IT THE COUNTRY TAVERN. T was a sort of half-way house between home and the open world. You might style it Home on the Road. It was the limit where the shyer and tenderer domestic feelings began to let go their hold, and give place to the bold and bustling influences of the world. The hotel of the city has little in common with the tavern of gone-by days, and can scarcely claim kinship. That was a peculiar social construction, shaped and furnished exactly to the purposes it was to serve. We find nothing like it in these times, not even in the country itself. On the subject of inns, Dr. Johnson's dictum may be worth quoting again: "No, sir," said he, "there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn." And he was fond of repeating Shenstone's well-known lines in support of his sentiment: "Whoe'er has travelled life's dull round, Where'er his stages may have been, The romances of Sir Walter are full of inns of every name and character. There is inn talk of the most attractive sort in "Don Quixote" and "Gil Blas." Sterne and Smollett and Fielding carry us off by the arm to the nearest tavern, where good cheer abounds, and care is soon dissipated, and the hard walls of real life become the merest boundaries of air. Shakspeare, too, was a confirmed tavern haunter, and knows not how to keep it a secret in his comedies. Multitudes of his finest fancies flew up to the clear sky of his mind while sitting in his favorite "Boar's Head" at Eastcheap. Ben Jonson 66 rare Ben " was altogether at home in the tavern's inspiring purlieus; and ruled the roast there in the midst of his learned and witty compeers. Dryden sat at "Will's," dispensing oracles and judgments to listening circles for all London. But jolly Sir John, that hero without courage, that never-full butt of old-fashion sack, ‘he remains chief and hugest of all tavernhaunters of any abiding repute. His great creator conceived him in the heart of the place where the best of his corpulent life was spent. Everybody who reads knows his habit of taking his ease in his own inn. The wits of Charles the Second's time, and of Anne's, were wont to make of the tavern their council chamber; and at length it became a forcing-house for all the sayings, fine and coarse, that delighted the town or provoked to reading. Who loved the old haunts better than Dick Steele, that pattern of unthrift and preacher of true gallantry? Who could conceive, in their little back-rooms, a nobler Cato, or profounder judgments on the genius of Milton, or an honester country 'squire than Sir Roger de Coverly, than Addison, with his black bottle at his elbow? there was poor Burns, - he frequented the taverns when he would better have been at the tail of his plough, turning up mice-nests and mountain daisies; and yet the tavern more or less fed his genius, as it lagged and loitered along the rough road he was destined to travel. And Going backwards again: one takes it to heart like a pleasant experience of his own, to read what old Izaak Walton, father of all good and quiet anglers, said and did, when himself and Venator came, early in the morning, to the little inn where the room was stuck about with ballads on the wall, and the white sheets of the hostess had such a sweet smell of lavender: "I'll now lead you to an honest alehouse, where we shall find a cleanly room, lavender in the windows, and twenty ballads stuck about the wall." This ideal inn, which Father Walton describes with such enticing simplicity, is the very one that, of all others, has taken captive our fancy. In lieu of scents of sour sack and spoiling punch, we seem to smell the sweet savors of primrose and dill, and the delicate boquet of the bottle of elderberry wine which the hostess takes down so choicely from the cupboard. An old tavern used to be, in the days I am calling up again with such fondness, the synonym of comfort and repose and plenty. We have few or none of these ancient affairs left now. They and the stage-coach were twinned in the inventor's brain; and when one fell into disuse, it was natural for the other to pass out of mind also. To keep tavern without the grand feeder of a stage line would have been making bricks without straw. The railways have, with a merciless straightline energy, cut and slashed up the pleasant old solitary turnpikes and quiet by-roads where the stage-coach once rattled its wheels and smacked its whip, and the life-blood of ancient tavern-keeping has thus been drained off into a swifter channel; so that "entertainment for man and beast" put away its dusty but honest toggery, and followed the style and whim of the railway. Hence, if you look for "entertainment," which socially implies what is domestic and cheerful for the tired traveller, you will now find nothing more than "refreshments," which mean a sanded floor, wire-dish covers in blue, swarms of flies, and a coming train. Ah! but these times are not those times! The sorriest of it all is, too, that none of us will live to know the broad and hearty reality of the by-gone days again! Still, it is due to posterity that the memory of the Old Tavern, and of the many kind offices it has so cheerfully performed for humanity, be kept green. Let us live it all over again, though it be but in the reproduction of a youthful dream. In the first place, and to begin at the beginning, it was a wonderful mart for coaches. They stood under almost every shed that made a convenient lean-to in the spacious yard, and in nearly every stage of existence, from the |