There was nothing vulgar or disgraceful about an inn a century ago.  From Elizabethan times to the early part of the nineteenth century they were frequented by most of the leading spirits of each generation.  Archbishop Leighton, who died in 1684, often used to say to Bishop Burnet that “if he were to choose a place to die in it should be an inn; it looked like a pilgrim’s going home, to whom this world was all as an Inn, and who was weary of the noise and confusion of it.”  His desire was fulfilled.  He died at the old Bell Inn in Warwick Lane, London, an old galleried hostel which was not demolished until 1865.  Dr. Johnson, when delighting in the comfort of the Shakespeare’s Head Inn, between Worcester and Lichfield, exclaimed:  “No, sir, there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is provided as by a good tavern or inn.”  This oft-quoted saying the learned Doctor uttered at the Chapel House Inn, near King’s Norton; its glory has departed; it is now a simple country-house by the roadside.  Shakespeare, who doubtless had many opportunities of testing the comforts of the famous inns at Southwark, makes Falstaff say:  “Shall I not take mine ease at mine inn?”; and Shenstone wrote the well-known rhymes on a window of the old Red Lion at Henley-on-Thames:—­

        Whoe’er has travelled life’s dull road,
          Where’er his stages may have been,
        May sigh to think he still has found
          The warmest welcome at an inn.

Fynes Morrison tells of the comforts of English inns even as early as the beginning of the seventeenth century.  In 1617 he wrote:—­

“The world affords not such inns as England hath, for as soon as a passenger comes the servants run to him; one takes his horse and walks him till he be cold, then rubs him and gives him meat; but let the master look to this point.  Another gives the traveller his private chamber and kindles his fire, the third pulls off his boots and makes them clean; then the host or hostess visits him—­if he will eat with the host—­or at a common table it will be 4d. and 6d.  If a gentleman has his own chamber, his ways are consulted, and he has music, too, if he likes.”

[Illustration:  The Wheelwrights’ Arms, Warwick]

The literature of England abounds in references to these ancient inns.  If Dr. Johnson, Addison, and Goldsmith were alive now, we should find them chatting together at the Authors’ Club, or the Savage, or the Athenaeum.  There were no literary clubs in their days, and the public parlours of the Cock Tavern or the “Cheshire Cheese” were their clubs, wherein they were quite as happy, if not quite so luxuriously housed, as if they had been members of a modern social institution.  Who has not sung in praise of inns?  Longfellow, in his Hyperion, makes Flemming say:  “He who has not been at a tavern knows not what a paradise it is.  O holy tavern!  O miraculous tavern!