Page:Literary Landmarks of Oxford.djvu/159

125 Montgomery's rooms, in Lincoln, were "in the Farther Quadrangle, East Side, Central."

The only Literary Landmark which William Shakspere is supposed to have left in Oxford was William Davenant, said to have been an undergraduate of Lincoln. He was unquestionably the son of his mother, and he was born at Oxford in The Crown Inn, of which his mother was landlady. Master John Aubrey reports her as being a beautiful woman, of good wit, but of light import. The establishment over which she ruled was demolished, according to tradition, in the last quarter of the Eighteenth Century, but its site, on Cornmarket Street, is said, by certain authorities, to be now occupied by a portion of The Roebuck Hotel, and consequently to continue in the same line of business. Perhaps the present court-yard of The Roebuck was the court-yard of The Crown, and familiar to the Bard of Avon, who is believed to have made this his hostelry on his journeyings between Stratford and London.

There is at this day, nearly opposite The Roebuck, and approached through a little archway, an ancient Crown Inn, picturesque to a degree in its old-fashioned irregularity of tumble-down, uncomfortable architecture; but we cannot be certain that it has any connection, except in name, with the establishment over the way. Which of