"Don't be of it, Sir. Now that you have a name you must be careful
to avoid many things not bad in themselves, but which will lessen
your character."

Whether Johnson's remark was prompted by an intimate knowledge of
the type of person frequenting the Boar's Head in his day cannot be
decided, but there are ample grounds for thinking that the patrons
of that inn were generally of a somewhat boisterous kind. That,
perhaps, is partly Shakespeare's fault. Prior to his making it the
scene of the mad revelry of Prince Hal and his none too choice
companions, the history of the Boar's Head, so far as we know it,
was sedately respectable. One of the earliest references to its
existence is in a lease dated 1537, some sixty years before the
first part of Henry IV was entered in the Stationers' Register. Some
half century later, that is in 1588, the inn was kept by one Thomas
Wright, whose son came into a "good inheritance," was made clerk of
the King's Stable, and a knight, and was "a very discreet and honest
gentleman."

But Shakespeare's pen dispelled any atmosphere of respectability
which lingered around the Boar's Head. From the time when he made it
the meeting-place of the mad-cap Prince of Wales and his roistering
followers, down to the day of Goldsmith's reverie under its roof,
the inn has dwelt in the imagination at least as the rendezvous of
hard drinkers and practical jokers. How could it be otherwise after
the limning of such a scene as that described in Henry IV? That was
sufficient to dedicate the inn to conviviality for ever.

How sharply the picture shapes itself as the hurrying dialogue is
read! The key-note of merriment is struck by the Prince himself as