Inns

Inn

Inns and taverns are two related forms of establishments or buildings where travellers can seek lodging and, usually, food and drink. They are typically located in the country or along a highway. Found in Europe, they possibly first sprang up when the Romans built their system of Roman roads two millennia ago. Some inns in Europe are several centuries old. In addition to providing for the needs of travellers, inns traditionally acted as community gathering places.

Quotes

• He had scarcely gone a short league, when Fortune, that was conducting his affairs from good to better, discovered to him the road, where he also espied an Inn. Sancho positively maintained it was an Inn, and his master that it was a castle; and the dispute lasted so long that they arrived there before it was determined.
  • Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (1605-15), Part I, Chapter XV.

• There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.
  • Samuel Johnson, reported in James Boswell, Life of Samuel Johnson (1776).

• Souls of poets dead and gone,
  What Elysium have ye known,
  Happy field or mossy cavern,
  Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?
  • John Keats, Mermaid Tavern (1819).

• A region of repose it seems,
  A place of slumber and of dreams.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863-1874), Part I. Prelude, line 18.

• In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half hung.
  • Alexander Pope, Moral Essays (1731-35), Epistle 3, line 299.

• Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?
  • William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I (c. 1597), Act III, scene 3, line 92.

• The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day:
  Now spurs the lated traveler apace
  To gain the timely inn.
  • William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1605), Act III, scene 3, line 7.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 394-95.

• You may go to Carlisle's and to Almanac's too;
  And I'll give you my Head if you find such a Host,
  For Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, Butter, or Toast;
  How he welcomes at once all the World and his Wife,
  And how civil to Folks he ne'er saw in his Life.
  • Christopher Anstey, New Bath Guide, Fourth Ed. (1767), p. 130. Phrase "the world and his wife" also found in Jonathan Swift, Polite Conversation, Third Dialogue. Another version "All the world and Little Billing." A parish in Northamptonshire.

• He who has not been at a tavern knows not what a paradise it is. O holy tavern! O miraculous tavern!—holy, because no carking cares are there, nor weariness, nor pain; and miraculous, because of the spits, which themselves turn round and round!
  • Pietro Aretino, quoted by Longfellow in Hyperion, Book III, Chapter II.

• Now musing o'er the changing scene
  Farmers behind the tavern screen
  Collect; with elbows idly press'd
  On hob, reclines the corner's guest,
  Reading the news to mark again
  The bankrupt lists or price of grain.
  Puffing the while his red-tipt pipe
  He dreams o'er troubles nearly ripe,
  Yet, winter's leisure to regale,
  Hopes better times, and sips his ale.
  • John Clare, Shepherd's Calendar.

• Alone the varying road of life,
  In calm content, in toil or strife,
  At morn or noon, by night or day,
  As time conducts him on his way,
  How oft doth man, by care oppressed,
  Find in an Inn a place of rest.
  • William Combe, Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, Canto IX, line 1.

• Where'er his fancy bids him roam,
  In ev'ry Inn he finds a home—
  * * * * *
  Will not an Inn his cares beguile,
  Where on each face he sees a smile?
  • William Combe, Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, Canto IX, line 13.

• Where you have friends you should not go to inns.
  • George Eliot, Agatha.

• The atmosphere
  Breathes rest and comfort and the many chambers
  Seem full of welcomes.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Masque of Pandora, Part V, line 33.

• Whoe'er has travel'd life's dull round,
  Where'er his stages may have been,
  May sigh to think he still has found
  The warmest welcome, at an inn.
  • William Shenstone, written at an Inn at Henley. Different version in Dodsley's Collection.

• What care if the day
  Be turned to gray,
  What care if the night come soon!
  We may choose the pace
  Who bow for grace,
  At the Inn of the Silver Moon.
  • Herman Knickerbocker Vielé, The Good Inn.

External links

• "North Korea cracks down on homes converted into Airbnb-style lodgings" by Moon Sung Hui, Radio Free Asia (February 12, 2024)