Godstow;’ and there is not one of his surviving associates, says his biographer, ‘who fails to look back at this moment, with melancholy pleasure, on the brilliant wit, the merry song, and the grave discussion which gave to the sanded parlour of the village alehouse the air of the Palæstra at Tusculum, or the Amaltheum of Cumæ.’
It is impossible to conceive any house of entertainment more dreary than some of the stage-houses, as they were called in New England; the bar-room with an odour of stale rum, the parlour with its everlasting sampler over the fireplace, weeping willow, tombstone, and inscription; the peacock’s feathers or asparagus boughs in the chimney, as if in cheerful mockery; the looking-glass that reflects every feature awry, the cross-lights of the windows, inquisitive loungers, pie-crust like leather, and cheese of mollified oak,—all defied both the senses and digestion, and made the crack of the coachman’s whip a joyful alarum.
The inns near famous localities identify themselves to the memory with the most attractive objects of travel; thus the inn, so rural and neat, at Edensor, with the marvels of Chatsworth; the ‘Red Horse,’ at Stratford-on-Avon, with Shakspeare’s tomb; and the ‘Nag’s Head,’ at Uttoxeter, with Johnson’s penance. It was while ‘waiting for the train,’ at an inn of Coventry, that Tennyson so gracefully paraphrased the legend of Godiva; and the sign of the ‘Flitch’ is associated with the famous bequest of the traditional patron of conjugal harmony. ‘A wayside inn at which we tarried, in Derbyshire, I fancied must have sheltered Moreland or Gainsborough, when caught in the rain, while sketching in that region. The landlady had grenadier proportions and red cheeks; a few peasants were drinking ale beneath a roof whence depended flitches of bacon, and with the frocks, the yellow hair, and the full, ruddy features we see in their pictures; the windows of the best room had little diamond-shaped panes, in which sprigs of holly were stuck. There were several ancient engravings in quaint-looking frames on the wall; the chairs and desk were of dark-veined wood that shone with the polish of many a year’s friction; a great fire blazed in the chimney, and the liquor was served in vessels only seen on this other side of the water, in venerable prints. It was an hostel where you would not be surprised to hear the crack of Tony Lumpkin’s whip, or to see the Vicar of Wakefield rush in, in search of Olivia—an alehouse that, you knew at once, had often given “an hour’s importance to the poor man’s heart,” and where Parson Adams or Squire Western would have felt themselves entirely at home.’[7]
Goldsmith has genially celebrated the humble, rustic inn in the Deserted Village, and his own habits confirmed the early predilection. ‘His favourite festivity,’ says one of his biographers, ‘his holiday of holidays, was to have three or four intimate friends to breakfast with him at ten, to start at eleven for a walk through the fields to Highbury Barn, where they dined at an ordinary, frequented by authors, templars, and retired citizens, for tenpence a head; to return at six to “White’s,” Conduit Street, and to end the evening with a supper at the “Grecian,” or “Temple Exchange Coffee-house.” The whole of the expense of the day’s fête never exceeded a crown, for which the party obtained “good air, good living, and good conversation.”’ ‘He, Goldsmith, however,’ adds Foster, ‘would leave a tavern if his jokes were not rewarded with a roar.’ One of Ben Jonson’s best comedies is the New Inn, and Southey’s most popular ballad is Mary of the Inn. Chaucer makes his Canterbury pilgrims set out from an inn at Southwark. We all remember the inns described by Scott. Elliston’s ‘larks’ at the ‘White Hart’ and ‘Red Cow’ were comical episodes, that read like a vaudeville. She Stoops to Conquer, L’Auberge Pleine, and The Double-bedded Room, are a few of the countless standard plays of which an inn is the scene. ‘What befell them at the Inn,’ is the heading of Don Quixote’s best chapters, for the knight always mistook inns for castles. Grammont’s adventures frequently boast the same scene, and it was ‘in the worst room of the worst inn’ that the accomplished, and dissolute Villiers died. Foote frequented the ‘Bedford’ in Covent Garden, and old Macklin doffed the buskin for the apron and carver. Philosophers, from Horace at the inn of Brundusium, to Montaigne noting the furniture, dishes, and prices at the inns where he rested on his journey into Italy, have found this a most suggestive and characteristic theme.
In German university towns, the professors frequent the ‘Hereditary Prince,’ or some other inn, at evening, to drink beer, smoke pipes, and discuss metaphysics. The jocose reproof which Lamb administers to the sentimental donor of Cœlebs was—
‘If ever I marry a wife,
I’ll marry a landlord’s daughter,
And sit in the bar all day,
And drink cold brandy and water.’