ed in it only three
years, when it became an inn. The inn of the poem might have been a
combination in Browning's memory of this and the "White Horse" at
Woolstone, which is described as a queerly pretty little inn with a
front distantly resembling a Chippendale bureau-bookcase. "It is tucked
away under the mighty sides of White Horse Hill, Berkshire, and
additionally overhung with trees and encircled with shrubberies and
under-woods, and is finally situated on a narrow road that presently
leads, as it would seem, to the end of the known world." So writes the
enthusiastic lover of inns, Charles Harper. Or, perhaps, since there is
a river to be seen from the inn of the poem the "Swan" at Sandleford
Water, where a foot bridge and a water splash on the river Enborne mark
the boundaries of Hampshire and Berkshire. Here "You have the place
wholly to yourself, or share it only with the squirrels and the birds of
the overarching trees." The illustration given of the Black Bear Inn,
Tewksbury, is a quite typical example of inn architecture, and may have
helped the picture in Browning's mind, though its situation is not so
rural as that described in the poem.

Inns have, from time immemorial, been the scenes of romances and
tragedies and crimes. There have been inns like the "Castle" where the
"quality" loved to congregate. The "inn album" of this establishment had
inscribed in it almost every eighteenth-century name of any distinction.
There have been inns which were noted as the resort of the wits of the
day. Ben Jonson loved to take "mine ease in mine inn," and Dr. Johnson
declared that a seat in a tavern chair was the height of human felicity.
"He was thinking," as it has been pertinently put, "not only of a
comfortable sanded parlor, a roaring fire, and plenty of good cheer and
good company, but also of the circle of humbly appreciative auditors who
gathered round an accepted wit, hung upon his words, offered themselves
as butts for his ironic or satiric humor, and--stood treat." Or there
was the inn of sinister aspect where highwaymen might congregate, or
inns with hosts who let their guests down through trap-doors in the
middle of the night to rob and murder them--or is this only a vague
remembrance of a fanciful inn of Dickens? Then there was the pilgrim's
inn in the days when Chaucerian folks loved to go on pilgrimages, and in
the last century the cyclists inn, and to-day the inn of the
automobilist. The particular inn