Simon Wadloe was one of the most famous landlords of this tavern. Pepys, April 22, 1661,—“Wadlow, the Vintner at the Devil, in Fleet Street, did lead a fine company of soldiers, all young comely men, in white Doublets” (this was on Charles II. going from the Tower to Whitehall.) Ben Jonson called him the king of skinkers.[421] Among the verses on the door of the Apollo room occurred the lines—
“Hang up all the poor hop drinkers,
Cries old Sim, the king of skinkers.”
Camden, in his “Remains,” records the following epitaph on this worthy:—
“Apollo et cohors Musarum,
Bacchus vini et uvarum,
Ceres pro pane et cervisia,
Adeste omnes cum tristitia.
Diique, Deæque, lamentate cuncti,
Simonis Vadloe funera defuncti,
Sub signo malo bene vixit, mirabile!
Si ad cœlum recessit gratias Diaboli.”[422]
In opposition to this Old Devil a Young Devil Tavern was opened, also in Fleet Street, in 1707, and here the first meetings of the Society of Antiquaries were held, but the “Young Devil” was not a success, and the house was soon closed.
Though the Devil is not a promising name for a public-house, owing to his near connexion with evil spirits, yet there was a third tavern named after—if not devoted to him—the Little Devil, Goodman’s Fields, Whitechapel. Ned Ward, in 1703, highly commends the punch of this house, which he partook of in “a room neat enough to entertain Venus and the graces.” It was a house entirely after jolly Ned’s fancy. “My landlord was good company, my landlady good humoured, her daughter charmingly pretty, and her maid tolerably handsome, who can laugh, cry, say her prayers, sing a song, all in a breath, and can turn in a minute to all sublunary points of a female compass.”[423]
The Devil (le Diable) was also a celebrated tavern in Paris, near the Palais de Justice. It is thus named in the “Ode à tous les Cabarets:”—
“Lieux sacrés où l’on est soumis
Aux saints oracles de Themis,
Encor que vous ayez la gloire,
De voir tout le monde à genoux,
Sans le Diable et la Tête-Noire;[424]
Je n’approcherais pas de vous.”[425]
In the seventeenth century Paris also had its Petit Diable, (Little Devil,) a tavern of some renown.