The “Red Lion” remains the most prominent house. What has rightly been called a “ghastly story” is that told of it in coaching days. An officer and his daughter, on their way to London to attend a funeral, only succeeded after a great deal of trouble in obtaining accommodation here. On retiring to her room, the young lady chanced to turn the handle of a cupboard, when to her horror the door burst open and a corpse toppled out, almost felling her to the floor. The “accommodation” had been made by hastily removing the body from the bed and placing it where it would not have been found, except for that feminine mingled curiosity and precautionary sense which impels our womenkind to peer agitatedly under every bed, to leave no cupboard unexplored, and no drawer not scrutinised.
This Bluebeard kind of a story was long a current anecdote in the posting days, and implicitly believed. It is probably safe to assume that it did the business of the “Red Lion” enormous damage, and that those travellers who subsequently stayed there approached all cupboards with dread.
The “Red Lion” possessed a queer character in the person of its ostler, James Ripley, who in 1781 published a little book of _Select Letters on Various Subjects_. On the title-page he states that he was then, and had been “for thirty years past,” ostler, and in his dedication to “the Hon. Col. Blaithwate and the rest of the officers of the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards Blue,” after saying that this dedication is “a grateful acknowledgement for the generous treatment always received for his unmerited services in the stable,” proceeds to grovel in the most abject manner. “I shall always esteem it an honour,” says he, “to rub down your horses’ heels, so long as I am able to stoop to my feet.”
[Illustration: JAMES RIPLEY, OSTLER OF THE “RED LION.”]
This remarkable person, if we may judge from the curious frontispiece to his _Select Letters_, appears to have doubled the parts of ostler at the “Red Lion” and Postmaster of Barnet; while he would also seem to have embarked in the newspaper trade, according to the little heaps of papers seen in the pigeonholes in the background, labelled “Whitehall Evening Post,” “Craftsman,” and “Gazetteer.” Here we perceive him, apparently inditing his _Letters_, a man with a decidedly Johnsonian cast of features, and clad in what looks more like a cast-off suit of an old Tower of London headsman than an ostler’s everyday clothes. He is evidently at a loss for a word, or is perhaps (and rightly) surprised at the gigantic size of his quill, plucked from an ostrich, at the very least of it. A sieve, a curry-comb, and other articles of stable equipment, lie beside him, or are more or less artistically displayed in the foreground. If it were not for the title, we might almost suppose this to be a representation of some notorious criminal writing his last dying speech and confession in the condemned hold of Newgate. The picture appears to have been drawn from several points of view at once, productive of results more curious than pleasing to professors of perspective drawing.