VISITORS’ BOOKS

The Visitors’ Book is no new thing. In 1466, when a distinguished Bohemian traveller, one Baron Leo von Rozmital, dined with the Knights of Windsor, his hosts, after dinner, produced what they called their “missal,” and asked for his autograph “in memoriam” of him. A little daunted, perhaps, by so ill-omened an expression, but still courteous, the Baron complied with the request, and wrote, “Lwyk z Rozmitala a z Blatnie.” This uncouth autograph was not unnaturally looked upon with suspicion, and the Baron, on leaving Windsor, found himself followed by the Knights, who made inquiries of his retinue as to his real name. They suspected him to be some impostor, or at the least considered him guilty of that kind of foolishness which nowadays induces a certain class of visitor to sign himself “Kruger” or the “King of the Cannibal Islands,” or, worse still, to write down the name of the latest notorious criminal.

Foolishness is expected in a Visitors’ Book, and is not often wanting. In the present writer’s own experience, when two friends who, oddly enough, were named Rands and Sands, wrote their names in such a volume, the waiter who read them there, half-apologetically, said, “No: your real names, please, gentlemen.” Argument and assertion could not convince, and in the end they wrote “Jones” and “Robinson,” which duly satisfied.

The Visitors’ Book of an inn usually contains little else than fulsome praise of the establishment and a somewhat revolting appreciation of its good cheer. Would-be wit and offensive scurrility are, as a rule, the only other characteristics; but from all this heap of chaff and rubbish it is possible to extract a residuum of fun and sprightly fancy. Many modern tourists in the Lake District have, for instance, been amused—after their own experiences around the steeps of Langdale Pikes—to read in the Visitors’ Book of the “Salutation” at Ambleside the following piece of poignant observation:

Of the “Swan,” at Thames Ditton, Theodore Hook wrote, but whether in a book there, or not, does not appear:

Among the severe epigrams that guests have left behind them, none other is so witty as that by Quin, written at the once famed “Pelican” inn, a favourite Bath Road hostelry at Speenhamland, Newbury:

Its monumental charges were long since ended, and where the “Pelican” stood there are now only stables and a veterinary establishment.

Bathos, ineptitude, and lines that refuse to scan are the stigmata of visitors’-book verse. There is no worse “poetry” on earth than that which lurks between those covers, or in the pages of young ladies’ albums, the last refuge of drivel and impertinence. People who would be ashamed to own their verse elsewhere will write and sign it in a Visitors’ Book; and thus we find, for example, at the “King’s Arms” at Malmesbury, the following, signed by Bishop Potter of New York:

Let us hope his divinity is better than his metrical efforts.The interesting pages of Visitors’ Books are generally those that are not there, as an Irishman might say; for the world is populated very densely with those appreciative people who, whether from a love of literature, or with an instinct for collecting autographs that may have a realisable value, remove the signatures of distinguished men, and with them anything original they may have written. Many years ago Charles Kingsley, Tom Taylor, dramatist and sometime editor of Punch, and Thomas Hughes, author of that classic, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, were staying at the Penygwryd Hotel, on the summit of Llanberis Pass, North Wales, and wrote a long set of verses in the Visitors’ Book; but the pages were stolen, long, since, and now you do but come to that book by asking very nicely for it, and then it is produced from a locked cupboard.

Here are the verses, the respective authors identified by the initials over each. It will clearly be seen that those three were sadly in want of occupation, and were wound up for a long run:

Enough; quantum sufficit!

It was for lack of that natural outlet, the Visitors’ Book, that many old-time guests had recourse to the window-pane. Unfortunately—or should it not perhaps rather be a fortunate circumstance?—while pen and ink were at command of every one, only a diamond ring would serve on glass; and not every guest was so luxuriously equipped.

The classic instance of a window-pane at an inn being thus inscribed is, of course, that of Shenstone’s writing the last stanza of his lines on “Freedom” upon the window of an inn—generally said to be the “Red Lion” at Henley-on-Thames. But who shall decide?

