INNS IN LITERATURE

Inns occupy a very large and prominent place in the literature of all ages. A great deal of Shakespeare is concerned with inns, most prominent among them the “Boar’s Head,” in Eastcheap, scene of many of Falstaff’s revels; while at the “Garter,” at Windsor, Falstaff had “his chamber, his house, his castle, his standing bed and truckle-bed,” and his chamber was “painted about with the Story of the Prodigal, fresh and new.”

It is difficult to see what the old dramatists could have done without inns. In Farquhar’s Beaux’ Stratagem we find some of the best dialogue to be that at the inn at Lichfield, between Boniface, the landlord, and Aimwell.

“I have heard your town of Lichfield much famed for ale,” says Aimwell: “I think I’ll taste that.”

“Sir,” replies the landlord, “I have now in my cellar ten tun of the best ale in Staffordshire; ’tis smooth as oil, sweet as milk, clear as amber, and strong as brandy, and will be just fourteen years old the fifth day of next March, old style.”

“You’re very exact in the age of your ales.”

“As punctual, sir, as in the age of my children. I’ll show you such ale. Here, tapster, broach number 1706, as the saying is. Sir, you shall taste my anno domini. I have lived in Lichfield, man and boy, above fifty years, and, I believe, have not consumed eight-and-fifty ounces of meat.”

“At a meal, you mean, if one may guess your sum by your bulk.”

“Not in my life, sir; I have fed freely upon ale. I have ate my ale, drank my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.”

Izaak Walton, going a-fishing in the river Lea, was not ashamed to call at the “Swan,” Tottenham High Cross, and drink ale, and call it “nectar.”

The history of the inns at which Pepys stayed would form an interesting subject of inquiry. Few men of his time were better informed than he on the subject of inns: large, small, dear, cheap, comfortable and uncomfortable: they are all set forth in detail in his Diary. He more than once patronised the “Red Lion” at Guildford, a far more important house then than now. At that time it possessed very fine and extensive orchards and gardens, and, according to Aubrey, could make up fifty beds, and owned stables for two hundred horses. Imagination can easily picture Mr. Pepys, during his stay in 1661, cutting asparagus for supper: “the best that ever I ate in my life.”

Those gardens were long since abolished, and Market Street stands on the site of them.On June 10th, 1668, we find him sleeping at the “George,” Salisbury, in a silk bed. He notes that he had “very good diet, but very dear,” and had probably, overnight, when sleeping in that silk bed, been visited with gruesome thoughts of the bill to follow the luxury. The bill was, as he expressed it, “exorbitant.”

Insatiable curiosity in that old Pepys. Something, too, of childlike wonder, infantile artlessness, and a fear of strange things, and the dark. His inquisitiveness took him to the lonely giant ramparts of Old Sarum, “prodigious, so as to fright me”; and thereabouts he and his party of three ladies riding pillion found, and stayed at, a rustic inn, where a pedlar was turned out of bed in order that our Samuel might turn in. The party found the beds “lousy.” Strangely enough, this was a discovery “which made us merry.” Every man to his taste in merriment.

And so, enjoying the full savour of life, he goes his way, as appreciative of good music as of a good dinner, and a connoisseur alike of sermons and of a pretty face. Did he ever outlive his lusts, and know all things to be vanities, before his natural force had abated? or did the end surprise him in midst of his worldly activities?

A transition from Pepys to Sir Roger de Coverley is easy and natural. The old servant in Sir Roger’s family, retiring from service and taking an inn, is one of Addison’s most pleasing pictures. To do honour to his master, the old retainer had Sir Roger’s portrait painted and hung it out as his sign, under the title of the “Knight’s Head.”

As soon as Sir Roger was acquainted with it, finding that his servant’s indiscretion proceeded wholly from affection and good-will, he only told him that he made him too high a compliment; and when the fellow seemed to think that could hardly be, added, with a more decisive look, that it was too great an honour for any man under a duke; but told him, at the same time, that it might be altered with a very few touches, and that he himself would be at the charge of it. Accordingly, they got a painter, by the Knight’s directions, to add a pair of whiskers to the face, and, by a little aggravation of the features, to change it into the “Saracen’s Head.”

