selfe no further. And although this, Ick bring you, as I have heard many learned men say, hath beene an auncient custome in Greece: and that the Grecians doe much commend a good man of that time, Socrates by name, for that hee sat out one whole night long, drinking a vie with another good man, Aristophanes; and yet the next morning in the breake of the

daye, without any rest uppon his drinking, made such a cunning geometrical instrument, that there was no maner of faulte to be found in the same bycause the drinking of wine after this sorte in a vie, in such excesse and waste, is a shrewde assault to trie the strength of him that quaffes so lustily."

SIR Thomas Browne is of opinion that the human faces described in alehouse signs, in coats of arms, &c. for the sun and moon, are reliques of Paganism, and that these visages originally implied Apollo and Diana. Butler, the author of Hudibras, asks a shrewd question on this head, which I do not remem. ber to have seen solved:

"Tell me but what's the nat❜ral cause Why on a sign no painter draws The full moon ever, but the half?" (a) There is a well-known proverb, "Good wine needs no bush ;" (1) i. e. nothing to point out where it is to be sold. The subsequent passage seems to prove that anciently tavern keepers kept both a bush (2) and a sign: a host is speaking:

"I rather will take down my bush and sign Then live by means of riotous expense."

Good Newes and Bad Newes, by S. R., 4to. Lond. 1622.

As does the following that anciently putting up boughs upon any thing was an indication that it was to be sold, which, if I do not much mistake, is also the reason why an old besom (which is a sort of dried bush) is put up at the top-mast head of a ship or boat when she is to be sold. (3)

to

"In olde times, such as solde horses were wont to put flowers or boughes upon their heads" (I think they now use ribbands) reveale that they were vendible." See "The English Fortune Teller," 4to. Lond. 1609, Sig. G 3.

The Chequers, at this time a common sign

(a) Hudibras, p. ii. c. iii. 1. 783.

of a public-house, was originally intended, I should suppose, for a kind of draught-board, called Tables, and showed that there that game might be played. From their colour, which was red, and the similarity to a lattice, it was corruptly called the Red Lettuce, which word is frequently used by ancient writers to signify an alehouse. See "The Antiquarian Repertory," vol. i. p. 50. Thus I read in "The Drunkard's Prospective," &c. by Joseph Rigbie, 8vo. Lond. 1656, p. 6:

"The tap-house fits them for a jaile,

The jaile to the gibbet sends them without
faile;

For those that through a lattice sang of late
You oft find crying through an iron

grate." (4)

In confirmation of the above hypothesis I subjoin a curious passage from Gayton's "Festivous Notes on Don Quixote," p. 340. "Mine host's policy for the drawing guests to his house and keeping them when he had them, is farre more ingenious than our duller ways of billiards, kettle-pins, noddyboards, tables, truncks, shovel-boards, fox and geese, or the like. He taught his bullies to drink (more Romano) according to the number of the letters on the errant ladies name: 'Clodia sex Cyathis, septem Justina bibatur:

the pledge so followed in Dulcinea del Toboso would make a house quickly turn round."

In Richard Flecknoe's " Ænigmatical Characters," 8vo. London, 1665, p. 84, speaking of "your fanatic reformers," he observes," As for the SIGNS, they have pretty well begun

their reformation already, changing the sign of the salutation of the Angel and our Lady into the Souldier and Citizen, and the Katherine Wheel into the Cat and Wheel; so as there only wants their making the Dragon to kill St. George, and the Devil to tweak St. Dunstan by the nose, to make the reformation compleat. Such ridiculous work they make of their reformation, and so zealous are they against all mirth and jollity, as they would pluck down the sign of the Cat and Fiddle too, if it durst but play so loud as they might hear it." (5)

In a curious poem entitled "Poor Robin's Perambulation from Saffron-Walden to London, July 1678," 4to. Lond. 1678, the following lines occur, p. 22:

"Going still nearer London, I did come
In little space of time to Newington.
Now as I past along I cast my eye on
The signs of Cock and Pie, and Bull and
Lion."

As do the following in "The British Apollo," fol. Lond. 1710, vol. iii. No. 34:

"I'm amaz'd at the signs

As I pass through the town:

To see the odd mixture,
A Magpye and Crown,
The Whale and the Crow,
The Razor and Hen,
The Leg and Sev'n Stars,
The Bible and Swan,

The Ar and the Bottle,

The Tun and the Lute,

The Eagle and Child,

The Shovel and Boot." (6) "In London," says Mr. Steevens, we have still the sign of the Bull and Gate, which exhibits but an odd combination of images. It was originally (as I learn from the title-page of an old play) the Bullogne Gate, i. e. one of the gates of Bullogne: designed perhaps as a compliment to Henry VIII., who took that place in 1544. The Bullogne Mouth, now the Bull and Mouth, had probably the same origin, i.e. the Mouth of the Harbour of Bullogne." (a)

To these may be added the Bell and Savage, i. e. the "Belle Sauvage," who was once to be shown there.