If we are to believe the account of Richard Graves, who knew the poet well, and published Recollections of Some Particulars in the Life of the Late William Shenstone, Esq., in 1788, the lines were first written in an arbour of what used to be the “Sunrising” inn, on the crest of Edge Hill, a house long since become a private residence.

According to Graves, Shenstone, about 1750, visited a friend, one Mr. Whistler, in the southernmost part of Oxfordshire, and did not particularly enjoy his visit, Mr. Whistler sending the poet’s servant off to stay at an inn, in order that the man and the domestics of his own house should not gossip together. Shenstone himself seems to have been a very unamiable guest, and one better suited to an inn than to the house of a friend; for he grew disagreeable over being expected to play “Pope Joan” in the evening with his friend’s children, and sulked when he lost a trifle at cards. Then he would not dress himself tidily for dinner, and snuffed and slouched to the inconvenience of every one, so that it is not surprising to read of a coolness, and then quarrels, coming to estrange the pair, resulting in Shenstone abruptly cutting short his visit. He lay, overnight, on his journey home, at the “Sunrising” inn, and the next morning, in an arbour, inscribed the famous lines which now form the last stanza of “Freedom.”

“More stanzas,” says Graves, “were added afterwards,” and he rightly adds that they “diminish the force” of the original thought.

The “Sunrising” inn, long since become a private mansion, and added to very largely, has no relics of Shenstone. It stands, with lovely gardens surrounding, on the very lip and verge of Edge Hill, and looks out across the great levels of Warwickshire. In recent times the hill has becomes famous, or notorious, for motor and cycle accidents, and the approach to it is heralded by a notice-board proclaiming “Great Danger. Cyclists Dismount.” But in these days of better brakes, very few obey that injunction, and ride down, safely enough.

Whistler died in 1754, when Shenstone, remorseful, wrote, “how little do all our disputes appear to us now!”

Here, then, is the original story of the famous inscription, but it does not necessarily prove that this melancholy poet did not also inscribe it at Henley-on-Thames and elsewhere, notably at the “White Swan,” at that quite different and far-distant place from the Thames-side Henley, Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire; an old-fashioned house still in existence, and claiming to date from 1358.

HENLEY-IN-ARDEN, AND THE “WHITE SWAN.”

If the story of the “Red Lion” at the Oxfordshire Henley be a myth, as it is held to be, it is one of very considerable age, and one that has not only misled uncounted myriads of writers, but will continue to do so until the end of time. There is no disabling the flying canard, no overtaking the original lie, howsoever hard you strive; and as the famous stanza really was at one time to be seen on a window of the “Red Lion” (whether written there by Shenstone or another), it really seems that there is a way out of the dilemma that probably has never until now been considered. Shenstone resided on the Shropshire border, near Henley-in-Arden, but on his journeys to and from London must often have stayed at the “Red Lion,” Henley-on-Thames, then on one of the two principal coach-routes; and it is quite probable that he was so pleased with the last stanza of “Freedom,” and so satisfied with its peculiar fitness for inn windows, that he inscribed it at both places, if not indeed at others as well:

Misquotation—sometimes a vice, occasionally a great improvement upon the original—has constantly rendered the last two lines:

and here, it seems, the use of posterity is the better.

Neither at the “White Swan” nor the “Red Lion” is the inscription now to be found.

Dean Swift’s bitter jest, by way of advice to the landlord, scratched on a window of the “Three Crosses” inn at Willoughby, on the road to Holyhead, is certainly the next most celebrated. It runs:

I have elsewhere,[8] and at considerable length, told the story of this remarkable incident, and given a facsimile of the still-surviving inscription, so hesitate before reprinting it.

In imagination one sees that gifted man riding horseback on his journeys between London and Holyhead, or Chester and Parkgate, on his way to or from Ireland, halting overnight with his attendant at the rough inns of that time, and leaving broadcast on the dim and flawed glass of their windows humorous or spiteful comments upon anything that chanced to arouse his criticism. You perceive him, waiting impatiently for breakfast, scrawling malignant lampoons with his ring, or recording the stupidities of his servant. The wayside taverns along that great north-westerly road should still have such evidence of his passing, only glass is brittle, and many a pane precious with those autographed records has accidentally perished, while doubtless many another has long ago been removed by admirers, and so become lost to the world.

