rds of the inns
that the drama was first nourished. The inn yard was to some extent the
forerunner of the theatre. When the companies left London in the summer
and went on tour, they found no small part of their audience in the
country hostelries. The place of the tavern in literary history has not
yet been written. From the "Tabard" of Chaucer to the "Mermaid" of
Shakespeare, through the coffee-houses of a later date, to the "Bohemia"
of Soho, where the free-lances of literature meet to-day, there is a
thread of connection well worth examining.

Our ubiquitous press tends to restrict the feast of reason and the flow
of soul; men do not care to express themselves too freely, or the
cleverest may wake one morning to find he has made some silent auditor
famous. A very notorious case of this kind occurred in the last decade
of the nineteenth century. But in Shakespeare's time wit seemed to
receive its guinea stamp from the tavern, and we have the records of
many men to show that when Shakespeare was one of the company the
audience had good reason to be content. There are many tributes to the
standard of the conversation. Beaumont, the dramatist, Francis Meres,
the clergyman schoolmaster, Richard Barnfield, the poet, Michael
Drayton, the intimate friend, all testify on behalf of Shakespeare; and
there are many others who must have seen and heard him. The attraction
of the tavern must have been increased to a great extent when their
patrons stood a chance of catching the crumbs that fell from the wit's
table. "To give you total reckoning of it," says Erle, "it is the busy
man's recreation, the idle man's business, the melancholy man's
sanctuary, the stranger's welcome, the inns a court man's entertainment,
the scholar's kindness, and the citizen's courtesy. It is the study
of sparkling wits, and a cup of canary their book, whence we leave
them."

=INTERIOR OF ST. SAVIOUR'S AT SOUTHWARK
(Edmund Shakespeare's Burial-place)=

All have passed--the spacious taverns, those who served, and those who
patronised them have gone, never to return. Where great writers and
poets assembled and marked the arrival of travellers from the country,
and listened to stories of "nine men in buckram," where the horseman saw
to the ease of his weary nag before his own, we see crowded
thoroughfares in which the pulse of traffic beats furiously for six long
days out of seven. Of the many changes London has known in the three
centuries that hav