According to Pope, in his Moral Essays, it was at an inn that the witty and sparkling debauchee, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, “the most accomplished man of the age, in riding, dancing, and fencing,” died in his fifty-ninth year, in 1687:

A most complete picture of retribution in a moral essay, set forth in the most denunciatory lines.In the whole range of poetry there is nothing that so well lends itself to a cold, calculated vituperation as the heroic couplet. You can pile detail upon detail, like an inventory-clerk, so long as rhymes last; and thus an impeachment of this sort has a very formidable air.

HOUSE WHERE THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM DIED, KIRKBY MOORSIDE.

But it has been denied that the profligate Duke ended in such misery. However that may be, he maintained his peculiar reputation to the last; for, according to Dr. Lowth, Bishop of London, he “died between two common girls,” at the house of one of his tenants in the Yorkshire village of Kirkby Moorside. That house is still wearily pointed out to the insistent stranger by the uninterested Kirkby Moorsiders, who, as Yorkshiremen with magnificent thirsts, are uninterested, chiefly by reason of its being no longer an inn; and, truth to tell, its old-time picturesque features, if it ever had any, are wholly overlaid by furiously ugly modern shop-fronts. Now, if it were only the “Swan,” some little way up the street, still, in the midst of picturesque squalor, dispensing drink of varied sorts to all and sundry, for good current coin of the realm, one might conceive some local historic and literary enthusiasm. The “Swan,” however, has no associations, and is merely, with its projecting porch, supported upon finely carved but woefully dilapidated seventeenth-century Renaissance pillars, a subject for an artist. The odd, and ugly, encroachment of an adjoining hairdresser’s shop is redeemed, from that same artistic point of view, by that now unusual object, a barber’s pole, projecting across.

The robust pages of Fielding and Smollett are rich in incidents of travel, and in scenes at wayside inns, where postboys, persecuted lovers, footpads, and highwaymen mingle romantically. The “Three Jolly Pigeons,” the village ale-house of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, must not be forgotten, while the “Black Bear” in Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth, is prominent. Marryat, Theodore Hook, Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever, Bulwer Lytton, all largely introduced inns into their novels. Dickens, of course, is so prolific in his references to inns and taverns that he requires special chapters. Thackeray’s inns are as the poles asunder from those of Dickens, and are superior places, the resorts of superior people, and of people who, if not superior, endeavour to appear so. In short, in their individual treatment of inns, Dickens and Thackeray are thoroughly characteristic and dissimilar. Thackeray’s waiters and the waiters drawn by Dickens are very different. Thackeray could never have imagined the waiter at the “Old Royal,” at Birmingham, who, having succeeded in obtaining an order for soda-water from Bob Sawyer, “melted imperceptibly away”; nor the preternaturally mean and cunning waiters at Yarmouth and at the “Golden Cross,” in David Copperfield—own brothers to the Artful Dodger. I don’t think there could ever have existed such creatures.

THE “BLACK SWAN,” KIRKBY MOORSIDE.

Thackeray’s waiters are not figments of the imagination; they are drawn from the life, as, for example, John, the old waiter in Vanity Fair, who, when Dobbin returns to England, after ten years in India, welcomes him as if he had been absent only weeks, and supposes he’ll have a roast fowl for dinner.

But in the amazing quantity of drink they consume, the characters of Dickens and Thackeray are on common ground. Mr. Pickwick could apparently begin drinking brandy shortly after breakfast, and continue all day, without being much the worse for it; and in Pendennis we read how Jack Finucane and Mr. Trotter, dining at Dick’s Restaurant with Mr. Bungay, drank with impunity what would easily suffice to overthrow most modern men.

Washington Irving thought as highly of inns as did Dr. Johnson. “To a homeless man, who has no spot on this wide world which he can truly call his own,” he says, in a memorable passage, “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. The armchair is his throne, the poker his sceptre, and the little parlour, some twelve feet square, his undisputed empire. It is a morsel of certainty, snatched from the midst of the uncertainties of life; it is a sunny moment gleaming out kindly on a cloudy day; and he who has advanced some way on the pilgrimage of existence knows the importance of husbanding even morsels and moments of enjoyment. ‘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.”

