On some signs the fiddling cat inspires with its music a cow to jump in ecstasy over a grinning moon. Thus we see everywhere the old religious motives and symbols turned into ridicule and blasphemy. This process began at the end of the Middle Ages, as the study of miniatures and of cathedral sculptures will amply prove. We cannot be surprised, therefore, to find such anti-papal signs as “Le cochon mitré” in Compiègne. The mediæval illuminators and sculptors loved to “hommifier” the swine and to attack under this disguise hypocritical and voluptuous priests. In the “Doctrinal rurale” of Pierre Michault of 1486 (in the National Library at Paris), we see a fat monk in the pedagogue’s chair, representing “concupiscence,” and evidently making such shocking remarks that his girl pupils put their fingers in their ears, while in the delicate framework of the miniature a preaching swine reveals the real character of this strange teacher.

The touching scene of the “Salutatio,” which inspired the artists of the Renaissance with such noble creations as Donatello’s marble relief in Florence, is degraded now to a ridiculous bowing and scraping between a lady and her partner or between two stylish gentlemen. The fanatical Puritans who thundered even against the harmless Christmas customs, so dear to the people, of course took offense at the use of the cross for a sign and in 1643 forced the landlord of the “Golden Cross,” in the Strand, London, to take his “superstitious and idolatrous” sign down. It is a curious irony of fate that Cromwell, who to the present day is made responsible for nearly all destructions in English cathedrals and who probably was an enemy, not only of Catholic but of all signs, was himself made an object of the signboard.

In England more than anywhere else the sign stands for heroes and hero-worship. Peter the Great and his visit to London were remembered in “The Czar’s Head”; English admirals and great generals like Wellington and the Prussian King Frederic, “the great Protestant hero,” all receive “signboard-honors.” London possessed still in 1881 thirty-seven “Duke of Wellington” taverns.

No less patriotic are the Dutch sign-painters, who love to picture their own celebrities Rembrandt, Ruysdael, or Erasmus of Rotterdam and the beloved Princes of Orange. One of them, the future King William III of England, we find even as a boy on a signboard with the inimitable Dutch inscription:—

But other “merkwaardige Personen,” great men of other nations, too, receive their share of this popular homage: Frederic the Great, Schiller, Gustavus Adolphus, and even old Cicero. Sometimes the popularity of a hero passes quickly. The English Admiral Vernon had hardly received signboard honors when he had to yield his place to Frederic, the “Glorious Protestant Hero,” as he was called after the battle of Rossbach. As a rule, a few changes in the costume of the portrait were considered sufficient by the landlord, who rarely indulged in the luxury of an entirely new picture for the new hero. To the English statesman, Horace Walpole, these rapid changes on the signboard suggested the following melancholy remarks: “I pondered these things in my breast and said to myself, ‘Surely all glory is but as a sign!’”

The French people were more loyal to their Bonaparte signs, long after the beloved emperor had been dethroned. For a long time the “napoléonisme cabaretier” refused to capitulate, says Carteret. In the country even serious fights were sometimes caused by the signs of the Imperialists, who ten years after Waterloo showed still the famous words, “La garde meurt et ne se rend pas,” or represented the meeting of Napoleon and Frederic with the inscription, “Le soleil luit pour tous les héros.” A tavern-keeper near Cannes, where Napoleon landed on his return from Elba, to reconquer France, honored the memory of the great man who rested in his inn with the words:—

On the other hand, we find the men who delivered their country from the yoke of the Corsican equally honored in signs; the tavern in which these great men had rested were for a long time held sacred by the people. “In Innsbruck, in the ‘Golden Eagle,’” we read in Heine’s “Reisebilder,” “where Andreas Hofer had lodged, and where every corner is still filled with his portraits and mementoes, I asked the landlord, if he knew anything of the ‘Sandwirth.’ Then the old gentleman boiled over with eloquence....”

To our great astonishment, we find even the idea of an invasion on old English tavern signs. We know well this fear of invasion is nothing new with our cousins. “Down the northeast wind the sea-thieves were always coming. England should always beware of the northeast wind. It blows her no good,”—that is the lesson the English school-children already learn in such books as C. R. L. Fletcher’s “History of England” (Oxford, 1911), to which Rudyard Kipling has contributed most passionate songs of patriotism. As early as 1753 the English had the black suspicion that Frederic the Great might land fifteen thousand of his Spartan Prussian soldiers on their coast, as if he just then had nothing else to do. Carlyle has refuted these suspicions as ridiculous: “King Friedrich distinguished himself by the grand human virtue of keeping well at home—of always minding his own affairs.” In these days of the Entente Cordiale and its result the World-War, the south wind, blowing from France, is entirely forgotten, but nevertheless it is just there that the most serious preparations for an invasion of England have been made repeatedly. In the year 1756 the cry resounded: “If France land on us, we are undone”; and in 1759 Admiral Conflans actually attempted to execute the idea with eighteen thousand men, but the enterprise failed completely, “not on the shores of Britain, but of Brittany.” Under Napoleon the danger increased, but after Nelson’s victory of Trafalgar, Napoleon had to abandon his maritime plans. The regained feeling of security was manifested in many caricatures mocking Napoleon, among which we have to reckon the sign “Old Bonaparte.” Using the familiar motive of “The ass in the bandbox,” the sign-painter represents the French Emperor riding on a donkey and sailing in a bandbox over the Channel to fight “Perfidious Albion.”