The Three Blue Balls (see the Antiquarian Repertory) prefixed to the doors and windows of pawnbrokers' shops (by the vulgar humorously enough said to indicate that it is two to one that the things pledged are ever redeemed) were in reality the arms of a set of merchants from Lombardy, who were the first that publicly lent money on pledges. They dwelt together in a street from them named Lombard-street, in London. The appellation of Lombard was formerly all over Europe considered as synonymous to "Usurer."(7)

(a) See Reed's Shakspeare, 8vo. Lond. 1803.

(1) In "Greene in Conceipt," 4to. 1598, p. 10, we read: "Good wine needes no Ivie bush."

(2) In "England's Parnassus," Lond. 1600, the first line of the address to the reader runs thus: "I hang no ivie out to sell my wine :" and in Braithwaite's "Strappado for the Divell," 8vo. Lond. 1615, p. 1, there is a dedication to Bacchus, "sole soveraigne of the ivy bush, prime founder of red-lettices," &c.

In Dekker's "Wonderful Yeare," 4to. Lond. 1603, Signat. F, we read: "Spied a

bush at the ende of a pole (the auncient badge of a countrey ale-house."

In Vaughan's "Golden Grove," 8vo. Lond. 1808, Signat. B b. b. is the following passage: "Like as an ivy-bush, put forth at a vintrie, is not the cause of the wine, but a signe that wine is to bee sold there; so, likewise, if we see smoke appearing in a chimney, we know that fire is there, albeit the smoke is not the cause of the fire."

The following is from Harris's "Drunkard's Cup," p. 299: " Nay if the house be not

worth an ivy-bush, let him have his tooles about him; nutmegs, rosemary, tobacco, with other the appurtenances, and he knowes how of puddle-ale to make a cup of English wine."

Coles, in his "Introduction to the Knowledge of Plants," p. 65, says "Box and Ivy last long green, and therefore Vintners make their Garlands thereof; though perhaps Ivy is the rather used, because of the antipathy between it and wine."

In a curious poem entitled "Poor Robin's Perambulation from Saffron-Walden to London, July 1678," 4to. Lond. 1678, at p. 16, we read:

"Some ale-houses upon the road I saw,

And some with bushes shewing they wine did draw."

A note in the Lansdowne MS. 226, fol. 171, upon the "Tavern Bush," by Bishop Kennett, says, "The dressing the frame or bush with ivy-leaves fresh from the plant was the custome forty years since, now generally left off for carved work."

By the following passage in "Whimzies; or a New Cast of Characters," 12mo. Lond. 1631, Second Part, p. 15, it should seem that signs in alehouses succeeded birch-poles. The author is describing a painter: "He bestowes his pencile on an aged piece of decayed canvas in a sooty ale-house, where Mother Red Cap must be set out in her colours. Here hee and his barmy hostesse drew both together, but not in like nature; she in ale, he in oyle but her commoditie goes better downe, which he meanes to have his full share of when his worke is done. If she aspire to the conceite of a sigue, and desire to have her birch-pole pulled downe, hee will supply her with one.'

In Scotland a wisp of straw upon a pole is, or was heretofore, the indication of an alehouse. So the quotation already made in p. 156, from Dunbar's Will of Maister Andro Kennedy: "Et unum ale-wisp ante me.'

(3) In Nash's" Christ's Teares over Jerusalem," 4to. Lond. 1613, p. 145, speaking of the head-dresses of London ladies, he says: "Even as angels are painted in church windowes, with glorious golden fronts, besette with sunne-beames, so beset they their fore

heads on either side with glorious borrowed gleamy bushes; which, rightly interpreted, should signify beauty to sell, since a bush is not else hanged forth, but to invite men to buy. And in Italy, when they sette any beast to sale, they crowne his head with Garlands, and bedeck it with gaudy blossoms, as full as ever it may stick."

(*) In the old play called "The First Part of Antonio and Melida," Marston's Works, Svo. Lond. 1633, Signat. E 3 b, we read: "As well knowen by my wit, as an ale-house by a red lattice."

So, in "A Fine Companion," one of Shakerley Marmion's plays: "A waterman's widow at the sign of the Red Lattice in Southwark." Again, in "Arden of Faversham," 1592:

"His sign pulled down, and his lattice born away."

Again, in "The Miseries of inforc'd Marriage," 1607,

""Tis treason to the red lattice, enemy to the sign post."

Hence, says Steevens, the present Chequers. Perhaps the reader will express some surprise when he is told that shops with the sign of the chequers were common among the Romans. See a view of the left-hand street of Pompeii (No. 9), presented by Sir William Hamilton (together with several others, equally curious) to the Antiquarian Society.

In King Henry IV., P. ii., Falstaff's Page, speaking of Bardolph, says: "He called me even now, my lord, through a red lattice, and I could see no part of his face from the window."

This designation of an alehouse is not altogether lost, though the original meaning of the word is, the sign being converted into a green lettuce; of which an instance occurs in Brownlow-street, Holborn. In the last will and testament of Lawrence Lucifer, the old batchiler of Limbo, at the end of the "Blacke Booke," 4to. 1604, is the following passage: "Watched sometimes ten houres together in an ale-house, ever and anon peeping forth and sampling thy nose with the red lattice."

See Reed's edit. of Shakspeare, vol. v. p. 83. In the Christmass Ordinary, by W. R., 4to. Lond. 1682, p. 8, we read: