Page:The George Inn, Southwark.djvu/32

 rare china, rare plates yes, a most wonderfully inviting and welcoming coffee-room so cosy and comfortable that once you were inside you would never want to get out, and once you were out you would be unhappy until you could again order "a fresh mug of 'alf-and-'alf, my dear, a brace of chops, with a kidney, and, if you don't mind, a mealy with its jacket on."

Mr. F. Hopkinson Smith's account of his visit is very picturesque and enticing, but he went wofullywoefully [sic] wrong over his Dickens associations, as we shall show later.

That painstaking authority on the coaching days and the historian of the English Roads, Mr. Charles G. Harper, says of the ancient hostelry:—

""The George," as it now stands, is the successor of a pre-Reformation inn formerly the "St. George," became secularised in the time of Henry the Eighth, when saints, even patron saints, were under a cloud. It is an exceedingly long range of buildings, dating from the seventeenth century, and in two distinct and different styles; a timbered, wooden-balustraded gallery in two storeys and a white-washed brick continuation. The long ground-floor range of windows to the kitchen, the bar, and the coffee-room, is protected from any accident in the manœuvring of the railway waggons by a continuous bulkhead of sleepers, driven into the ground. It is pleasing to be able to bear witness to the thriving trade that continues to be done in this sole ancient survivor of the old Southwark galleried inns, and to note that, however harshly fate, as personified by rapacious landlords, has dealt with its kind, the old-world savour of the inn is thoroughly appreciated by those not generally thought sentimental persons, the commercial men who dine and lunch, and the commercial travellers who sleep there."

A reference is also made to the Inn by Mr. E. V. Lucas in Loiterer's Harvest:—

What "Ye Old Dick Whittingdon" in Cloth Fair does for the Shakespearean devotee the "George Inn" in the Borough does for the lover of Pickwick and its