Two picturesque specimens--the “Old Tabard,” in the Borough, and the “Warwick Arms,” close to Paternoster Row, would have found admirers in Nuremberg or Rouen. The latter was a remarkable specimen from its size and elaborateness, with its huge roof, rambling galleries and crannies, cavernous dark shadows, and general air of mystery. The tiled roofs of these buildings seemed to grow bent and warped from age and weakness, and fall into those wavings and twists which form an element of the picturesque. The wood of the balustrades grew black and grimed; it was strange that what appeared so crazy should have held together so long. The “Tabard,” though it did not date from Chaucer’s day, as many innocently fancied, was a genuine structure of the seventeenth century. The wonder, in truth, is that any of these fragile structures should still be in existence. Perhaps the most remarkable and most interesting of the old inn-yards was that of the “Four Swans,” which stood till some eight or ten years ago in Bishopsgate Street. This was considered the most perfect and best preserved of all, having more galleries, and having been the scene of a stirring adventure during the Roundhead and Cavalier wars. Its neighbour, the “Green Dragon,” was levelled about the same time. What a pleasing twang, it may be said, is there about the titles of these hostelries, which contrast with the more prosaic designations of latter-day life! Of these old inns, with their yards and galleries, there are but two or three in which the business of entertainment is still carried on. There is the old “Bell Inn,” a grimed, caked, red-brick, ancient building, with its sign of the Bell, a china shop in front, and an archway according to the old pattern. Entering, there is the true old-world flavour--the galleries, the tumble-down stairs fashioned of wood-panelling with projecting eaves, the files of bells outside, the kitchen to the left as in a foreign hotel, strange little rickety stairsteps as from the cabin of a ship, with also the occasional appearance of a figure in one of the galleries. The inn life here, from these arrangements, is certain to correspond--every one is, as it were, in evidence. You can hardly dream of the noisy Holborn just outside. It is very different in the regular hostelries, where everything is at the top of the house or at the bottom, not, as here, all round about it. London has many of these quaint surprises to those who wish to see them. Here is to be seen the low arch, under which the coaches and waggons drove into the inn-yard, with its galleries running round, from which chambermaids looked down or called to those below. Even now it seems a strange order of things and a quaint arrangement, and you wonder how business is carried on at such places.