Daily entries from the 17th century London diary
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The location above is vaguely right. The Latham Companion describes the location as “On the river side of the main street continuing the Strand towards Whitehall Palace, some eight doors south of Angel Court and just north of Scotland Yard.” However, the inn was later known as the Rummer, and this 18th century map http://www.motco.com/Map/81002/SeriesSearchPlatesFullb.asp?mode=query&artist=384&other=337&x=11&y=11 shows what I assume to be the Rummer on the other (non river side) of the road.
The Rummer is depicted in ‘Night’ by Hogarth: http://www.library.northwestern.edu/spec/hogarth/Decay5.html
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Its regular customers a generation or so earlier had included the Elizabethan dramatist Ben Jonson, and the Cavalier poet Robert Herrick who wrote the following:
An Ode for Ben Jonson
Ah Ben!
Say how or when
Shall we, thy guests,
Meet at those lyric feasts,
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the TRIPLE TUN;
Where we such clusters had,
As made us nobly wild, not mad?
And yet each verse of thine
Out-did the meat, out-did the frolic wine.My Ben!
Or come again,
Or send to us
Thy wit’s great overplus;
But teach us yet
Wisely to husband it,
Lest we that talent spend;
And having once brought to an end
That precious stock,—the store
Of such a wit the world should have no more.