seems to us not quite equal in poetical value to the following we read somewhere else:—

Some of Hagarty’s contributions have moralizing titles—as, “The Spirit of Contradiction,” representing two brewers with a barrel of beer, pulling different ways—which do not amuse us any more to-day. “The Logger-Heads,” or, “We are Three” (add: fools), is an old sign to which Shakespeare alludes in his “Twelfth Night” (ii, iii), where the Fool comes between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and, taking each by the hand, says: “How now, my Hearts, did you never see the picture of We Three?” In country taverns sometimes two asses were painted on the wall, with the inscription: “We three asses.” The newcomer used to spell these words with great seriousness, to the delight of the old customers. Another sign by Hagarty, “Death and the Doctor,” evidently goes back to the popular scenes of the “Dance of Death” and reminds us of other gruesome signs, the above-mentioned French signs, “La Mort qui trompe,” “La Fête de Mort” in Lyon and “La Cave des Morts” in Geneva. This physician’s sign probably resembled the rude woodcuts of the first printed editions of the “Dance of Death” from the fifteenth century: the doctor very unwilling to follow his colleague, “the sure Physician,” as Shakespeare has called Death. Some such picture was in the poet’s mind when he wrote the words in “Cymbeline,” v, v:—

This exhibition of Signboards inspired by Hogarth was the first and most amusing of its kind. More than one hundred years later an “Exposition Nationale des Enseignes parlantes artistiques” was arranged in Brussels with one hundred and forty-one different signs, and in 1902 the Prefet de la Seine organized in the City Hall of Paris a great “Concours d’Enseignes.” Both represent serious and idealistic efforts to improve the artistic side of trade-signs, and by this means to ennoble the picture of the street so often disfigured by vulgar advertisements. Well-known artists, as the sculptors Dervé and Moreau-Vauthier, the painters Willette, Bellery-Desfontaines, Félix Régamey, and the popular collaborator of “Le Rire,” Albert Guilleaume, contributed to this exhibition and thus stimulated their colleagues to work for the Museum of the Street. Henri Détaille, the famous painter of battle scenes and pupil of Meissonier, was the spiritual author of the competition. In a letter to Grand-Carteret, the writer of a great, luxurious publication on the signs of Lyon, he had expressed the hope to educate and refine the artistic instinct of the masses through this medium of noble signs: “L’enseigne amusera la foule: rien n’empêche même qu’elle soit instructive tout en restant une très pure œuvre d’art.” He ends his letter with the following lines that give credit to his good heart and his sympathy for the common people: “Que les enseignes les plus belles les plus artistiques aillent surtout dans les quartiers pauvres, populeux et privés, de toute manifestation d’art.” If we reflect that indeed the posters often are the only touches of brightness in the gray monotony of the poor quarters, we will heartily join Détaille in the wish that these posters might be pure and noble creations of art. Certain German posters, lithographed by such artists as Cissarz, seem to approach this ideal. The recent German War-Poster, “Gedenket Eurer Dichter und Denker,” may find an honorable mention in this connection.

In England the advice Détaille gave to the artists “à reprendre la tradition” has never been entirely forgotten, and even to the present day well-known artists have not disdained to paint signs occasionally. But before we enter the amiable society of contemporary artists we will show due honor to the great master Grinling Gibbons, who, so to speak, is an honorary member of the Sign-Makers’ Guild. To no visitor of London is the name of this sculptor unfamiliar. His master-hand carved the choir stalls in St. Paul’s Cathedral and many elaborate wood-sculptures in royal castles. One of his works is the famous golden cock in “Ye Olde Cock Tavern” in Fleet Street. When the old house was torn down to make room for a branch office of the Bank of England, the noble bird was obliged to move across the street, where he now occupies the seat of honor in a large and rather dull room. I am sure he would prefer to roost in the little paneled room, up another flight, where Tennyson wrote the poem that made the creature immortal.

