The “Red Horse”--the name is taken from the Vale of Red Horse in which the town of Stratford-on-Avon stands--is still in being, and the “Washington Irving Room” is even yet a shrine, of sorts. A shrine, however, none too easy for the casual worshipper of heroes, or the amateur of literary landmarks, to come to, for it is generally used as a private sitting-room; and not the most sympathetic and easy-going of guests who has hired it for that purpose is content to receive all day a stream of strangers bubbling over with real, or affected, interest. It is a small room, measuring some ten feet by fifteen, looking out upon Bridge Street. Nowadays the walls of it are hung with portraits of Irving himself, of Longfellow, and others, together with old views of the town; and a framed letter written by Irving, and a silhouette of “Sally Garner,” daughter of the landlord of that time, bring the place closely into touch with the _Sketch Book_. The “Sexton’s Clock” stands beside the door, with a suitably inscribed brass plate; but no longer may you wield that poker which was Irving’s “sceptre,” nor sit in the chair that was, in his fancy, a throne; for the poker is kept in the office of the hotel, and the chair, also with an inscribed brass plate, is locked within a cupboard, through whose glass doors you may see where it is jealously retired from touch. In short, every thing that will harbour an inscription has one, not excepting the poker itself, which has been engraved with the legend, “Geoffrey Crayon’s Sceptre.” The chambermaid who so obliquely suggested that it was time to go to bed, and no doubt preceded him to Number 15, with candle and warming-pan, was, we are told, “pretty Hannah Cuppage,” and we wish he had told us more about her, instead of writing so much very thin description of antiquities. Poets--Southey apart, with his tragical _Mary, the Maid of the Inn_--have not sung so frequently as might have been expected of the fair maids at inns. Of this type of minstrelsy, Gay’s ballad on Molly Mog, daughter of the landlord at the “Rose,” Wokingham, is best known: Says my Uncle, I pray you discover What hath been the cause of your woes; Why you pine and you whine like a lover? --I have seen Molly Mog, of the “Rose.” O Nephew! your grief is but folly, In town you may find better prog; Half a crown there will get you a Molly, A Molly much better than Mog. But he will not hear anything of the kind: I know that by wits ’tis recited That women are best at a clog: But I am not so easily frighted From loving of sweet Molly Mog. And so forth, for twelve more verses; when, having exhausted all possible rhymes to “Mog,” he concludes, not before we are heartily tired of him and Molly too. The ballad was composed in the company of Swift, Pope, and Arbuthnot, the four friends whiling away the dull hours of a rainy day at the inn by capping verses in praise of Molly, “with pluvial patter for refrain.”