In this connection we ask permission to tell the story of another donkey-sign. Joseph II, Emperor of the old German Empire, whom we might call the “traveling Kaiser” of the eighteenth century, loved to put up at simple inns; even when he was invited by Frederic the Great, at their first interview in Neisse, to lodge in the castle, he preferred the liberty of having his ease at “The Three Kings.” Once, in Maestricht, he stopped at a hotel called “The Gray Donkey,” and gave the landlord as proof of his complete satisfaction the privilege to call his house hereafter “Kaiser Joseph” and to paint on his sign the equestrian portrait of his noble guest. But the Dutch customers did not recognize their old tavern under such a glorious name, and the landlord was finally obliged to put under the imperial picture the odd words: “The Real Gray Donkey.” Duke Charles of Württemberg, who knew this fancy of the Emperor, once pleased him enormously by hanging a big sign, “Hotel de l’Empereur,” out over the portal of his castle in Stuttgart, himself receiving the imperial visitor in the humble costume of an obedient landlord.

More serious political events are equally reflected in the history of the sign. When Richard III lost throne and life at Bosworth in 1485, the Black Bears, the heraldic animals of his royal escutcheon, disappeared from the tavern sign and were replaced by the Blue Bear of the Count of Oxford. It was even a dangerous thing in those days to play with the seemingly harmless sign. A landlord of a Crown inn, who once said jokingly that he intended to make his son the heir of the crown, was accused of high treason and had to suffer death in 1467. Another sign, still popular in England, “The Royal Oak,” came into vogue after the restoration of Charles II, because it reminded the good people of the oak in which the persecuted king had found a shelter against his enemies. When Charles I’s proud head fell, a day after his execution, “The Crown” of the poet tavern-keeper Taylor, who possessed the courage of his conviction, appeared veiled in black.

The sign in mourning occurs again, but this time for a very frivolous reason. In 1736 the tavern-keepers, disgusted with the “New Act against spirituous liquors,” covered their signs with “deep mourning” as symbol of protest. That this law had not been too severe is evidenced by Hogarth’s engraving “Gin Lane,” published fifteen years later, where we read over a tavern the disgusting announcement: “Here gentlemen and others can get drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence.”

Macaulay has pointed out the great importance of public-houses as political meeting-grounds. Party congresses of the Liberals were held in the early day in “The Rose,” but in general the Whigs preferred places that had a punchbowl on their sign, punch being at the end of the seventeenth century not only a very popular beverage, but decidedly a “Whig drink,” while the Tories drank mostly—noblesse oblige—wine or champagne. We find the punchbowl either alone or in more or less logical combinations, as “Ship and Punchbowl,” “Parrot and Punchbowl,” “Half-Moon and Punchbowl,” and the like.

An old American sign, “The Federal Punch,” is evidently a revised edition of the Whig sign of the mother country. The business of imbibing the party drink was not forgotten in these political meetings. In fact, the Tories attended to it one time so thoroughly in their Apollo Tavern in Fleet Street that they were unable to execute their own decision to go “in a body” to King William to present him an address of thanks. “They were induced to forego their intention; and not without cause: for a great crowd of squires after a revel, at which doubtless neither October nor claret had been spared, might have caused some inconvenience in the present chamber.” Finally they decided to send as their representative an elderly country gentleman who was, for a wonder, still sober.

Beside these respectable meeting-places of the two great parties there were “treason taverns,” suspicious ale-houses, where plotters and hired murderers, not without the encouragement of the exiled king James II, forged their black plans against the life of William, the Prince of Orange. One of these places had the fitting name “The Dog” in Drury Lane, “a tavern which was frequented by lawless and desperate men.”

We will end our enumeration of politically important taverns with the “Cadran Bleu” in Paris, where the Marseillais were greeted by the Parisians after they had completed their long journey across the whole of France, singing for the first time the famous song of the Revolution: “Marchez, abattez le tyran.” “Patriot clasps dusty patriot to his bosom, there is footwashing and reflection: dinner of twelve hundred covers at the Blue Dial, Cadran Bleu.”

