If we enter the “Falcon,” Shakespeare’s words greet us from the wall: “Good wine is a good familiar creature if it be well used, exclaim no more against it.” The gentle invitation of the blinking sign to enter and to share joy and sorrow with friendly comrades, Shakespeare himself has often followed. A French critic, Mézières, went so far as to call him “un habitué de la taverne,” politely adding that “he never lost his self-control and never contended himself with the light joys of the flying hour.” The “Red Lion” in Henley-on-the-Thames once owned a window pane--recently by mistake packed in the trunk of a confused traveler--into which Shenstone scratched the much-quoted words:-- “Whoe’er has traveled life’s dull round, Where’er his stages may have been, May sigh to think he still has found The warmest welcome at an inn.” They are of true Shakespearean spirit and remind us of Speed’s words in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” (II, v):-- “I’ll to the alehouse with you presently, where, for one shot of five pence, thou shalt have five thousand welcomes.” It would seem hardly necessary further to urge such an enthusiastic lover of the tavern, but Launce thought differently. _Launce._ If thou wilt go with me to the alehouse, so; if not, thou art an Hebrew, a Jew, and not worth the name of a Christian. _Speed._ Why? _Launce._ Because thou hast not so much charity in thee as to go to the ale with a Christian. We are not surprised to hear the final question, “Wilt thou go?” promptly answered, “At thy service.” Most of the tavern names Shakespeare mentions are true products of the Renaissance times when classical studies were extremely popular. “The Centaur,” “The Phenix,” “The Pomegranate,”--an ornament we find so often in the brocades of the sixteenth century,--all are signs of his own time, simply transplanted from London he knew so well to Genoa or Ephesus, places he had never put his eye on. “The Pegasus,” by the man in the street called “The Flying Horse,” decorated still in the year 1691 the house of a jeweler and banker in Lombard Street. In passing, we may remark that all the signs which to-day surprise the traveler in this busy street are more or less happy reproductions of the old signs, hung out there by the great banking firms for King Edward’s coronation.