Among the living English artists who painted signs we may mention Nicholson and Pryde, both experts in the art of the poster. Our illustration “The Goat,” which hangs out on High Street, No. 3, in London, is attributed to them, but even the greatest admirer of Nicholson’s woodcuts will not find it worth while to pay a visit to this unattractive ale-house. There is more charm in “The Rowing Barge,” a signed work of G. D. Leslie, member of the Royal Academy, in Wallingford on the Thames, where we found it in the neighborhood of the old Norman Church of St. Leonhard.

It took even two Academicians, Leslie and L. E. Hodgson, to produce the “George and Dragon” sign in Wargrave, a fascinating little place buried amidst the greenery of giant trees. The damp climate has effaced and darkened the sign considerably; the owner of the inn has therefore taken it in and placed it on the garden side of the house, under the protection of a balcony. Wargrave has a few other remarkable signs, such as the one of the “Bull Inn,” which seems to be inspired by the beautiful picture of young Potter.

But not the least beautiful among signs are the works of unknown artists. All the admirable signs in forged iron, from the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, in southern Germany, belong to this group. Benno Rüttenauer, to whom we are indebted in many ways, has praised these pure works of art in an article on “Swabian Tavern Signs”: “They are a joy to the eye and caress it as the melody of a folk-song caresses the ear.” From what invisible sources springs their beauty? we ask, just as we do before the great, miraculous flowers of Gothic cathedrals rising mysteriously from the plain cornfields of northern France. Simple artisans were their inventors and creators, men who dared to let their own ideas grow in the free play of glowing, flexible iron, not yet disturbed by pattern-books and school wisdom.

More beautiful still than these are the eternal signs with which Mother Nature, the only real teacher of all true artists, invites the weary pilgrim to rest: the moon, the gentle shining stars, and the blossoming trees under whose perfumed branches we sleep so sweetly. This is the oldest inn; the Germans call it “Bei Mutter Grün,” and the French speak similarly of “loger à l’enseigne de la lune”; “coucher à l’enseigne de la belle étoile.” Nobody has sung the charms of this natural inn more sweetly than the Swabian poet Uhland in his song, “Bei einem Wirte wundermild,” which we beg permission to quote in W. W. Skeat’s happy translation:—

CHAPTER VIII
THE SIGN IN POETRY

Like a prophetic star the sign seems to stand over the birth-house of many a poet. Or shall we not agree with Chateaubriand who saw in the eagle on the house in Bread Street, London, where Milton was born, an “augure et symbole”? And is it not a curious coincidence that the greatest French comedy-writer was born “à l’enseigne du Pavillon des Cinges dans la Rue des Étuves Saint-Honoré” in Paris? One of the most ingenious reconstructions of Robida (the architect of Vieux Paris, never to be forgotten by any visitor of the Parisian World’s Fair of 1900) was this birthplace of Molière’s that took its name from the mighty corner-beam, covered with carved monkeys. Truly, Milton had hoped less from the eagle on his father’s house than from the gentle star of Venus under which he was born. In his family Bible, one of the many autograph treasures of the British Museum, he has registered his birth with his own hand: “John Milton was born the 9th of December, 1608, die Veneris, half an hour after 6 in the morning.” It availed him little to be born on the day of Venus, and the promise given to the “children of Venus” by an old German calendar of 1489, “They shall sing joyfully and free from care,” was not fulfilled in his life. His marriage was an unhappy one. Taine said of him: “Ni les circonstances ni la nature l’avaient fait pour le bonheur.” But the eagle on the house of his childhood proved to be a true symbol of his great future, for like an eagle he soared to the highest heights of poetical creation. Schiller was born in Marbach in the neighboring house to the “Golden Lion,” whose landlord his grandfather had been.

Considering that all houses in earlier times were distinguished by such symbols, even the most pious could not help being born under a sign. Calvin, the French Puritan, was even born in an inn, the “grasse hôtellerie des Quatre Nations” at Noyen in Picardy. On the other hand, merry souls seem to have preferred saints as patrons of their birthplace, for Gavarni, the ingenious cartoonist, came into the world at Paris “à l’enseigne de Sainte Opportune, Rue des Vieilles Haudriettes.”