To the present day the right to assemble freely in the tavern, “this temple of true liberty,” is suspiciously guarded by all parties. To the present day the tavern serves all kinds of political and social clubs and sometimes even burial societies similar to those of which Washington Irving has told us such amusing stories, as “The Swan and Horseshoe” and “Cock and Crown,” once flourishing in the heart of London, in Little Britain.

CHAPTER X
TRAVELING WITH GOETHE AND FREDERIC THE GREAT

“Ici toute liberté, Monsieur, comme si nous étions au cabaret.”

Frederic the Great.

There is a surprising parallelism between the fathers of these two greatest men of the eighteenth century. These fathers, whom narrow-minded critics usually call pedants, transmitted to their sons the great gift of “life’s serious conduct.” Rarely has the old Councillor Goethe found so much just appreciation as Carlyle has shown for Frederic William I. The character of both the sons constitutes a happy combination of this serious paternal heritage and the joyful element of sanguine optimism. Both, although they owe perhaps most to their fathers, feel themselves drawn to the softer natures of their mothers, who hardly ever refused them any wish. And most of us prefer to share with them the love of their charming mothers, Frau Rath and Sophie Dorothea,—because it is always more agreeable to be loved than to be educated,—and reserve for the fathers at best a cool esteem.

Travel for pleasure or sport was unknown to the old Spartan King of Prussia, as indeed it was to his greater son, who did not even appreciate the sport of hunting. When they traveled it was for the inspection of the administration of their country or to review their troops. Old Frederic William, in his great simplicity, preferred even to pass the night in airy barns than to sleep in stuffy rooms. “Dinner-table to be spread always in some airy place, garden-house, tent, big clean barn,—Majesty likes air, of all things;—will sleep too, in a clean barn or garden-house: better anything than being stifled, thinks his Majesty.” We never hear that he stopped at inns, and Frederic, too, we meet only rarely in taverns, once in Braunschweig in Korn’s Hotel, where he was received one night in the Freemasons’ lodge very secretly because his severe papa despised such childish fooleries utterly. Occasionally, perhaps, while in Potsdam he visits inns like “The Three Crowns,” where one could find better food, he says, than at the table of his Mecklenburg cousins in their castle Mirow. In the first year of his reign, when he traveled incognito to French Alsace, he had very distressing experiences in different taverns. In a letter to Voltaire he describes in French verses the various accidents of this trip:—

Traveling all day in the worst of weathers, as if the last day of judgment had come, and in the evening to get a poor meal in a miserable tavern—and a large bill:—

The landlord of the “Post” in Kehl demands passes from Frederic and his companions, and Frederic fabricates them himself with his Prussian seal. Again in Strassburg they present the same passes to the custom officials, not without adding a gold coin:—

Here they stop at “The Raven,” where Frederic immediately began to study the French people. His judgment is not very flattering, although he communicates it to his French friend:—

In the evening he invites even French officers to dine with him and the following morning goes to a military review. Here one of his own soldiers, a Prussian deserter, “un malheureux pendard,” recognizes him; he quickly hurries back to “The Raven,” pays his bill, and leaves Strassburg, never to see it again.

Like the old king, Frederic preferred to stop in rectories when traveling through the Prussian lands, but sometimes was prevented from doing so by his very faithful but very independent coachman Pfund. If the pastor had forgotten to give this important person his due tip on the last visit, Pfund would surely cut him on future occasions, and force his old master to go on to the next town, where he was sure to find a host of better manners. This sin of omission was rarely committed by pastors who received the honor of a royal visit, because they could very well afford to humor old Pfund a little, when they themselves received from the otherwise economical king the handsome “royalty” of fifty dollars for a dinner and one hundred dollars for dinner and a night’s lodging. General von der Marwitz has told us the story of how Pfund once opposed the king, who was tired and wanted to stop in the rectory of Dolgelin, by saying the sun was not yet down and they could well reach the next town, and how the old king patiently submitted to the will of his Automedon. But there is a limit even to the patience of old kings, and on one occasion, when Pfund went too far in his rudeness, Frederic rebelled, and, to teach his coachman morals, ordered him forthwith to cart manure and fagots with a team of donkeys. After a year the king happened to meet him, busily engaged in his new and modest occupation, and kindly inquired: “How d’ye do?” The coachman’s classic answer August Kopisch has celebrated in a song which we venture to translate:—