He was very speedily answered, No! for at that instant the chimes preluded the stroke of midnight, and at the same time “a gentle tap came at the door, and a pretty chambermaid, putting in her smiling face, inquired, with a hesitating air,” whether that momentary monarch of all he surveyed had rung. Of course she knew perfectly well he had not rung, and the humbled autocrat of those twelve square feet was quite correct when he “understood it as a modest hint that it was time to retire.” The Emperor of the Inn Parlour accordingly abdicated immediately, lest a worse thing—i.e., the possible turning off the gas at the meter—should befall; and, his dream of absolute dominion at an end, went off to bed, like a good boy, rather than the Crowned Head he had fancied himself.

WASHINGTON IRVING’S “THRONE” AND “SCEPTRE.”

The “Red Horse”—the name is taken from the Vale of Red Horse in which the town of Stratford-on-Avon stands—is still in being, and the “Washington Irving Room” is even yet a shrine, of sorts. A shrine, however, none too easy for the casual worshipper of heroes, or the amateur of literary landmarks, to come to, for it is generally used as a private sitting-room; and not the most sympathetic and easy-going of guests who has hired it for that purpose is content to receive all day a stream of strangers bubbling over with real, or affected, interest. It is a small room, measuring some ten feet by fifteen, looking out upon Bridge Street. Nowadays the walls of it are hung with portraits of Irving himself, of Longfellow, and others, together with old views of the town; and a framed letter written by Irving, and a silhouette of “Sally Garner,” daughter of the landlord of that time, bring the place closely into touch with the Sketch Book. The “Sexton’s Clock” stands beside the door, with a suitably inscribed brass plate; but no longer may you wield that poker which was Irving’s “sceptre,” nor sit in the chair that was, in his fancy, a throne; for the poker is kept in the office of the hotel, and the chair, also with an inscribed brass plate, is locked within a cupboard, through whose glass doors you may see where it is jealously retired from touch. In short, every thing that will harbour an inscription has one, not excepting the poker itself, which has been engraved with the legend, “Geoffrey Crayon’s Sceptre.”

The chambermaid who so obliquely suggested that it was time to go to bed, and no doubt preceded him to Number 15, with candle and warming-pan, was, we are told, “pretty Hannah Cuppage,” and we wish he had told us more about her, instead of writing so much very thin description of antiquities.

Poets—Southey apart, with his tragical Mary, the Maid of the Inn—have not sung so frequently as might have been expected of the fair maids at inns. Of this type of minstrelsy, Gay’s ballad on Molly Mog, daughter of the landlord at the “Rose,” Wokingham, is best known:

But he will not hear anything of the kind:

And so forth, for twelve more verses; when, having exhausted all possible rhymes to “Mog,” he concludes, not before we are heartily tired of him and Molly too.

The ballad was composed in the company of Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, the four friends whiling away the dull hours of a rainy day at the inn by capping verses in praise of Molly, “with pluvial patter for refrain.”

The verses were supposed to be the lament of the love-lorn young Squire of Arborfield, the last of the Standens, who died through an unrequited affection for her.

The beautiful Molly lived to the age of sixty-seven, and died a spinster, in 1766. It should be added that the present “Rose” inn at Wokingham, although itself of great age, and not unpicturesque, and an inn centuries before coy Molly herself was thought of, has only in modern times adopted the sign. The old “Rose” is the plain red-brick house opposite, now occupied partly as an ironmonger’s shop.

Another Mary, maid—barmaid—of the inn, is sung in the modern song, “The Belle of the ‘Rose and Crown’”; but no one would accuse that of being poetry. How does it go?—

Let us hope, in all charity, that purse-proud bounder and the barmaid married, and lived happily ever after.

Inns figure in various ways in literature. Daniel De Foe wrote a part of Robinson Crusoe at the “Rose and Crown” at Halifax, and at the “Royal Hotel,” at Bideford, Charles Kingsley wrote Westward Ho! During a wakeful night at the “Burford Bridge Hotel,” near Dorking, Robert Louis Stevenson imagined a highway romance in the tapping of an outside shutter by some chance wayfarer at dead o’ night, and there Keats composed Endymion.

