r
cry, though it would appear that the kind of cheer and accommodation
varies to a much lesser degree than might be supposed. Certainly the
demand for brevity and the luxuriousness of the later years of the
nineteenth century, and even to some extent during Dickens' time, with the
innovation of railway travel, gas-lamps, the telegraph, and what not, was
making an entirely new set of conditions and demands.

The old "Tabard" of Chaucer's day is no more, though an antiquary of 1840
has attempted to construct what it may have been out of the "Talbot" of
that day, which stood in the ancient High Street of Southwark, just across
London Bridge, where, said the annalist Stow, "there were so many fair
inns for receipt of travellers,"--the rivals of the Boar's Heads and
Mermaids of another generation.

Of the actual Dickens' inns, perhaps none is more vividly impressed on the
imagination than that of the "Maypole," that fantastic structure of
"Barnaby Rudge," the original of which is the "King's Head" at Chigwell on
the borders of Epping Forest. It was here that Mr. Willet sat in his
accustomed place, "his eyes on the eternal boiler." "Before he had got his
ideas into focus, he had stared at the plebeian utensil quite twenty
minutes,"--all of which indicates the minutiae and precision of Dickens'
observations. This actual copper, vouched for by several documents of
attestation, with an old chair which formerly stood in the Chester Room of
the "Maypole," is to-day in the possession of Mr. Bransby Williams, of
London, an ardent enthusiast of all matters in connection with Dickens and
his stories.

Of the _Pickwickian Inns_, the "White Horse" at Ipswich--"the overgrown
tavern" to which Mr. Pickwick journeyed by the London Coach--is something
of tangible reality, and doubtless little changed to this day; the same
being equally true of "The Leather Bottle" at Cobham. The old "White Hart"
in the Borough High Street, the scene of the first meeting of Mr. Pickwick
and Weller, was demolished in 1889. Not so the "Magpie and Stump,"--that
referred to in "Pickwick" as being in the vicinity of the Clare Market,
and "closely approximating to the back of the 'New Inn.'" This seems to
have been of an imaginary character in nomenclature, at least, though it
is like enough that some neighbourhood hostelry--or, as it is further
referred to, as being what the ordinary person would call a "low
public-house"--was in mind.

The old "Fountain Inn"