Quaintly pious is the allusion of John Winthrop, in a letter—more than two centuries old—to his father, the first governor of Massachusetts, when the project of immigration was about to be realized: ‘For the business of New England, I can say no other thing but that I believe confidently that the whole disposition thereof is from the Lord; and, for myself, I have seen so much of the vanity of the world, that I esteem no more of the diversities of countries than as so many inns, whereof the traveller that hath lodged in the best or in the worst findeth no difference when he cometh to his journey’s end.’[8]
It has been said of Socrates that he ‘looked upon himself as a traveller who halts at the public inn of the Earth.’ ‘Was I in a condition to stipulate with death,’ writes Sterne, ‘I should certainly declare against submitting to it before my friends, and therefore I never seriously think upon the mode and the manner of this great catastrophe, but I constantly draw the curtain across it with this wish, that the Disposer of all things may so order it, that it happen not to me in my own house, but rather in some decent inn.’ Aaron Burr realized in a forlorn manner Yorick’s desire when, after years of social ostracism, he expired at a tavern on Staten Island.
The beautiful significance of the first incident in the life of Christ is seldom realized, offering, as it does, so wonderful and affecting a contrast between the humblest mortal vicissitudes in the outward circumstances of birth and the highest glory of a spiritual advent: they ‘laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.’ It was to an inn that the Good Samaritan carried the traveller who had ‘fallen among thieves.’ Joseph’s brethren rested at an inn on their way to Egypt; and it was at the ‘Three Taverns,’ in the suburbs of Rome, that Paul was met by the brethren. Venerable as are these allusions in sacred history, the visible token of the antiquity of inns that strikes our imagination most vividly is the wine-stains on the marble counter in Pompeii.
Falstaff absolutely requires the frame of an inn to make his portrait intelligible, with the buxom figure of Mrs. Quickly in the background; and it may safely be asserted that no public house of entertainment has afforded such world-wide mirth as the ‘Boar’s Head,’ Eastcheap. The freaks of Tony Lumpkin have their natural scope at an alehouse; and Goldoni’s Locandiera is a fine colloquial piece of real life; even the most eloquent of England’s historians cites the superior inns that existed in the range of travel there, during the early part of the seventeenth century, as a reliable evidence of the prosperity and civil advancement of the nation. These inns are, in fact, the original retreats for ‘freedom and comfort,’ whence our pleasant ideas on the subject are derived; they still exist in some of the rural districts of the kingdom; and the cleanliness, good fare, and retirement of the old-fashioned English inn, as well as the freshness and urbanity of the host, wholly justify their renown. The exigencies of the climate, and the domestic habits of the people, explain this superiority; where so much enjoyment is sought within doors, and the national character is reserved and individual, better provision is naturally made both for the physical well-being and the privacy of the wayfarer than is required under less inclement skies, and among a more vivacious and social race.
A most characteristic note of Boswell’s is that which records his idol’s hearty encomiums on a tavern, while dining at one in London. Both the man and the place then combined to realize the perfection of the idea, for that dim and multitudinous city invites to secluded conviviality; and that irritable, dogmatic, yet epicurean sage required the liberty of speech, an absolute deference, and the solid physical comforts so easily obtained at a London tavern. There he could make ‘inarticulate, animal noises over his food’ without restraint; there he could bring only such companions as would bear to be contradicted, and there he could refresh body and mind without fear of intrusion from a printer’s devil or needy author. Bores and duns away, a good listener by, surrounded with pleasant viands and a cheerful blaze, a man so organized and situated might, without extravagance, call a tavern-chair the throne of human felicity, and quote Shenstone’s praise of inns with rapture. Beneath this jovial appreciation, however, there lurks a sad inference; it argues a homeless lot, for lonely or ungenial must be the residence, contrast with which renders an inn so attractive; and we must bear in mind that the winsome aspect they wear in English literature is based on their casual and temporary enjoyment; it is as recreative, not abiding places, that they are usually introduced; and, in an imaginative point of view, our sense of the appropriate is gratified by these landmarks of our precarious destiny, for we are but ‘pilgrims and sojourners on the earth.’ Jeremy Taylor compared human life to an inn, and Archbishop Leighton used to say he would prefer to die in one.
