The Road and the Inn
Evvaw good book about the inns of Great Britain and those rivers of life that flow past their doors, the high roads, serves a double purpose, for not only does it delight the hearts of foot-pilgrims and loiterers—there are still a few of this perse- cuted breed—but it tends to keep the inn from becoming, what some motorists obviously regard it as already, a " mere dormitory-in the country for urban populations." The phrase occurs in Mr. Hartmann's book, and it does not, unfortunately; give an exaggerated idea of what the petrol age may eventually. bring us to. The standard of road-hospitality has inevitably been lowered ; a deterioration which Mr. Burke attributes directly to the motorists, who " do not travel, but buzz from: place to place." They have therefore only themselves to blame when the inn-keeper has " nothing to offer them but bedrooms with peeling wall-papers and meals out of a tin." There is no denying that it is a sad state of affairs, but—it may be repeated—the more 'we hear of inns the better ; Mr. Burke's
anthology reconstructs for us the busy and fascinating world of the we-petrol English road in all its separate fascinations : and if we cannotgo back, surely we can beguided by the past. Here are Pepys and Boswell, Scott and Dickens, George Eliot and Kingsley and Daniel Defoe : a hundred " piquant morsels of prose in which the English inn is commemorated," and each one in its own way delicious. If inn-keepers would see it, such a book as this, such a collection of recipes for merriment, is worth its weight in gold to them.
Inns have great names to live up to, despite Addison's lament that " our streets are filled with Blue Boars, Black Swans and Red Lions," and that " there is nothing hire sound literature to be met with in these objects." Mr. Maskell tells the story of each inn-sign charmingly, and Addison is duly put in his place as—in this instance—a mere babbler of non- sense. Nothing like sound literature indeed v. There is scarcely an inn-sign in the country that can be said to be meaningless, unless it is one of ye olde stucco taverns of 1927, and a dozen names of early coaching inns will make a poem however you like to arrange them. Not the least interesting section of this book is a list of " remarkable inns " at the end, where the wayfarer may revive memories pleasant and un- pleasant amidst a riot of Boars, Bells, Foxes, Swans, Leather Bottles, Anglers' Arms, Running Horses, and Peacocks to his heart's content. Of The Story of the Roads it need only be said that here is a brief and competently written little history of highways and lesser roads in Britain from the age of cross- country driftways down to our own time, " when roads and bridges have once again become inadequate to the needs of the traffic."
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