The “Royal” is in many respects a notable house. The earliest portion, dating from 1688, is the old mansion of one of Bideford’s merchant princes, who flourished so bravely in the remote times when distance had not been annihilated by mechanical invention and when each port had its own rich and self-contained trade. The house compares well with the “Star” Hotel at Yarmouth, whose history closely matches it. Here, at Bideford, a finely carved oak staircase leads to rooms magnificently panelled and furnished with moulded plaster ceilings designed in wreaths of fruits and flowers, ascribed to Italian workmanship. The Drawing-room, in which Westward Ho! or a portion of it, was written, has an exceptionally fine ceiling, of this type.

The great “Lion” inn on Wyle Cop, Shrewsbury, forms the scene of one of De Quincey’s mystical rhapsodies. It is the house to which he came in 1802, when, as a youth, he was setting forth in his unpractical way for London. He had walked in from Oswestry, reaching Shrewsbury two hours after nightfall. Innkeepers in those times knew little of pedestrians who footed it for pleasure, and classed all who walked when they might have rode as tramps. Therefore, it will be allowed that De Quincey timed his arrival well, at an hour when dusty feet are not so easily seen. However, had his shoes been noticed, he was ready with a defence, for he came to the “Lion” as a passenger already booked to London by the Mail. An Oswestry friend had performed that service for him, and here he was come to await the arrival of that conveyance.

“This character,” he says, “at once installed me as rightfully a guest of the inn, however profligate a life I might have previously led as a pedestrian. Accordingly I was received with special courtesy, and, it so happened, with something even like pomp. Four wax-lights carried before me by obedient mutes, these were but ordinary honours, meant (as old experience had instructed me) for the first engineering step towards effecting a lodgment upon the stranger’s purse. In fact, the wax-lights are used by innkeepers, both abroad and at home, to ‘try the range of their guns.’ If the stranger submits quietly, as a good anti-pedestrian ought surely to do, and fires no counter-gun by way of protest, then he is recognised at once as passively within range, and amenable to orders. I have always looked upon this fine of 5s. or 7s. (for wax that you do not absolutely need) as a sort of inaugural honorarium entrance-money, what in jails used to be known as smart money, proclaiming me to be a man comme il faut, and no toll in this world of tolls do I pay so cheerfully. This, meantime, as I have said, was too customary a form to confer much distinction. The wax-lights, to use the magnificent Grecian phrase ep?p e?e moved pompously before me, as the holy-holy fire (the inextinguishable fire and its golden hearth) moved before CÆsar semper Augustus, when he made his official or ceremonial avatars. Yet still this moved along the ancient channels of glorification: it rolled along ancient grooves—I might say, indeed, like one of the twelve CÆsars when dying, Ut puto, Deus fio (It’s my private opinion that at this very moment I am turning into a god), but still the metamorphosis was not complete. That was accomplished when I stepped into the sumptuous room allotted to me. It was a ball-room of noble proportions—lighted, if I chose to issue orders, by three gorgeous chandeliers, not basely wrapped up in paper, but sparkling through all their thickets of crystal branches, and flashing back the soft rays of my tall waxen lights. There were, moreover, two orchestras, which money would have filled within thirty minutes. And, upon the whole, one thing only was wanting—viz., a throne, for the completion of my apotheosis.

“It might be seven p.m. when first I entered upon my kingdom. About three hours later I rose from my chair, and with considerable interest looked out into the night. For nearly two hours I had heard fierce winds arising; and the whole atmosphere had by this time become one vast laboratory of hostile movements in all directions. Such a chaos, such a distracting wilderness of dim sights, and of those awful ‘sounds that live in darkness’ (Wordsworth’s Excursion), never had I consciously witnessed.... Long before midnight the household (with the exception of a solitary waiter) had retired to rest. Two hours, at least, were left to me, after twelve o’clock had struck, for heart-shaking reflections, and the local circumstances around me deepened and intensified these reflections, impressed upon them solemnity and terror, sometimes even horror....

