Francis Beaumont (Epistle to Ben Jonson).

What would one not give to have been present at the Mermaid Tavern with the wonderful Elizabethans who met there? Among them were Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Sir Walter Raleigh, Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne, Carew, and John Selden. One is reminded of the Symposium of Plato.

The poem of Keats is well known:

Souls of Poets dead and gone,

What Elysium have ye known,

Happy field or mossy cavern,

Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?

On a day like this, when the sun is hid,