of Buccleugh, just returned from military service abroad, on his way
into London, halted at the Bear to quaff a glass of sack with a
friend. A few minutes later he put off in a boat for the further
shore of the Thames, but ere the craft had gone many yards from land
the earl exclaimed, "I am deadly sick, row back; Lord have mercy
upon me!" Those were his last words, for he died that night.

Another picturesque figure of the seventeenth century is among the
shades that haunt the memory of the Bear, Samuel Pepys, that
irrepressible gadabout who was more intimately acquainted with the
inns and taverns of London than any man of his time. That
Thames-side hostelry was evidently a favourite resort of the
diarist. On both occasions of his visits to Southwark Pair he made
the inn his base of operations as it were, especially in 1668 when
the puppet-show of Whittington seemed "pretty to see," though he
could not resist the reflection "how that idle thing do work upon
people that see it, and even myself too!"

Pepys had other excitements that day. He was so mightily taken with
Jacob Hall's dancing on the ropes that on meeting that worthy at a
tavern he presented him with a bottle of wine. Having done justice
to all the sights of the fair, he returned to the Bear, where his
Waterman awaited him with the gold and other things to the value of
forty pounds which the prudent diarist had left in his charge at the
inn "for fear of my pockets being cut."

Pepys himself incidentally explains why he had so friendly a regard
for the Bridge-foot tavern. "Going through bridge by water," he
writes, "my Waterman told me how the mistress of the Beare tavern,
at the bridge-foot, did lately fling herself into the Thames, and