tavern; but it must have been an inn likewise.
At least Dame Quickly "let out beds;"
for did not Sir John board and lodge there?
Was it not in the dame's dolphin chamber,
by a sea-coal fire that the knight sat while
the placable landlady was dressing his
wounded head, broken by Prince Hal for
likening his father, the King, to a singing
man at Windsor? Was it not into that
dolphin chamber that entered unto Mrs.
Quickly her gossip, the butcher's wife, who
came to borrow a mess of vinegar for her
dish of prawns; whereupon Sir John did
desire to eat some, and was told by his
considerate hostess that they were ill for a green
wound? Did he not in that same chamber
bid the dame fetch him forty shillings? How
many score of times forty shillings had been
borrowed there, I wonder? Was it not in
a room at the Boar's Head that Sir John
departed his merry, disreputable life. There
he picked at the sheets, and babbled o' green
fields, and there was but one way with him,
for his nose was as sharp as a pen. Here
he died, and I will wager that had even
that stern chief justice (who was so hard
upon the knight for his excesses) read the
exquisite account our Shakspeare has left
us of Falstaff`s death, the solemn magistrate
would have dropped one tear to the
memory of that humorous, incorrigible,
immortal old sinner.

Fat Jack had his country as well as his
town inns. In the Garter Inn, at Windsor,
the glorious intrigue of the "Merry Wives"
is chiefly conducted. Hither comes mine
host of the Garter, and Master Brook,
jealous and mysterious, and Bardolph with
his flaming nose, transformed into a decorous
drawer, fetching in Sir John a cup of sack—
"simple? No, with eggs." Here was that
notable quarrel between Falstaff and his
acolytes, touching the stolen fan and the
fifteenpence the knight received as his
share, on the ground that he would not
endanger his soul gratis. I doubt if Sir John
ever paid his reckoning at the Garter after
his discomfiture, and he bad begun to
perceive that he had been made an ass. I doubt
very much indeed whether mine host, jolly
and joke-loving as he was, ever had the face
to present his little bill to the crest-fallen
knight.

Inns, as I have said, abound with literary
and historical land-marks. Ben Jonson's last
comedy was called the New Inn. The first
Protestant bishop (so Catholics say) was
consecrated at an inn—the Nag's Head, in
either Holborn or the Poultry. The ruin of
King Charles the First was consummated in
an inn. Old Hooker, the divine, coming to
London to preach at Paul's Cross, and alighting
very wet and weary at an inn mostly resorted
to by clergymen, was so kindly received by
an artful landlady; so coddled and cockered
up with possets and warm toasts, that, being
a simple-minded, guileless man, he was easily
inveigled into marrying the landlady's daughter,
an ignorant boor and a shrew. The poor
man went to the altar like a witless dolt to
the correction of the stocks; to his correction,
indeed; for his wife led him a dreadful
life. One of his old pupils, a bishop's son,
visiting him afterwards in his country
parsonage, found him tending sheep with one
hand and holding a Greek folio in the other;
and even from this employment he was called
by his virago wife to rock the baby's cradle!
Sir Bulwer Lytton has a pleasant reminiscence
of poor Hooker's married life in a scene in
Pelham.

Sir Walter Scott is great on inns at home
and abroad. Julian Peveril's despatches are
stolen from him at an inn: the fearful
  tribunal of the Vehmgericht hold their sittings
in some awful subterranean cave beneath a
German inn. The first scene of Kenilworth is
laid at an inn: the most amusing scene in
Rob Roy takes place in the Clachan inn
of Aberfoil. Then we have the roadside inn,
where the author of Waverley, in a white top
coat and top boots appears so mysteriously,
and consumes so many beefsteaks: we have
the inn where Rob Roy, decently disguised as
Campbell, forces his company on Morris;
also, the inn for which Dick Tinto painted
the sign: we have the inn of inns, which
has immortalised the Tweedside village of
Innerleithen, where Meg Dods holds her
hosterial state, and bids defiance to
commercial travellers. I might multiply instances
of the lustre which the Great Wizard has
shed over inns, at home and abroad, until you
and I were tired.

There is scarcely a great work by a great
writer, but I find some pleasant mention of
"mine inn" therein. To the Hercules Pillars
Squire Western sent his chaplain to fetch his
tobacco-box. At an inn did dear old Parson
Adams fall into one of the most dreadful of his
dilemmas. Don Quixote and inns are inseparable:
in an inn he was drubbed; in an inn
he was tossed in a blanket. Gil Bias received
many lessons of practical philosophy in inns.
In one did the sycophant praise him inordinately
and devour his fish and his omelettes;
telling him afterwards never to place
confidence in any one who told him that he was
the eighth wonder of the world. The first
provincial letter of Pascal was written to a
friend supposed to be lodging at an inn. The
best French vaudeville I know (and from
which our own Deaf as a Post is translated)
is called L'Auberge Pleine—The Full Inn.
Sir John Suckling the poet died at an inn
in France. His servant had robbed him and
absconded, and his master hastily pulling on
his boots to pursue him, drew a rusty nail into
his foot; the wound from which mortifying,
Sir John Suckling died. At an inn at St. Omer
Titus Oates hatched some of his subtlest
plots and made some of his grandest Popish
discoveries. The inn adventures of the
Chevalier de Grammont will not readily be