The owner in 1558 was Humfrey Colet, or Collet, who had been Member of Parliament for Southwark. Soon after the middle of the seventeenth century, in a book called _Musarum Deliciæ, or the Muses' Recreation_, compiled by Sir John Mennes (Admiral and Chief Comptroller of the Navy) and Dr. James Smith, appeared some lines, "upon a surfeit caught by drinking bad sack at 'the George' in Southwark." Perhaps the landlord mended his ways; in any case, the rent was shortly afterwards £150 a year--a large sum for those days. The "George" was a great coaching and carriers' inn. Only a fragment of it, but a picturesque one, now exists; it is still galleried, and dates from shortly after the Southwark Fire of 1676. The rest of the building was pulled down in 1889-90. All the inns to which allusion has been made were clustered together on the east side of the Borough High Street, the gateways of those most distant from each other being only about 140 yards apart. Another leading thoroughfare from London to the east was the road through Aldgate to Whitechapel. Here, though the houses of entertainment were historically far less interesting than those of Southwark, they flourished for many years. Where a modern hotel with the same sign now stands, next to the Metropolitan railway station on the north side of Aldgate High Street, there was once a well-known inn, the "Three Nuns," so called, perhaps, from the contiguity of the nuns of St. Clare, or _sorores minores_, who gave a name to the Minories. The "Three Nuns" inn is mentioned by Defoe in his _Journal of the Plague_, which, though it describes events that happened when he was little more than an infant, has an air of authenticity suggesting personal experience. We are told by him that near this inn was the "dreadful gulf--for such it was rather than a pit"--in which, during the Plague of 1665, not less than 1,114 bodies were buried in a fortnight, from the 6th to the 20th of September. Throughout the eighteenth and the early part of the nineteenth centuries this house was much frequented by coaches and carriers. The late Mr. Edwin Edwards, who etched it in 1871, was told by the landlord that a four-horse coach was then running from there to Southend during the summer months. A painting of the holy nuns still appeared on the sign-board. The house was rebuilt soon after the formation of the Metropolitan Railway. A short distance west of the "Three Nuns," at 31, Aldgate High Street, the premises of Messrs. Adkin and Sons, wholesale tobacconists, occupy the site of the old "Blue Boar" coaching inn, which they replaced in 1861. The sculptured sign of the "Blue Boar," let into the wall in front, was put up at the time of the rebuilding. The former inn, described on a drawing in the Crace collection as the oldest in London, is held by some to be the same as that referred to in an order of the Privy Council to the Lord Mayor, dated from St. James's, September 5th, 1557, wherein he is told to "apprehende and to