Sometimes Fate seems to mock the highflying ambitions of a great poet, by changing the house of his birth into a common public-house, as happened in the case of Chateaubriand, “the gentilhomme né” and his birthplace in the Rue des Juifs at Saint-Malo. On the other hand, Rabelais’s birthplace in Chinon, which became a tavern after his death, should have been one from the first hour of his life; for his was like the “étrange nativité” of his hero Gargantua: “Soubdain qu’il fut né, ne cria comme les aultres enfans: ‘Mies, mies’; mais à haulte voix s’escrioit: ‘À boire, à boire, à boire!’ comme invitant tout le monde à boire.” A little poem tells us the story how his study was transformed into a wine-cellar for merry revelers:—

The oldest poetical tradition of tavern signs we find, perhaps, in the songs of Villon, who sometimes has been called the Paul Verlaine of the fifteenth century, on account of his similar vicissitudes in life. A child of the people, he is not ashamed of his low origin:—

Living the life of the common people, he mingles freely with them, and in his wordly poems many a tavern adventure is told with zest. As a roaming scholar he wanders from place to place and, having rarely a penny in his purse, he acquires easily the art of dining without paying:—

And although he arrives at the tavern door riding shank’s mare, poor devil that he is,—

he is rich in fascinating stories to win the landlord’s favors and to secure ample credit. Full of self-assurance, he demands always the best of everything, “boire ypocras à jour et à nuyctée” (day and night to sip Hypokras), one of Falstaff’s various favorite drinks.

Curious sign-names Villon mentions; as, the tin plate,—

or, the golden mortar (“le mortier d’or”), and even “the pestle.” The mortar was really a chemist’s sign. To-day, even, we may see, in a little French provincial town over the door of a druggist, a bear diligently braying some wholesome herb, in a mortar, an “Ours qui pile.”

The animal kingdom is represented by the mule, “la Mulle,” an inn frequented by Rabelais, too, the red donkey (“un asne rouge”), and the white horse that, like all the painted horses, had the bad habit of never moving (“le cheval blanc qui ne bouge”). We have seen above that the “White Horse” was popular in Italy, too, although an old Italian proverb pretends that it is just as capricious as a beautiful woman and a source of continual annoyances:—

The most famous of all the cabarets immortalized by Villon is “le trou de la Pomme de Pin,” as he usually calls it. In the “Repues Franches,” from which we quoted the story of the Hotel du Pestel we read:—

We see that our poet-tramp hated adulteraters of wine (“les taverniers qui brouillent nostre vin”) not less sincerely than his old Roman colleague Horace. In his older days he regretted the dissipation of his youth, sadly reflecting upon what a comfortable age he could have now if ...

The tavern of the “Pomme de Pin” stood near the Madeleine Church—not the famous one we all know, but an old building in the “cité,” Rue de la Lanterne, which was pulled down in the time of the Revolution. Rabelais loved the place and praised this pineapple higher than the golden apple that young Paris once gave to Venus, thus creating endless troubles among men and gods:—

Sainte-Beuve has called this tavern, connected with so many proud names in French literature, “la véritable taverne littéraire, le vrai cabaret classique,” a title which to-day is deserved by the “Cabaret du Chat Noir,” the creation of such gifted artists as Henri Rivière, Willette, and, last but not least, Steinlen, the painter of its sign.

Next in literary celebrity stands “La Croix de Lorraine,” where Molière used to relax from his strenuous life as poet and actor and get merry over the blinking glass, “assez pour vers le soir être en goguettes.” Among the guests ponderous Boileau sometimes appeared, although he seems to have taken his admonition in the “Art poétique,” “connaissez la ville,” rather seriously and to have made quite extensive studies of the Parisian public-houses. We find him in the “Diable,” who had his quarters in those days very near the Sainte Chapelle, and in “La Tête Noire,” a counterpart of “The Golden Head” in Malines where Dürer lodged on his journey through the Netherlands.

