Page:The George Inn, Southwark.djvu/28

 flavour of the good old coaching days; to explore the picturesque galleries, the quaint passages, the queer-shaped rooms, the mysterious corridors upstairs; to lunch in that low-ceilinged, cosy red-curtained coffee-room; to peep into that roomy, old-fashioned, kitchen, and to gossip in that particularly comfortable bar-parlour, with its wondrous array of glasses, bottles and bowls, with its bright flowers and its communicative green parrot, who seems to have a word to say to everybody, and whom I fancy must have exchanged jokes with Sam Weller.

It always reminds me that "Luncheon is ready!" says George. I am very glad to hear it, and I am certain my fellow travellers will be, and, after all my chattering, will be only too glad to rest awhile at a thoroughly Dickensian hostelry, the very centre of this most important province of Dickens land.

That is a very pleasing pen picture of the George, and is as true in its descriptive passages to-day as when it was written.

Another eminent Dickensian scholar, Mr. Percy FitzGerald, writing in The Magazine of Art, 1884, says:

""The George" has really a bright and bustling air of business. It is a not unpicturesque courtyard from its very irregularity, the old wooden galleries being alternated with buildings of a different pattern, some projecting forward. The galleries are gay with paint and plenty of flowers; and, altogether, one might seem able to take one's ease in one's inn here very fairly."

In 1912, the American novelist, the late F. Hopkinson Smith, visited London and wrote a book entitled "Dickens's London." He visited the George and was wonderfully impressed with it, as the following extract will show:

And a wonderful old inn it is even now, its front in two connecting sections, each bracing the other up, their shoulders touching. Seen from one end, in foreshortened perspective, it presents a continuous wobble from sill to eaves, its roof-line sagging, its chimney out of plumb,