One such was the pane at the “Yacht” inn at Chester, that hoary timbered and plastered tavern whose nodding gables scarce uphold the story that this was once the foremost hotel of this picturesque city. The Dean, then at the height of his fame, halting here on his way into Ireland, was in one of his companionable humours, and invited the Dean and the other dignified clergy of the Cathedral to supper; but not one of them acknowledged his intended hospitality. Deans, Canons, and Prebendaries all agreed among themselves, or resolved separately, to ignore the distinguished visitor, who, in his rage, decorated a window with the couplet:

On the whole, regarding this quite dispassionately, having regard to the gross affront on the one hand and Swift’s malignant nature and very full sense of what was due to himself on the other, it can hardly be said that he rose to the heights of epigram or sank to the depths of abuse demanded by the occasion. Here he surely should have surpassed himself, in the one category or the other, or—even more characteristically—in both. We want more bitterness, more gall, an extra infusion of wormwood, and feel that this is an ineffectual thing that any affronted person, owning a diamond and merely capable of writing, could have achieved. And, even so, the historic pane itself has disappeared.

The guests at inns in the middle of the eighteenth century often did not, it seems, disdain the walls; for in Columella, a curious novel of travelling, published about that period, we read that the characters in it found time on their journey “to examine the inscriptions on walls and windows, and learned that the love of woman, the love of wine, and the love of fame were the three ruling passions that usually vented themselves” in this manner.

These were travellers who, come what might, determined to be unconventional.

“When they came to an inn, instead of complaining of their accommodations, or bullying the waiters, they diverted themselves with the humours of my landlord, criticising his taste in his furniture or his pictures, or in perusing the inscriptions on the walls or windows, or inquiring into the history of the neighbouring gentry. In short, they had determined to be pleased with everything, and therefore were not disappointed.”

At the inn where these original persons breakfasted the great patriot, John Wilkes, had usurped the principal place over the parlour chimney. Where they stopped to dine, the virtuous George the Third and the amiable Charlotte had resumed their places in the dining-room, and “Wilkes was only stuck up against the stable-door, and in the temple of Cloacina.”

Alas! poor Wilkes, to be subjected to such an indignity!

At one inn they found the inscription:

and there is your bid for fame. The other remarks they shamelessly quote are all very well for eighteenth-century books, but they are not permitted on the printed page in our own time.

There was once a poet of a minor sort who not only cherished a mania for scribbling verse on the windows of inns, but was mad enough to collect and print a series of these by no means distinguished efforts, which he published under the title of Verses written on Windows in several parts of the Kingdom in a Journey to Scotland.

This extraordinary person was one Aaron Hill, who “flourished” (as an historian might say) between 1685 and 1750. If he is at all remembered to-day, it is only as a friend of Pope, whose truest criticism presents him as “one of the flying fishes, only capable of making brief flights out of the profound.” He afterwards, with more friendship and less truth, described Hill as attempting to dive into dulness, but rising unstained to “mount far off among the swans of Thames.” How pretty! but he was in truth the veriest goose, and his pinions ineffectual.

Hill wrote reams of rhymes, but few of them are poetry and fewer have any power of entertaining. In 1728 he travelled in Scotland, and there—it is an experience not unmatched nowadays—he encountered, while staying at an inn in the Highlands, bad weather. Happily, not all who are weatherbound in those latitudes scrawl their thoughts on windows, or poetic congestion must long since have ensued. At that inn—what inn or where we are not told, he accomplished his one excellent epigram, his solitary perfect quatrain:

Other specimens of his quality do not exhibit the inspiration of those lines, and indeed he is found to be too concerned with moral analogies to please greatly, even in the best of them. Thus:

And again:

There is some just observation in that last, although how you are to give a bone apiece, and at the same time, to Whig and Tory, would, as I conceive the situation, be a difficult, not to say an impossible, matter in our scheme of politics. When a Government comes into power, be it Whig or Tory, or any other fancy label you please, it takes all the bones, and the other dog merely does the growling, until the times do alter.

With two more specimens we practically exhaust Hill’s well of fancy:

How true that last admission!

---