To him it was, because there he found his toadies, whom he could bully to his heart’s content. But the man who could say ’My mind to me a kingdom is’ did not care to sit on such a throne. But we have insensibly strayed into side-openings; let us return to the main avenue of galleried taverns. We shall have to mention so many, that we see no better means of preventing our getting confused and losing our way altogether than to arrange them alphabetically according to the signs they were known by. The first inn thus on our list is the Angel, at Islington. Its establishment dates back two hundred years. Originally it presented the usual features of a large country inn, having a long front, with an overhanging tiled roof; the principal entrance was beneath a projection, which extended along a portion of the front, and had a wooden gallery at top. The inn-yard, approached by a gateway in the centre, was nearly a quadrangle, having double galleries supported by plain columns and carved pilasters, with caryatides and other figures. This courtyard, as it was more than a hundred years, was preserved by Hogarth in his print of a ’Stage Coach.’ There is also a view of it in Pinks’s ’History of Clerkenwell.’ In olden days the inn was a great halting-place for travellers from London, and from the northern and western counties. On the King’s birthday the royal mail coaches used to meet there, as shown in an engraving of 1812, in the Crace collection in the British Museum. In 1819 the old house was pulled down, and the present ordinary-looking building erected in its stead, a grand opportunity, afforded by its commanding position, ninety-nine feet above the Trinity high water-mark, at the meeting of so many important roads, being thus stupidly lost.