We had forgotten to include in the sketch of O'Conor a pretty touch found in Richard Grant White's "England Without and Within," recorded in his account of a visit to Leicester's Hospital at Warwick, where one of the brethren "showed me a little piece of embroidery worked by poor Amy Robsart. It was framed and hung up against the wall. The frame, he told me, had been paid for by ' a gen tleman in America,' of whom I probably had never heard, 1 one Mr. Charles O'Conor, a great lawer.' Mr. O'Conor had seen it ' laying araound loose,' and for Amy Robsart's sake had furnished a frame for its proper preservation." Inns. — While investigating the law of innkeepers, recently, the Chair man has come across much good reading. Among the most interesting of it is the celebrated opinion of Chief Justice Daly in Cromwell v. Stevens, 2 Daly, 1 5, on the subject of inns and the distinction between them and boarding houses. It amounts to a very considerable monograph on the subject, the most complete to be found in the law books and hardly equaled anywhere else. Inns have been a favorite subject among novelists, poets and painters. Of modern novelists Dickens is the richest in the treatment of them, and several inns of England have been rendered famous (not infamous) by his pen, and have become favorite pilgrimages of his admirers. Dickens is a master of gastronomy and fre quently serves up very toothsome repasts to his crea tures at these places, and makes his readers' mouths hunger and thirst for his fictitious food and drink. Of course everybody is familiar with Shenstone's praise of the inn, with Archbishop Leighton's desire to die at an inn, and with Doctor Johnson's declaration that "There is nothing which has as yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn." One can easily believe that the Doctor was sincere if Hoswell was correct in his narration, that he took two young women from Staffordshire, " pretty fools " he called them, to dine at the " Mitre," and after dinner he put one of them on his knee, and fondled her for half an hour together. Rossetti has depicted this scene on canvas, in which, with his customary awkward perspective, he has made Boswell's head nearer the Doctor's than that of the prim-looking maiden who sits on Ursa Major's knee. Falstaff, who certainly was an expert in the matter of taverns, was of opinion that he was en titled to take his ease in his inn, and he brought Dame Quickly into some trouble by his fascinations exercised at her house. What can be more seductive than the pictures of inns and inn stables by the Dutch painters? In a recent English book, entitled "Coach ing Daysand Coaching Ways," exquisitely illustrated.
one gets a charming impression of the old English inns, and the incidents of stage-coach travel, before the railroads, Mr. Ruskin's abhorrence, came in to spoil all the romance of the road and the traveler's temporary home. One of the earliest allusions to taverns is that to "the Three Taverns," in Acts xxviii. 15. This was a station on the Appian road, along which St. Paul traveled on his way from Puteoli to Rome. Some years ago Col. Ingersoll made a very amusing argument in the New York Court of Appeals, on the question whether strong drink came within the de scription of "entertainment" which an innkeeper was bound to furnish travelers at table, and might lawfully furnish without a license to sell liquors. He made an argument that entertained the Court and the Bar, and he produced quite a strong impression by citing St. Paul's observation in coming in sight of the Three Taverns—' ■ he thanked God and took courage" — at the sight of the Taverns, as the witty Colonel would have it. But he, like anothej famous adver sary of religion," wresteth the Scripture to his own destruction," for Paul was not so fond of taverns as this would indicate. What the Apostle said, was : "And from thence," i.e. Rome, " when the brethren heard of us, they came to meet us as far as Appii Forum and the Three Taverns; whom when Paul saw, he thanked God, and took courage." It was the sight of the brethren, and not of the taverns, that made Paul thankful and courageous. It was a serious question in Paul's day, and indeed until within this century, whether travelers ought to thank God and take courage, or pray God and lose heart at the sight of an inn, for the innkeepers were very frequently, either by choice or from neces sity, a very bad class of men, in league with the highwaymen, thieves and robbers who infested the country and the roads, and followed their victims to and from the inns. Charles Reade, in " The Cloister and the Hearth," gives a terrible idea of the dangers of the inns and of those scoundrel innkeepers who, like Macbeth, "murdered sleep." Dumas, in "Twenty Years After," speaks of innkeepers as " that particular class of society, which, when there were robbers on the highway, was associated with them, and since there are none, has advantageously re placed them." One takes keen pleasure in reading how Porthos' servant, in " The Three Musketeers," lassoed the landlord's fine wine out of the cellar window and served it up to his master, and how Athos barricaded himself with his servant in the cellar of the inn in which he was attacked, and suc cessfully resisted siege for a fortnight, meantime eating and drinking the landlord's best provision, to his landlord's despair and his own fattening. It was this slate of society that led the common