It would be amusing to count how many immortal works have been created over a tavern table. Have we not heard that in our days Mascagni wrote the incomparable overture to his “Cavalleria Rusticana” on the little marble table of a modern café? Racine is supposed to have written his “Plaideurs” on the tavern table of the “Mouton Blanc” in Paris, and this happy circumstance seems to have affected his style very agreeably and to have made the play easier for a modern reader than the solemn dramas which are so difficult to enjoy if one does not happen to be a Frenchman. How attractive a place this “Mouton Blanc” was we might imagine from the little rhyme:—

What gifted fathers earned through tavern creations the prodigal sons sometimes lost again in gambling. Louis Racine spent the little fortune his father had left him in the “Epée de bois,” the same place where the comedy-writer Marivaux once gambled away his paternal heritage, regaining it soon, to be sure, by new and charming productions. It is mostly the stimulating company of comrades and fellow-artists, the freedom from petty household cares, that draws the poet to a quiet tavern corner; but sometimes, too, a charming landlady is the attractive force which may become so irresistible as to bind him forever in marriage bonds. Maybe, too, the tavern-bill was growing so hopelessly big that the poor dreamer saw no other solution. This was the reason why La Serre married the landlady of the “Trois ponts d’or,” it being understood that “contrat de mariage valait quittance alors entre cabaretière et poète,” as Michel-Fournier expresses the matter.

The tender relationship between the landlady and the poet-guest has given birth to numerous songs, from which we select the famous German Lied by Rudolf Baumbach:

and the not less charming poem of Molière’s successor, Dancourt, composed in honor of the landlady of the “Cabaret du petit père noire”:—

The classical literary tavern of England was without doubt “The Mermaid Tavern,” once situated in Bread Street not far from Milton’s birthplace. Here the famous club, founded by Ben Jonson, in 1603, assembled, among them the immortal Shakespeare. The fascination of this mermaid was still in the nineteenth century so great as to inspire Keats with his charming “Lines on the Mermaid Tavern,” which we feel inclined to quote in full from Anning Bell’s illustrated edition, where it stands under a graceful reconstruction of the sign:—

Truly a capricious wind has carried away the old Mermaid sign into far and unknown regions, and to-day the scholars are disputing where really the famous house stood.

Two other taverns, less roughly handled by Father Time, may claim to be next in literary rank: “The Cheshire Cheese” and “The Cock,” both in Fleet Street. “Ye olde Cheshire Cheese,” or simply “The Cheese,” is not easy to find because it really stands on a narrow side-lane, the Wine Office Court. It has the great advantage of having preserved unchanged the character of a seventeenth-century tavern. Although venerable, it is not the original building, which was destroyed, together with many other public-houses in the great fire of 1666. Pious souls saw in the fact that the conflagration started in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner an evident proof that the fire was sent from Heaven as punishment for “the sin of gluttony.” Shakespeare is said to have turned in not unfrequently at the old house of the “Cheshire Cheese” on his way to the Blackfriars’ Theatre in the Playhouse Yard, Ludgate Hill, where he was director for a time, or coming back for a twilight drink after the performance, which in those times closed as early as five o’clock. In spite of the warning fire of 1666 the sin of gluttony is still readily committed in the “Cheshire Cheese,” whose specialty, a meat pudding,—containing not only roast beef, kidneys, and oysters, but sky-larks too!—might even be called a sin against the holy ghost of poetry. Once immersed in this pudding the divine singers are silent forever without the consolation of the children’s book:—

Some of these lark puddings are even shipped to Yankeeland, which sends every year countless pilgrims to the “Cheshire Cheese.” If possible, the American father of a family will take the seat of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous lexicographer, lean his head against the old paneling, which clearly shows the marks of the greasy wigs of the Doctor and his friend Oliver Goldsmith, and look at chick and child with an Olympian air, as if he wanted to say: “I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my mouth let no dog bark.”

