CONCLUSION 375 



house as if he were in his own. Whereas at a tavern there 

 is a general freedom from anxiety. You are sure you 

 are welcome, and the more noise you make, the more 

 trouble you give, the more good things you call for, the 

 welcomer you are. No servants will attend you with the 

 alacrity which waiters do, who are incited by the prospect 

 of an immediate reward in proportion as they please. 

 No, sir ; there is nothing which has yet been contrived 

 by man by which so much happiness is produced as by a 

 good tavern or inn." 



Hear, hear ! say I ; but while on the subject of inns 

 may remark that I have been much disappointed in my 

 ramblings ; in truth began some six years too late from this 

 point of view. For in that interval the country has been 

 deprived of many of its finest examples of this hospitable 

 sort of architecture. Of those fine examples — few and 

 far between — which still remain, many are now sinking 

 into a state of irremediable disrepair — witness the great 

 inn at Stilton for one — and will in the near fulness of 

 time doubtless be improved altogether off the face of the 

 earth. 



Some of these meanwhile on these direct roads of 

 England which I have up to now treated of, have been 

 preserved by a sympathetic artist's pencil, and the thought 

 is so satisfactory a one that I propose to bestow on three 

 other inns — not on the main roads, but magnificent 

 houses still, the same enviable fate. 



At Norton St. Philip, then, in Somersetshire, seven 

 miles south-east of Bath, there still stands in the George 

 Inn, a half-timbered, fifteenth century house, of the finest 

 possible type. Monmouth passed the night of June 26th, 

 1685, at this George. He watched a skirmish between 

 his outposts and Feversham's from the windows of the 

 inn, was shot at while standing there for his pains, and 

 marched upon Frome next day. At Glastonbury, in the 

 same county, an inn of the same name — the George — 

 with front one splendid mass of panelling, pierced where 

 necessary for windows, the finest piece of domestic work 



