Whoe'er has travelled life's dull road,
Where'er his stages may have been,
May sigh to think he still has found
The warmest welcome at an inn.
Fynes Morrison tells of the comforts of English inns even as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century. In 1617 he wrote:—
"The world affords not such inns as England hath, for as soon as a passenger comes the servants run to him; one takes his horse and walks him till he be cold, then rubs him and gives him meat; but let the master look to this point. Another gives the traveller his private chamber and kindles his fire, the third pulls off his boots and makes them clean; then the host or hostess visits him—if he will eat with the host—or at a common table it will be 4d. and 6d. If a gentleman has his own chamber, his ways are consulted, and he has music, too, if he likes."
The Wheelwrights' Arms, Warwick
The literature of England abounds in references to these ancient inns. If Dr. Johnson, Addison, and Goldsmith were alive now, we should find them chatting together at the Authors' Club, or the Savage, or the Athenæum. There were no literary clubs in their days, and the public parlours of the Cock Tavern or the "Cheshire Cheese" were their clubs, wherein they were quite as happy, if not quite so luxuriously housed, as if they had been members of a modern social institution. Who has not sung in praise of inns? Longfellow, in his Hyperion, makes Flemming say: "He who has not been at a tavern knows not what a paradise it is. O holy tavern! O miraculous tavern! Holy, because no carking cares are there, nor weariness, nor pain; and miraculous, because of the spits which of themselves turned round and round." They appealed strongly to Washington Irving, who, when recording his visit to the shrine of Shakespeare, says: "To a homeless man, who has no spot on this wide world which he can truly call his own, there is a momentary feeling of something like independence and territorial consequence, when after a weary day's travel he kicks off his boots, thrusts his feet into slippers, and stretches himself before an inn fire. Let the world without go as it may; let kingdoms rise or fall, so long as he has the wherewithal to pay his bill, he is, for the time being, the very monarch of all he surveys.... 'Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?' thought I, as I gave the fire a stir, lolled back in my elbow chair, and cast a complacent look about the little parlour of the Red Horse at Stratford-on-Avon."
Entrance to the Reindeer Inn, Banbury