Among the guests and visitors at this “house of antique ease” we find many famous names beside Johnson and the author of the “Vicar of Wakefield,” who dwelt in the neighboring house, No. 6, Wine Office Court; men like Swift, Addison, Sheridan, Pope, even Voltaire, who must have felt rather out of place in this atmosphere of beefsteak and ale. Among modern poets Thackeray and Dickens are foremost,—Dickens who has studied so intimately the taverns and inns of his country. Under the spell of these souls of poets dead and gone, writers of the present generation love to gather here in literary clubs, such as the Johnson Club, which has adopted as its device the Doctor’s classical definition of the word “club”: “An assembly of good fellows meeting under certain conditions.” Johnson, who spent almost all his life in taverns, favored not only “The Cheese” with his presence, but others, too, as “The Mitre,” in whose dark coffee-room Hawthorne once dined. This old house has entirely vanished from the ground, just as the still older inn “The Devil”—who, following his old custom of settling near a church, had established himself opposite St. Dunstan’s. Thus we no longer “go to The Devil,” but if we have some serious business on hand we may step into “Child’s Bank,” which stands exactly on his former spot.

How important a rôle the waiters played in these old taverns we may realize from the fact that the portraits of two former head waiters decorate the walls of “The Cheshire Cheese.” Tennyson has celebrated another of these dignitaries in a long poem written in the Cock Tavern, beginning in this classical fashion:—

Dreaming over his glass of wine the poet sees in a sudden vision the prototype of the cock who once brought the head-waiter as a round country boy to the city, to the great bewilderment of his church-tower colleagues who witnessed his audacious flight:—

The description of this legendary cock, inspired evidently by the beautiful work of Gibbon’s master-hand, still to be seen in the modern Cock Tavern in Fleet Street, might well be called classical, and shall not be withheld from our readers:—

Everybody who knows and loves the Swabian poet Mörike, the music for whose songs, composed by Hugo Wolff, have become the property of the international brotherhood of music-lovers, will think of his “Old Church-Tower Cock,” strangely similar in feeling to Tennyson’s poem of “The Cock” and his brothers of the weather.

We are not surprised to find that the poets of the land of Wanderlust give special attention to taverns and signs. Besides Mörike, and Uhland, whose “Inn” we quoted above, Johann Peter Hebel, a son of the Black Forest, has always shown a special predilection for the sign and its wonders. In an untranslatable poem, “On the death of a tippler,” he celebrates his man as a diligent astronomer who never tires looking for shining “Stars,” a brave knight always ready to hunt up “Bears” and “Lions,” a pious Christian willing to do penitence at the “Cross,” a man who frequented the best society, including “The Three Kings,” his most intimate friends.

Germany may boast, too, of a classical literary tavern, the “Bratwurstglöckle” in Nuremberg, built directly against the walls of a church, the Gothic Moritz-Kapelle. Among its famous guests were the Mastersinger, Hans Sachs, and Dürer, Germany’s greatest artist. Like a house out of a fairy tale it stands before us; we are only surprised that no fence of sausages surrounds it and that its door and window shutters are ordinary wood and not gingerbread!

CHAPTER IX
POLITICAL SIGNS

“Au-dessus de ma tête, Charles Quint, Joseph II ou Napoléon pendus à une vieillie potence en fer et faisant enseigne, grands empereurs qui ne sont plus bons qu’à achalander une auberge.”

Victor Hugo, Le Rhin.

At the first glance our peaceful sign seems to have nothing to do with politics whatsoever, except perhaps in so far as under its symbol the Philistines assemble, not only to drink and be merry, but, as a side-issue, to solve the world’s problems. The contrast of human strife and battle outside, somewhere in distant lands, with the undisturbed comfort of the tap-room has been for ages one of the chief fascinations of the tavern, and none has described this selfish attitude of the Philistine more graphically than Goethe in the conversation of the two citizens in his “Faust”:—

This opinion the other citizen, who reminds us curiously of certain modern neutrals, approves with the following words:—

This seems about all the political wisdom the tavern sign has to suggest; but if we investigate more closely the varying forms and continual changes of the sign we shall discover in its evolution nothing less than a little history of civilization in pictures. Every great event in the world’s history finds its echo in some transformation of the sign, that proves itself a sensitive indicator for the popular valuation of leading men and important occurrences. In the eagle-names of the Roman signs we seem to hear the conquering wings of the Roman eagles soaring over the world, and on the Cymbrian shield over the cocktavern on the Forum we read the pride of the victorious Roman soldier.

