According to Pope, in his _Moral Essays_, it was at an inn that the witty and sparkling debauchee, George Villiers, second Duke of Buckingham, “the most accomplished man of the age, in riding, dancing, and fencing,” died in his fifty-ninth year, in 1687: In the worst inn’s worst room, with mat half hung, The floors of plaster and the walls of dung, On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw, With tape-tied curtains, never meant to draw, The George and Garter dangling from that bed Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red, Great Villiers lies--alas! how changed from him, That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim. A most complete picture of retribution in a moral essay, set forth in the most denunciatory lines. In the whole range of poetry there is nothing that so well lends itself to a cold, calculated vituperation as the heroic couplet. You can pile detail upon detail, like an inventory-clerk, so long as rhymes last; and thus an impeachment of this sort has a very formidable air. [Illustration: HOUSE WHERE THE DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM DIED, KIRKBY MOORSIDE.] But it has been denied that the profligate Duke ended in such misery. However that may be, he maintained his peculiar reputation to the last; for, according to Dr. Lowth, Bishop of London, he “died between two common girls,” at the house of one of his tenants in the Yorkshire village of Kirkby Moorside. That house is still wearily pointed out to the insistent stranger by the uninterested Kirkby Moorsiders, who, as Yorkshiremen with magnificent thirsts, are uninterested, chiefly by reason of its being no longer an inn; and, truth to tell, its old-time picturesque features, if it ever had any, are wholly overlaid by furiously ugly modern shop-fronts. Now, if it were only the “Swan,” some little way up the street, still, in the midst of picturesque squalor, dispensing drink of varied sorts to all and sundry, for good current coin of the realm, one might conceive some local historic and literary enthusiasm. The “Swan,” however, has no associations, and is merely, with its projecting porch, supported upon finely carved but woefully dilapidated seventeenth-century Renaissance pillars, a subject for an artist. The odd, and ugly, encroachment of an adjoining hairdresser’s shop is redeemed, from that same artistic point of view, by that now unusual object, a barber’s pole, projecting across.