Now, though nobody would be in the least surprised to have read or heard of the Nag’s Head in the Borough, yet there is probably not a single reader who will see this collocation of the “Nag’s Head” with “St. James’s Street” without an exclamation, or at least a feeling of surprise, at it being possible there should ever have been such a thing in St. James’s Street at all—­that is to say, not a nag’s head, either horsically or hobbyhorsically speaking, but tavernistically; for be it known to all men, that the Nag’s Head here mentioned was an inn or tavern actually in the very middle of the royal and fashionable street called St. James’s.  One might write a whole chapter upon the variations and mutations of the names of inns, and inquire curiously whether their modification in various places and at various times depends merely upon fashion, or whether it is produced by some really existing but latent sympathy between peculiar names, as applied to inns, and particular circumstances, affecting localities, times, seasons, and national character.

Having already touched upon this subject, however, though with but a slight and allusive sentence or two, in reference to our friend the Green Dragon, and being at this moment pressed for time and room, we shall say no more upon the subject here, but enter at once into the Nag’s Head, and lead the reader by the hand to the door of a certain large apartment, which, at about half-past nine o’clock, on the night we have just been speaking of, was well nigh as full as it could hold.

The people whom it contained were of various descriptions, but most of them were gentlemanly men enough in their appearance, and these were ranged round little tables in parties of five or six, or sometimes more.  It cannot, indeed, be said that their occupations were particularly edifying.  Dice, backgammon-boards, and cards were spread on many of the tables; punch smoked around with a very fragrant odour; and whatever might have been the nature of the conversation in general, the oaths and expletives, with which it was interlarded from time to time, spoke not very well for either the morality or the eloquence of our ancestors:  for such, indeed, I must call these gentlemen, forming as they did part of the great ancestral body of a hundred and fifty years ago; though I devoutly hope and pray that none of my own immediate progenitors happened to be amongst the number there assembled.  The smell of punch and other strong drink was, to the atmosphere of the place, exactly what the dissolute and swaggering air of a great number of the persons assembled there was to the natural expression of the human countenance.  The noise, too, was very great; so that the ear of a new comer required to become accustomed to it before he could hear anything that was taking place.