...
But to come into Southwark on a Spring morning in search of Chaucer
and the Tabard Inn is to ask of London more than she will give you. It
is strange, seeing that she is so English, that for her the living are
more than the dead. Consider England, southern England, if you know
her well enough, and remember what in the face of every other country
of Europe she has conserved of the past in material and tangible
things--roads, boundaries, churches, houses, and indeed whole towns
and villages. Yet London has so little of her glory and her past about
her in material things, that it is often only by her attitude to life
you might know she is not a creation of yesterday. It is true the fire
of 1666 destroyed almost all, but apparently it did not destroy the
Tabard Inn, which nevertheless is gone--it and its successors.
Something remained that should have been sacred, not indeed from
Chaucer's day but at least from that of the Restoration, something
that was beautiful, till some forty years ago. All is gone now; of the
old Inn as we may see it in a drawing of 1810, a two-storied building
with steepish roofs of tiles, dormer windows and railed balconies
supported below by pillars of stone, above by pillars of wood,
standing about two sides of a courtyard in which the carrier's long
covered carts from Horsham or Rochester are waiting, nothing at all
remains.
Pages:
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26