The robust pages of Fielding and Smollett are rich in incidents of travel, and in scenes at wayside inns, where postboys, persecuted lovers, footpads, and highwaymen mingle romantically. The “Three Jolly Pigeons,” the village ale-house of Goldsmith’s _She Stoops to Conquer_, must not be forgotten, while the “Black Bear” in Sir Walter Scott’s _Kenilworth_, is prominent. Marryat, Theodore Hook, Harrison Ainsworth, Charles Lever, Bulwer Lytton, all largely introduced inns into their novels. Dickens, of course, is so prolific in his references to inns and taverns that he requires special chapters. Thackeray’s inns are as the poles asunder from those of Dickens, and are superior places, the resorts of superior people, and of people who, if not superior, endeavour to appear so. In short, in their individual treatment of inns, Dickens and Thackeray are thoroughly characteristic and dissimilar. Thackeray’s waiters and the waiters drawn by Dickens are very different. Thackeray could never have imagined the waiter at the “Old Royal,” at Birmingham, who, having succeeded in obtaining an order for soda-water from Bob Sawyer, “melted imperceptibly away”; nor the preternaturally mean and cunning waiters at Yarmouth and at the “Golden Cross,” in _David Copperfield_--own brothers to the Artful Dodger. I don’t think there could ever have existed such creatures. [Illustration: THE “BLACK SWAN,” KIRKBY MOORSIDE.] Thackeray’s waiters are not figments of the imagination; they are drawn from the life, as, for example, John, the old waiter in _Vanity Fair_, who, when Dobbin returns to England, after ten years in India, welcomes him as if he had been absent only weeks, and supposes he’ll have a roast fowl for dinner. But in the amazing quantity of drink they consume, the characters of Dickens and Thackeray are on common ground. Mr. Pickwick could apparently begin drinking brandy shortly after breakfast, and continue all day, without being much the worse for it; and in _Pendennis_ we read how Jack Finucane and Mr. Trotter, dining at Dick’s Restaurant with Mr. Bungay, drank with impunity what would easily suffice to overthrow most modern men.