One more example of Boniface’s wit must conclude this notice of Signboard poesy. At a public-house in Sussex, the sign of which is the White Horse, there is painted under the figure of that animal the couplet:—
To the roadsters who enter a welcome he snorts, While they fill up his quarters and empty his quarts.
In addition to signboard verses, inscriptions within the alehouse are by no means uncommon. Burns, who was fond of this style of composition, inscribed these lines on the window of the Globe Tavern at Dumfries:—
The grey-beard, old wisdom, may boast of his treasures, Give me with gay folly to live; I grant him his calm-blooded, time-settled pleasures, But Folly has raptures to give.
Dowie’s Tavern, in Libberton’s Wynd, Edinburgh, was the favourite resort of Burns, and is said by the able recorder of the _Traditions of Edinburgh_ “to have been formerly as dark and plain an old-fashioned house as any drunken lawyer of the last century could have wished to nestle in.” { 227}
Dowie’s was much resorted to by the Lords of Session for “Meridians,” as well as in the evening for its Edinburgh ale. The ale was Younger’s. That brewer, together with his friends, instituted a Club there, which they sportively called the “College of Doway.” Johnnie Dowie is described as having been the sleekest and kindest of landlords. Nothing could equal the benignity of his smile when he brought in a bottle of “the Ale” to a company of well-known and friendly customers. It was a perfect treat to see his formality in drawing the cork, his precision in filling the glasses, his regularity in drinking the healths of all present in the first glass (which he always did, and at every successive bottle), and then his douce civility in withdrawing. Johnnie always wore a cocked hat, and buckles at knees and shoes, as well as a crutched cane.[52] Not so polished as Burns’ verses, but perhaps more suited to the Genius loci, are the lines written up in a certain old tap-room:—
He that doath upon the table sit, A pot of porter shall for-fe-it.
The following additional specimens of tap-room verse are typical of their kind, and may be said to contain the be-all and end-all of the host’s proverbial philosophy. The first is taken from an Inn at Sittingbourne, where it hangs framed and glazed over the door:—