75 



tea. Readers of Bosvvell's life of the great moralist will, however, 

 find an occasional vinous indiscretion recorded. The disgrace in 

 those days was not in getting inebriated, but in being unable to 

 carry your liquor. 



The " Salutation and Cat," in Newgate-street, was at one time 

 noted as a place of resort for celebrated men, one tradition of the 

 house being that Sir Christopher Wren used to smoke .his pipe 

 there, while St. Paul's was in the course of re-building. Sir T. N. 

 Telford, in his life of Charles Lamb, informs us that "this was the 

 house where Coleridge usually met Charles Lamb when in town, 

 and in a little smoky room they sat together smoking oronoko and 

 drinking egg nogg, the first discoursing of his idol Bowles, and the 

 other rejoicing mildly in Cowper and Burns ; or both dreaming of 

 Pantisocracy and golden days to come on earth." When Lamb, 

 in 1818, collected his works, he makes the following allusion to 

 their former meetings at this tavern : — " Some of the sonnets 

 which shall be carelessly turned over by the general reader may 

 happily awaken in your remembrance — which I am sorry should 

 ever be totally extinct — the memory of sunny days and delightful 

 years, even so far back as those old suppers at our old inn, when 

 life was fresh and topics exhaustless, and you first kindled in me, if 

 not the power, yet the love of poetry and beauty and kindliness." 

 And this meeting place of the poets was at the sign of the 

 " Salutation and Cat," a curious combination of terms. Th^ 

 following explanation is given in Notes and Queries, from which is 

 derived my information on the subject: — "A lithograph v.'hich 

 was hung in the coffee room of the inn was presented to the 

 proprietor by one of the Ackermanns. An aged dandy is saluting 

 a friend whom he has met in the street, and offering him a pinch 

 out of the snuff box which forms the top of the wood-like cane. 

 This box knob was, it appears, called a cat, hence the connection 

 of terms apparently so foreign to each other." The salutation on 

 some of the old signboards represented an angel saluting the 

 Virgin Mary. 



Among literary men, few had during his time more experience 

 of inns than " Bobby Burns, the poet," as he loved to call himself. 



