s with Royal Palaces as an attraction for those
who would worship at the shrines of a bygone age,--a process which has
been made the easier of late, now that the paternal Society of Arts has
taken upon itself to appropriately mark, by means of a memorial tablet,
many of these localities, of which all mention is often omitted from the
guide-books. Often the actual houses themselves have disappeared, and it
may be questioned if it were not better that in some instances a tablet
commemorating a home or haunt of some notability were not omitted. Still
if the accompanying inscription is only sufficiently explicit, the act is
a worthy one, and truth to tell, a work that is well performed in London.

Suburban London, too, in a way, may well come within the scope of the
passion of any lover of material things which have at one time or another
been a part and parcel of the lives of great men. And so, coupled with
literary associations, we have the more or less imaginary "Bell" at
Edmonton to remind us of Cowper, of many houses and scenes identified with
Carlyle, at Chelsea; of the poet Thompson, of Gainsborough, and a round
score of celebrities who have been closely identified with Richmond,--and
yet others as great, reminiscent of Pepys, Addison, Steele, Thackeray and
the whole noble band of chroniclers, essayists, and diarists of the
seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The "houses of entertainment"--as the Georgian novelist was pleased to
refer to inns and taverns--had in Dickens' day not departed greatly from
their original status. Referring solely to those coaching and
posting-houses situated at a greater or lesser distance from the centre of
town,--on the main roads running therefrom, and those city establishments
comprehended strictly under the head of taverns,--which were more
particularly places of refreshment for mankind of the genus male. These
two classes were, and are, quite distinct from the later-day
_caravanserai_ known as hotels, and as such performed vastly different
functions.

To be sure, all life and movement of the early nineteenth century, and for
a couple of hundred years before, had a great deal to do with inns and
taverns.

From Chaucer's famous "Tabard," where--

_"In Southwark at the Tabard as I lay_
_Ready to wenden on my pilgrimage,"_

to "The Bull," at Rochester, whose courtyard is still as described by
Dickens, and the somewhat mythical "Maypole" of "Barnaby Rudge," is a fa