In our chapter on “Heraldic Signs” we recognized the relationship between the landlords and the ruling powers. The swinging sign of a “crown” means the rule of kings, and thankful subjects who enjoy the peace secured by their monarch and the comfort of settling down in “The Crown” to a blessed meal. It means good times, efficient landlords and easy food-supply, if you get such an excellent and abundant dinner as Heine was offered on his wanderings through the Harz by the tavern-keeper of “The Crown” in Klausthal: “My repast consisted of spring-green parsley-soup, violet-blue cabbage, a pile of roast veal which resembled Chimborazo in miniature and a sort of smoked herrings, called Bückings from their inventor William Bücking, who died in 1447, and who, on account of the invention, was so greatly honored by Charles V that the great monarch in 1556 made a journey from Middleburg to Bievlied in Zealand for the express purpose of visiting the grave of the great fishdrier. How exquisitely such dishes taste when we are familiar with their historical associations!”

And do not the kings themselves appear on the sign? The “Three Kings” were originally the “Wise Men” from the East. How the Catholic Church came to represent them as kings we read in Fischart’s quaint old German of his amusing “Bienenkorb” of 1580: “Und das sie weiter auss den treien Weisen aus Morgenland trei König gemacht hat und den eynen so Bechschwarz als eynen Moren, ist aus den Weissagungen Salomonis oder Davids gefischet, die da sagen, dass die König aus Morenland Christum anzubeten kommen werden.” The East, the land of the morn, was thus confused with the land of the Moors which we should rather seek to the south of Bethlehem. On “Three Kings’ Day,” of course, the taverns of this name were scenes of special merriment, the good Catholics joyfully shouting, “The King drinks.” “The three gentlemen,” as Carlyle calls them disrespectfully, are buried in the Cologne Cathedral, but their memory is honored still by many a visitor of a “Three Kings” tavern in good Rhenish wine which our forefathers called the theological wine. We find the sign of the famous travelers from distant lands especially on the great roads of commerce leading from Italy over the Alps, so in Augsburg and Basle. Originally a royalist symbol of the landlord’s loyalty to monarchy, of his eagerness to serve crowned guests if fortune should lead them his way, it was changed in the times of the Revolution to the democratic “Three Moors,” and the first landlord who is said to have deprived his three kings of their crowns was the landlord in Basle. Maybe time helped him to make this change, slowly wearing away the gilded glitter of the crowns and darkening the kings to black-a-moors. To-day the famous house in Augsburg, where Charles V once lodged as guest of the rich banker Fugger for more than a year, is called “Three Moors.” The traveler still may see the big fireplace in which the generous merchant burned all the imperial promissory notes.

But whatever the explanation of this “Three Moors’” sign may be, there can be no doubt that the Revolution had a noticeable influence on signs in general. The inn “Zum Rosenkrantz” in Strassburg was called after 1790 “A la couronne civile,” to please the rationalistic worshipers of the “Supreme Being,” and countless king-signs were sold as old iron. Sébastien Mercier, in his “Tableau de Paris,” has given a merciless report of this great catastrophe which swept away so many of the signs which we have learned to respect and to love: “Chez les marchands de ferrailles du quai de la Mégisserie, sont des magazins de vieilles enseignes, propre à décorer l’entrée de tous les cabarets et tabagies des faubourgs et de la banlieu de Paris. Là tous les rois de la terre dorment ensemble: Louis XVI et Georges III se baisent fraternellement; le roi de Prusse couche avec l’impératrice de Russie, l’empereur est de niveau avec les électeurs; là enfin la tiare et le turban se confonde. Un cabaretier arrive, remue avec le pied toutes ces têtes couronnées, les examine, prend au hasard la figure du roi de Pologne, l’emporte et écrit dessous: Au grand vainqueur. Un autre gargotier demande une impératrice; il veut que sa gorge soit boursouflée, et le peintre, sortant de la taverne voisine, fait présent d’une gorge rebondie à toutes les princesses d’Europe. Le même peintre coiffe d’une couronne de laurier une tête de Louis XV lui ôte sa perruque et sa bourse, et voilà, un César.—Toutes ces figures royales ont d’étranges physionomies et font éternellement la moue à la populace qui les regarde. Aucun de ces souverains ne sourit au peuple, même en peinture; ils out tous l’air hagard ou burlesque, des yeux éraillés, un nez de travers, une bouche énorme....”

