The Old Inns of Old England -how alluring and how inexhaustible a theme When you set out to reckon up the number of those old inns that demand a mention, how vast a subject it is For although the Vandal-identified here with the brewer and the ground-landlord-has been busy in London and the great centres of population, destroying many of those famous old hostelries our grandfathers knew and appreciated, and building in their stead "hotels" of the most grandiose and palatial kind, there are happily still remaining to us a large number of the genuine old cosy haunts where the traveller, stained with the marks of travel, may enter and take his ease without being ashamed of his travel-stains or put out of countenance by the modish visitors of this complicated age, who dress usually as if going to a ball, and whose patronage has rung the death-knell of many an inn once quaint and curious, but now merely "replete with every modern convenience."