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."

[Illustration: Entrance to the Reindeer Inn, Banbury]

And again, on Christmas Eve Irving tells of his joyous long day's ride
in a coach, and how he at length arrived at a village where he had
determined to stay the night. As he drove into the great gateway of
the inn (some of them were mighty narrow and required much skill on
the part of the Jehu) he saw on one side the light of a rousing
kitchen fire beaming through a window. He "entered and admired, for
the hundredth time, that picture of convenience, neatness, and broad