We see those were bad days for kings, even for painted ones. If the landlord had Jacobin blood in his veins he would not content himself with such harmless changes as removing the painted crowns. He would call his tavern no longer “Le Roi Maure,” but forthwith “Le Roi Mort,” and on the sign the picture of the dead king Louis XVI would testify to his stanch republicanism. Or he would choose as sign-hero Brutus the famous regicide. Dickens has introduced us to such a tavern, “The good Republican Brutus,” in the “Tale of Two Cities,” and his picture of the place, although in a book of fiction, shows clearly the colors of historical truth: “It had a quieter look than any other place of the same description they had passed, and though red with patriotic caps was not so red as the rest.” The guests were a rather suspicious-looking crowd. One workman with bare breast and arms reads aloud the latest terrible news to the rest who listen attentively. All are armed, some have laid their weapons aside to be resumed, if needed. In the classical chapter “The Wine-Shop,” where he describes the hopeless misery of the poor people crowded together in the narrow streets of the St. Antoine quarter, he sees even in the merchants’ signs symbols of misery or threats of future atrocities: “The trade-signs (and they were almost as many as the shops) were all grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman painted up, only the leanest scraps of meat, the baker the coarsest of meager loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer.... Nothing was represented in a flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but the cutler’s knives and axes were sharp and bright, the smith’s hammers were heavy, and the gunmaker’s stock was murderous.”

It was in a tavern in Varennes that the fate of Louis XVI was sealed. Here the fugitive king was arrested and forced to go back to Paris to pay with his blood the debt of sins which his ancestors had accumulated. “Forty-eight years after the royal coach was stopped in this town,” says Victor Hugo, “I saw hanging from an old iron bracket the picture of Louis Philippe with the inscription: ‘Au grand Monarque.’” Nowhere do we observe quicker changes than in governments and tavern signs, remarks the German tramp-poet Seume; and Victor Hugo indulges in similar reflections, passing in review the signs of the last one hundred years from Louis XV to Bonaparte and Charles X: “Louis XVI s’est peut-être arrêté au Grand Monarque, et s’est vu là peint en enseigne, roi en peinture lui-même.—Pauvre ‘Grand Monarque?’” he exclaims in pathetic pity. This supposition of Hugo’s, however, is not correct, as we learn from Carlyle, who, scrutinizing with the prophetic vision of a poet the darkness of the past, possessed at the same time the exactness and sincerity of a true historian and who has given us, based on a personal visit to the locality, the following description of the nocturnal scene: “The village of Varennes lies dark and slumberous, a most unlevel Village of inverse saddle-shape, as men write. It sleeps; the rushing of the River Aire singing lullaby to it. Nevertheless from the Golden Arm, Bras d’or Tavern across that sloping Marketplace, there still comes shine of social light....”

Even the American Revolution left its traces on the tavern signs of the Yankeeland. The old Baptist pastor and Professor of Theology, Galusha Anderson, who has given us, in his charming book, “When Neighbors were Neighbors,” in his simple way a kind of social history of the early United States, mentions signs that he saw in his youth “where the English red-coats were represented flying before our revolutionary forefathers.” And Washington Irving has given us, in his “Rip Van Winkle,” a classical example of the political changes the signboard had to undergo. When this curious dreamer and unhappy husband, after many years of mysterious absence, came back to his native village, nothing perhaps surprised him so much as to find on the old tavern the strange words, “The Union Hotel, by Jonathan Doolittle,” and to see even the good old sign strangely altered: “He recognised on the sign, however, the ruby face of King George, under which he had smoked so many a peaceful pipe; but even this was singularly metamorphosed. The red coat was changed for one of blue and buff, a sword was held instead of a sceptre, the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was painted in large characters, General Washington.” Thus he received from the signboard the necessary instruction on the great changes that had taken place during his absence, how his country had developed from an English Colony to a free Republic.

