“Come on, you mad-cap. I’ll to the Alehouse with you presently, where, for one shot of fivepence, thou shalt have five thousand welcomes.” _Two Gentlemen of Verona._ Act ii., sc. 5. Whoe’er has travelled 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. _Shenstone._ _ALE HOUSES: THEIR ORIGIN. — HOSPITALITY IN MEDIÆVAL TIMES. — OLD LONDON INNS AND TAVERNS. — ANECDOTES OF INNS AND INN KEEPERS. — CURIOUS SIGNS. — SIGN-BOARD AND ALE-HOUSE VERSES. — SIGN-BOARD ARTISTS. — ALE-HOUSE SONGS AND CATCHES._ “No, Sir;” said Dr. Johnson, “there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced, as by a good tavern or inn.” The argument by which the great Doctor leads up to this oracular deliverance is as follows:—“There is no private house in which people can enjoy themselves so well as in a capital tavern. Let there be ever so great plenty of good things, ever so much grandeur, ever so much elegance, and ever so much desire that everybody should be easy, in the nature of things it cannot be; there must always be some degree of care and anxiety. The master of the house is anxious to entertain his guests, the guests are anxious to be agreeable to him, and no man but a very impudent dog indeed, can as freely command what is in another {183} man’s house as if it were his own; whereas, at a tavern there is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you are welcome, and the more noise you make, the more trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the welcomer you are. No servant will attend you with the alacrity which waiters do who are incited by the prospect of an immediate reward in proportion as they please.” The Doctor seems most conscientiously to have made his practice square with his preaching. Till the end of his life, although generally an abstemious man, he was regular in his attendance at the various taverns he patronised, and his burly figure was as well known amongst the frequenters of the inns and taverns of Fleet Street, as that of the most notorious roysterer of the time. In his day the tavern—the London tavern especially—attained the highest point of social importance which it has ever reached; and many of those convivial and social functions, now for the most part discharged by the clubs and by private hospitality, were then considered to fell within its special province. During the last century the tavern gathered around its hospitable hearth those groups of savants and wits, which have been the starting points of many a scientific and literary society of the present day. It is, of course, impossible for us in the space we are able to devote to the history of public hospitality in England, to do more than give a very slight sketch of the subject.