This was the type of hostelry that, apart from the mere tavern, or alehouse, remained for so many centuries typical of the English good-class inns. It was at once, in a sense--to compare old times with new--the hotel and railway-station of an age that knew neither railways nor the class of house we style "hotel." It was the fine flower of the hostelling business, and to it came and went the carriers' waggons, the early travellers riding horseback, and, in the course of time, as the age of wonderful inventions began to dawn, the stage and mail-coaches. Travellers of the most gentle birth, equally with those rich merchants and clothiers who were the greatest travellers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, inned at such establishments. It was at one such that Archbishop Leighton ended. He had said, years before, that "if he must choose a place to die in, it should be an inn, it looking like a pilgrim's going home, to whom this world was an inn, and who was weary of the noise and confusion of it." He died, that good and gentle man, at the "Bell" in Warwick Lane, in 1684.
London, once rich in hostelries of this type, has now but one. In fine, it is not in the metropolis that the amateur of old inns of any kind would nowadays seek with great success; although, well within the memory of most people, it was exceptionally well furnished with them. It was neither good taste nor good business that, in 1897, demolished the "Old Bell," Holborn, a pretty old-world galleried inn that maintained until the very last an excellent trade in all branches of licensed-victualling; and would have continued so to do had it not been that the greed for higher ground-rent ordained the ending of it, in favour of the giant (and very vulgar) building now occupying the spot where it stood. That may have been a remunerative transaction for the ground-landlord; but, looking at these commercial-minded clearances in a broader way, they are nothing less than disastrous. If, to fill some private purses over-full, you thus callously rebuild historic cities, their history becomes merely a matter for the printed page, and themselves to the eye nothing but a congeries of crowded streets where the motor-omnibuses scream and clash and stink, and citizens hustle to get a living. History, without visible ancient buildings to assure the sceptical modern traveller that it is not wholly lies, will never by itself draw visitors.