“The unusual dimensions of the rooms, especially their towering height, brought up continually and obstinately, through natural links of associated feelings or images, the mighty vision of London waiting me, afar off. An altitude of nineteen or twenty feet showed itself unavoidably upon an exaggerated scale in some of the smaller side-rooms—meant probably for cards or for refreshments. This single feature of the rooms—their unusual altitude, and the echoing hollowness which had become the exponent of that altitude—this one terrific feature (for terrific it was in its effect), together with the crowding and evanescent images of the flying feet that so often had spread gladness through these halls, on the wings of youth and hope, at seasons when every room rang with music—all this, rising in tumultuous vision, whilst the dead hours of the night were stealing along, all around me—household and town—sleeping, and whilst against the windows more and more the storm was raving, and to all appearance endlessly growing, threw me into the deadliest condition of nervous emotion under contradictory forces, high over which predominated horror recoiling from that unfathomed abyss in London into which I was now so wilfully precipitating myself.”

The circumstance that led to his being shown into the ball-room of the “Lion,” was that of the house being under repair. That room is still in existence, and a noble and impressive room it is, occupying the upper floor of a two-storeyed building, added to the back of the older house perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago. Lofty, as he describes it, and lighted by tall windows, the feature of the two music-galleries and the chandeliers are still there, together with the supper-room at one end divided off from the greater saloon, and therefore disproportionately lofty. The ball-room is additionally lighted from the ceiling by a domed skylight. The moulded plaster decorations on walls and ceiling, in the Adams style—that style which so beautifully recast classic conventions—are exquisite, and even yet keep their delicate colouring, as do the emblematic figures of Music and Dancing painted on the door-panels. At rare intervals the room is used for its original purpose, and has a fine oak dancing-floor, but it more commonly serves, throughout the year, that of a commercial traveller’s stock-room.

The way to this derelict haunt of eighteenth-century gaiety lies down the yard of the inn, and up a fine broad stone stairway, now much chipped, dirty, and neglected. On the ground floor is the billiard-room of the present day, formerly the coach dining-room. In crepuscular apartments adjoining, in these times given over to forgotten lumber, the curious may find the deserted kitchens of a bygone age, with the lifts and hatches to upper floors that once conveyed their abundant meals to a vanished generation of John Bulls.

This portion of the house is seen to advantage at the end of the cobble-stoned yard, passing the old coach-office remaining there, unchanged, and proceeding to the other end, where the yard passes out into a steep and narrow lane called Stony Bank. Looking back, the great red-brick bulk of the ball-room, with the stone effigy of a lion on the parapet, is seen; the surrounding buildings giving a very powerful impression of the extensive business done here in days of old.

YARD OF THE “OLD ANGEL,” BASINGSTOKE.

The “Old Angel,” Basingstoke, associated with Jane Austen’s early days, has for close upon thirty years ceased from being an inn, and is now quite unrecognisable as a modern “temperance hotel.” In the rear, approached nowadays through the yard of a livery-stable, the old Assembly Rooms where she danced with the Élite of the county families of her day, may with some difficulty be found by climbing a crazy staircase and pushing through the accumulated cobwebs of years. There, on a spacious upper floor, is the ball-room of a hundred years ago, now deserted, or but seldom used as a corn-store.

The great “Royal George” hotel at Knutsford is associated with that finest of Mrs. Gaskell’s works, Cranford, and the “White Hart” at Whitchurch, on the Exeter Road, has reminiscences of Newman.

The “White Hart” is an inn typical of the coaching age along that western highway, and repays examination. Dark and tortuous corridors, a coffee-room decorated in barbaric colours, a capacious stable-yard, all tell of the old days of the Exeter Mail. The inn stands in the centre of the little town of narrow streets, where the Oxford and Southampton Road crosses the road to Exeter, and was thus in receipt of a very great deal of coaching business, travellers from Southampton or from Oxford changing here and waiting for the West of England coaches. Here it was, perhaps in the coffee-room, that the young clergyman who afterwards became a pervert to Rome and figured prominently as Cardinal Newman, wrote the first verses of the Lyra Apostolica, beginning:

Are these the tracks of some unearthly friend?