There are still a few signs in existence that might give us an idea how such old American signs probably looked. We refer especially to the “Governor Hancock” sign in the old Boston State House and a couple of amusing signs in the little historical museum at Lexington.

In its long political career the sign was not spared the humiliation of being used as gallows. One of the first victims of the French Revolution was Foulon. He was charged with making the people eat grass; and now a raging mob forced into his dead mouth the food he had proposed for others. According to tradition this old sinner was hanged to a lantern on the corner of the Place de la Grève and the Rue de la Vannerie. But this is contradicted by such an old Parisian as Victorien Sardou, who says that Foulon was hanged to a sign which, as he remembers well from his childhood days, was still to be seen, under Louis Philippe, although nobody really seemed to give attention to it in those days of Romanticism.

Another gruesome story we are told by Macaulay, how under James II, after the defeat of the unhappy Duke of Monmouth, the partisans of the pretender were suspended from a signpost before a tavern in Taunton by order of a certain Colonel Percy Kirke. “They were not suffered even to take leave of their nearest relations. The signpost of the White Hart Inn served for a gallows. It is said that the work of death went on in sight of the windows where the officers of the Tangier regiment were carousing, and that at every health a wretch was turned off. When the legs of the dying men quivered in the last agony, the colonel ordered the drums to strike up. He would give the rebels, he said, music to their dancing. The tradition runs that one of the captives was not even allowed the indulgence of a speedy death. Twice he was suspended from the signpost, and twice cut down. Twice he was asked if he repented of his treason, and twice he replied that if the deed were to do again, he would do it. Then he was tied up for the last time.”

The Chief Justice and Lord Chancellor Jeffreys, who continued the work of persecution against the partisans of the Duke of Monmouth,—the man whose Bloody Assizes will not be easily forgotten in England,—once nearly paid with his life the foolish desire to climb up on a signpost in a happy hour of complete intoxication. After a wild orgy in company with the Lord Treasurer, he and his companion decided to undress until they were “almost stark naked” and to drink the king’s health from the airy height of a signpost. Jeffreys took a severe cold and alarmed not a little the king, who feared the irreparable loss of such a valuable servant.

After the uncanny stories of the signpost’s function as a gallows, we find a certain comfort in hearing that the sign occasionally offered a refuge to persecuted political offenders. In the days of the Corsican, the partisans of the Bourbons, called by the beautiful name of “Chouans,” were happy to find such a refuge, “une cache fameuse,” behind the big sign of the perfumer Caron. The persecuted Chouan had only to step out through a window and to close the blinds behind him and he was perfectly safe against the detectives of Fouché, the chief of the police. If the fugitive, however, made a blunder and stepped by mistake into the barber shop of M. Teissier, he was undone; because this was the man who had the honor of shaving the Cæsarean face of Napoleon.

Before the French Revolution another great event in the world’s history had produced considerable changes on the signboard—the Reformation. We have already noticed how the new ideas and motives of the Renaissance influenced, not only the sculptured frame of the sign, but created new forms, such as the Dolphin, the Siren, the Pegasus, the Sagittary, Fortuna, Apollo, Phœnix, Minerva, Hercules, Castor and Pollux, Bacchus, all favorite themes of this classical period. The discovery of America at the same time brought the “Wild Man” into great popularity, and the newly introduced tobacco, “the filthy weed,” caused the creation of countless Indian and Huron signs, “black-a-moors and other dusky foreigners.”

The Reformation itself had a more negative effect on the sign. It tried to eliminate or to change the old saint signs. Cromwell in England declaimed against Catholic-sounding tavern names. “St. Catherine and Wheel” was changed to “Cat and Wheel,” and degenerated further into “Cat and Fiddle,” a sign still popular in England and celebrated in the famous children’s rhyme :—