But not so of the English country inn.  It comes out into the foreground of a thousand interesting histories and pictures of common life.  In them it has an individuality as marked as the parish church, couchante in its wide-rimmed nest of grave stones; as marked in unique architecture, location, and surroundings.  In none of these features will you find two alike, if you travel from one end of the country to the other; especially among those a century old.  You might as well mistake one of the living animals for the other, as to mistake “The Blue Boar” for “The Red Lion.”  They differ as much from each other in general make and aspect as do their nominal prototypes.  To give every one of their thousands “a local habitation and a name” of striking distinctness, has required an ingenuity which has produced many interesting feats of house-building and nomenclature.  Both these departments of genius figure largely in the poetry and classics of the institution, with which the reading million of America have been familiar from youth up.  And when any of them come to travel in England, it will greatly enhance their enjoyment to find that the pictures they have admired and the descriptions they have read of the famous country inn have been true to the very life and letter.  All its salient features they recognise at once, and are ready to exclaim, “How natural!” meaning by that, how true is the original to the picture which they have seen so frequently.  If they go far enough, they will find the very original of every one of the hundred pictures they have seen, painted by pen or pencil.  They will find that all of them have been true copies from nature.  Here is the portly-looking, well-to-do, two-story tavern, standing out with its comfortable, cream-colored face broadside to the street.  It is represented in the old engraving with a coach-and-four drawn up before the door, surrounded by a crowd of spectators and passengers, some descending and ascending on ladders over the forward wheels; some looking with admiration at the scarlet coats of the pursy and consequential driver and guard; some exchanging greetings, others farewell salutations; ostlers in long waistcoats, plush or fustian shorts, and yellow leggings, standing bareheaded with watering-pails at the “‘osses’ ’eads;” trunks great and small going up and down; village boys in high excitement; village grandfathers looking very animated; the landlord, burly, bland, and happy, with a face as rotund and genial as the full moon shining upon the scene; and those round, rosy, sunny, laughing faces peering out of the windows with delightful wonderment and exhilaration, winked at by the driver, and saluted with a graceful motion of his whip-handle in recognition of the barmaid, chambermaid, and all the other maids of the house.  The coach, with all its picturesque appointments, its four-in-hand, the stirring heraldry of its horn coming down the road, its rattling wheels, the life and stir aroused and moved in its wake,—­all this has gone from the presence of a higher civilisation.  It will never re-appear in future pictures of actual life in England.  It is all gone where the hedges and hedge-row trees will probably go in their turn.  But the same village inn remains, and can be as easily recognised as a widow in weeds, who still wears a hopeful face, and makes the best of her bereavement.