At Creggin, Montgomeryshire, the Rodney Pillar Inn is distinguished by a double signboard, on one side of which is the following verse:— Under these trees, in sunny weather, Just try a cup of ale, however; And if in tempest, or in storm, A couple then to make you warm: But when the day is very cold. Then taste a mug a twelvemonth old. On the reverse are these lines:— Rest and regale yourself, ’tis pleasant, Enough is all the present need, That’s the due of the hardy peasant, Who toils all sorts of men to feed. {226} Then muzzle not the ox when he treads out the corn, Nor grudge honest labour its pipe and its horn. Another queer old inscription is the following:— John Uff Sells good ale and that’s enough; A mistake here, Sells foreign spirits as well as beer. At a public-house in Devonshire the landlord has painted outside his door, “Good beer sold here, but don’t take my word for it;” and at the Bell Inn, Oxford, kept by John Good, are these lines:— My name, likewise my ale, is Good, Walk in and taste my own home brew’d, For all that know John Good can tell That like my sign it bears the Bell. One more example of Boniface’s wit must conclude this notice of Signboard poesy. At a public-house in Sussex, the sign of which is the White Horse, there is painted under the figure of that animal the couplet:— To the roadsters who enter a welcome he snorts, While they fill up his quarters and empty his quarts. In addition to signboard verses, inscriptions within the alehouse are by no means uncommon. Burns, who was fond of this style of composition, inscribed these lines on the window of the Globe Tavern at Dumfries:— The grey-beard, old wisdom, may boast of his treasures, Give me with gay folly to live; I grant him his calm-blooded, time-settled pleasures, But Folly has raptures to give. Dowie’s Tavern, in Libberton’s Wynd, Edinburgh, was the favourite resort of Burns, and is said by the able recorder of the _Traditions of Edinburgh_ “to have been formerly as dark and plain an old-fashioned house as any drunken lawyer of the last century could have wished to nestle in.” {227}