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190 times (though perhaps their great goodness may be debatable ground) the inn kitchen was a cheerful place; and guests of every rank took a contented seat on the oaken settles by its blazing hearth, and did not relish the savoury mess, on which mine hostess piqued herself, at all the less because they had witnessed somewhat of its preparation. The degrees of society were more strongly marked; but then there was less fear of confusion. After all, the English hostel owes much of its charms to Chaucer; our associations are of his haunting pictures—his delicate Lady Prioress, his comely young squire, with their pleasant interchange of tale and legend, rise upon the mind's eye in all the fascination of his vivid delineations.

But these days were past at the time of which we write; a severe and staid, if not sober, spirit was abroad. And though the annals of the period do not show us that there was less ale drawn, or less canary called for; men got dry with the heat of polemical discussion, and drunk with a text, not the fag end of a ballad, in their mouths; and people made a sort of morality of straight hair, long faces, and sad-coloured garments. Yet, as the Carraras approached the inn where Arden had decided that