The inn yards of Bishopsgate and Southwark witnessed the early performances of the English drama; and the auditorium of the theatre takes its form from the tiers of galleries surrounding the “pit” which the players found there. Music halls have also grown up from the impromptu concerts in the taverns. The older music halls, like the _Oxford_, _Middlesex_, or _Deacon’s_, were twenty years ago simply public-houses with a hall behind them, where a chairman, armed with a hammer to maintain silence, announced each performer by name and arranged the order of the programme.
Many inns contain museums. At the _Marquis of Granby_, near New Cross Station, there is a magnificent collection of hunting-knives, rifles, etc. The late Mr. Frank Churchill, of the _White Lion_, Warlingham, displayed in the ancient chimney-corner of that house gridirons, spits, and domestic utensils of ancient pattern, and Mr. Alfred Churchill had a similar museum at the _White Hart_, at Bletchingley.
For some unknown reason the police are discouraging these museums, and in some districts publicans are warned against harbouring games of any kinds. Even good old English manly pastimes like bowls and skittles are under the ban of the licensing magistrates.
The other day we discussed the matter with an old yeoman farmer, while we watched a quartette of young fellows playing a kind of bagatelle. He declared that the effect of this policy, now so sedulously pursued by the police, of depriving public-house frequenters of any species of recreation whatever, was fast driving young men into the political clubs where extravagant gambling and hard drinking, especially of spirits, was the fashion. Many promising careers had been ruined in this way--and this we may corroborate from our own experience in various towns. With tears in his eyes the old man confessed to us that his vote had blackballed his own boy from admission into the local club. The total expenditure of the group during a whole evening’s amusement at the public-house amounted to a sum not exceeding a shilling; perchance at the club they might have been tempted to squander away at least half their week’s earnings.
John Ball, shut up in the Archbishop’s prison at Canterbury, fell a’longing for “the green fields and the whitethorn bushes, and the lark singing over the corn, and the talk of good fellows round the alehouse bench.” The same craving for the real things of life comes to every creative genius fretting against class restrictions. Sir Walter Scott, when staying with Wordsworth at Grassmere, usually managed to give his host the slip in order to spend an hour or two in the _Swan_ beyond the village; just as Addison had fled the splendid state of Holland House for the _Old White Horse_ in Kensington Road. Either this wayside inn or the _Red Lion_ at Hampton, was the scene of the historic drinking bout between Addison and Pope, which so upset the latter’s digestion and sense of dignity that he ever afterwards described the great essayist as a terrible drunkard. The _Bull and Bush_, in North End Hampstead, now chiefly patronised by holiday makers on account of its attractive tea-gardens, was another resort where Addison, Dryden, Steele, and the rest of the famous galaxy of wits loved to gather. It is said also to have once been the country seat of Hogarth.