Edinburgh also has its famous White Horse; in a close in the Canongate, an inn dating from the time of Queen Mary Stuart, and which Scott has introduced in one of his novels, may still be seen. It was well-known to runaway couples, and hundreds have been made happy or unhappy for life “at a moment’s notice,” in its large room, in which, as well as in the White Hart in the Grassmarket, these _impromptu_ marriages were as regularly performed as at Gretna Green. The WHITE HORSE CELLAR, Piccadilly, now a tame omnibus office, was for more than a century one of the bustling coaching inns for the West. “Some persons think the sublimest object in nature is a ship launched on the bosom of the ocean; but give me, for my private satisfaction, the mail coaches that pour down Piccadilly of an evening, tear up the pavement, and devour the way before them to the Land’s-End.”--_Hazlitt._ This place calls up pleasant fancies of travelling by the mail, through merry roads, with blooming hawthorn and chestnut trees, larks singing aloft, the village bells, and the blacksmith’s hammer tinkling in the distance; but another White Horse Inn shows the dark side of the picture--the unsafety of the roads, for the White Horse, corner of Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square, was long a detached public-house, where travellers customarily stopped for refreshment, and to examine their firearms before crossing the fields to Lisson Green.[236] The last White Horse we shall mention was in Pope’s Head Alley, the sign of John Sudbury and George Humble, the first men that opened a printshop in London, in the beginning of the seventeenth century. Peacham, in his “Compleat Gentleman,” says that Goltzius’ engravings were commonly to be had in Pope’s Head Alley. There also, in 1611, the first edition of Speed’s “Great Britain” was published. At a certain place in Warwickshire a fellow started a public-house near four others, with signs respectively of the Bear, the Angel, the Ship, and the Three Cups. Yet quite undaunted at his neighbours, he put up the White Horse as his sign, and under it wrote the following spirited and prophetic rhymes:-- “My _White Horse_ shall bite the _Bear_, And make the _Angel_ fly; Shall turn the _Ship_ her bottom up, And drink the _Three Cups_ dry.” And so it did; the lines pleased the people, the other houses soon lost their custom, and tradition says that the fellow made a considerable fortune.