An inn called the “Green Man” stands on the site of that busy house, but it is of more recent date than the old Whig headquarters. It may be seen at the fork of roads where the “new” road to St. Albans, driven through the yard of the old “Green Man” in 1826, branches off. Thus the “Red Lion” remains, long after the eclipse of its rival. Its frontage is impressive by size rather than beauty. With a range of fifteen windows in line, and its fiercely-whiskered red lion balancing himself at the end of a prodigiously long wrought-iron sign, it is eloquent of the old days. The lion turns his head north, gazing away from the direction in which his chief customers came. But this white-stuccoed frontage does not hide anything of antiquity, for this is not that original “Red Lion” to which Samuel Pepys resorted. The house he refers to in his diary is the “Old Red Lion”; down the hill, at the approach to Barnet. There he “lay” in 1667. “August 11th, Lord’s Day,” he writes: “Up by four o’clock . . . and got to the wells at Barnet by seven o’clock, and there found many people a-drinking.” After “drinking three glasses and the women nothing,” the party sojourned “to the Red Lion, where we ’light and went up into the great room, and there drank, and ate some of the best cheesecakes that ever I ate in my life.” The keenness of the innkeepers who let post-horses during the last few years of the coaching age is scarcely credible. It was a fierce competition. The landlord of the “Red Lion” at Barnet thought nothing of forcibly taking out the post-horses from any private carriage passing his house, and putting in a pair of his own, to do the next stage to St. Albans. This, too, free of charge, in order to prevent the business going to the hated rival. Mine host of that hotel also had his little ways of drawing custom, and gave a glass of sherry and a sandwich, gratis, to the travellers changing there. But things did not end here. The landlord of the “Red Lion,” finding, perhaps, that the sherry and sandwich at the “Green Man” was more attractive than his method, engaged a gang of bruisers to pounce upon passing chaises, and even to haul them out of his rival’s stable-yard. Evidently a man of wrath, this licensed victualler! After several contests of this kind, the authorities interfered. The combatants were bound over to keep the peace, the punching of conks and bread-baskets, and the tapping of claret ceased, and people travelling down the road were actually allowed to decide for themselves which house they would patronise! XIV