Old inns in London may perhaps owe their repute to the share they have in the scenery of Pickwick and Nickleby. The London inns and inn-yards, still used as houses of entertainment, are among the last few survivals which link us to the antique customs of old London. These are now being swept away with a pitiless rapidity, and in a dozen years more not one will be left. The enormous, sheltering, tiled roofs, the galleries, balustrades, crannies, winding stairs, joined to make these singular structures picturesque, with their lights and shadows, suggestive of the buildings in an old Normandy town. The strange part is that these hostelries seem to do business up to the moment of their extinction; and even when that occurs, the traffic is transferred to a parasite public-house bearing the same name. In most cases, however, the tradition of its being a halt or starting place for carriers and country waggons is maintained, as the great railway companies have seized on many to serve as their goods depots. Hence we find the Bricklayers’ Arms and such places, from under whose archways now rumble forth the Pickford vans, instead of the favourite “Mouldy’s Iron Devil,” the six or eight-horse waggon of our grandsires. The old inns were frail and precarious structures; and it is a marvel that they should have survived so long, the vast expanse of tiled roof being warped and bent in eddying waves, while the crazy stairs and galleries of ancient wood were rotten with age. Many of the Dickens inns were in the City, notably the one in which Mr. Squeers put up when he used to repair to London to collect victims for his school. Mr. Squeers’s house, with many other curious places, was swept away when Snow Hill was abolished, and the Holborn Viaduct carried through to Newgate Street.