Goethe’s father, although himself the son of a landlord, disliked inns and public-houses very keenly, as we read in Goethe’s autobiography, “Dichtung und Wahrheit”: “This feeling had rooted itself firmly in him on his travels through Italy, France, and Germany. Although he seldom spoke in images, and only called them to his aid when he was very cheerful, yet he used often to repeat that he always fancied he saw a great cobweb spun across the gate of an inn, so ingeniously that the insects could indeed fly in but that even the privileged wasps could not fly out again unplucked. It seemed to him something horrible, that one should be obliged to pay immoderately for renouncing one’s habits and all that was dear to one in life and living after the manner of publicans and waiters. He praised the hospitality of the olden time, and reluctantly as he otherwise endured even anything unusual in the house, he yet practiced hospitality....” This excessive aversion to all inns the great son inherited from his father, although he admitted it was a weakness. We are therefore not surprised to see the student Goethe, when he for the first time traveled full of longing to Dresden in the yellow coach, lodge in the modest quarters of a philosophical cobbler, whose home seemed to him as romantic and picturesque as an old Dutch painting. Perhaps it was the memory of this interior that inspired Goethe later, when he was called “Doktor Wolf” by his proud mother, to arrange in “The Star” at Weimar, in honor of the Duchess Anna Amalie, a “festivity in clair-obscure” with the distinct purpose of creating a Rembrandt scene.

But before we wander in the far world with the student and doctor, let us take a stroll through the Frankfurt of his childhood and admire the many signs that still decorated, not inns alone, but also, houses of private citizens. The “Goldene Wage,” situated on the Domplatz and built in 1625, as well as the “Grosse Engel,” opposite the Römer, are still standing, and are filled to-day with the treasures of art-loving antiquarians. Recollections of his childhood passed through Goethe’s mind when he described in “Hermann und Dorothea” the pharmacy “Zum Engel,” near the “Golden Lion” on the market-place, and the old bachelor chemist who was too stingy to regild his angel-sign:—

The father of some boy friends of Goethe’s, a Herr von Senckenberg, “lived at the corner of Hare Street, which took its name from a sign on the house that represented one hare at least if not three hares.” Von Senckenberg’s three sons were consequently called the “three hares,” which nickname they could not shake off for a long while.

It was in the “Golden Lion” at Frankfurt that Voltaire was arrested and interned on his word of honor until his luggage containing the stolen “Œuvre de Poésies” of Frederic the Great should arrive. In these poems the king had ridiculed several crowned heads, and it was of the utmost importance for him to get them back before the revengeful Frenchman could make use of them against him. But for some reason or other the trunks did not arrive, and Voltaire, losing patience and “without warning anybody, privately revoked said word of honor” and tried to escape, an attempt that failed and ended in a tragic-comic fashion. Father Goethe, who loved to tell this story to his children as a warning example never to seek the favors of princes, does not agree here with Carlyle in the name of the tavern, but says it was “The Rose” in which “this extraordinary poet and writer was held as a prisoner for a considerable time.” When the fugitive was brought back, the landlord of the tavern refused to take him in again, and the “Bock” became for the rest of the time his involuntary lodging-place.

In spite of this bad example and his father’s distinct warnings, Goethe in 1778 accepted the invitation of the Duke of Weimar to the “Römische Kaiser” in Frankfurt, where he was “joyfully and graciously” received, and where definite arrangements were made for his removal to Weimar.

After the death of Goethe’s father, Mutter Aja sold the old homestead on the Hirschgraben and took a flat in the “Goldenen Brunnen” on the Rossmarket, where the golden fountain of her good humor continued to flow for all her friends, but where she no longer had such facilities for entertaining guests as in the roomy house of old. When, therefore, her daughter-in-law and her grandson, the “liebe Augst,” came to visit her, she ordered rooms for them in “The Swan.” Her apartment in the “Golden Fountain” we know from her own lively description in a letter to her son, who visited her here several times before her death in 1808.

Let us now accompany the student Goethe to Strassburg and pay a visit to the inn “Zum Geist,” where his friendship with Herder, so important for his future development, was formed. “I visited Herder morning and evening, I even remained whole days with him ... and daily learned to appreciate his beautiful and great qualities, his extensive knowledge, and his profound views.” In Leipzig, the next university where Goethe studied, he lived in a house, between the old and the new market, which was called after its sign “Die Feuerkugel.” One of the first calls he made was to the literary dictator Gottsched, who “lived very respectably in the first story of the ‘Golden Bear,’ where the elder Breitkopf, on account of the great advantage which Gottsched’s writings had brought to the trade, had assured him a lodging for life.” This Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf was the inventor of music printing and the founder of the famous publishing firm of to-day. His house, the “Golden Bear,” number 11 Universitätsstrasse, is to-day the home of the Royal Saxon Institute for universal history and the history of civilization, founded by the distinguished historian Lamprecht. In Goethe’s day Breitkopf’s son built a great new house opposite the “Golden Bear” which was called “Zum Silbernen Bären.”

A very popular sign in those days, in Germany, and especially in the neighborhood of Frankfurt, was the pentacle. Goethe calls it simply the beer-sign in his autobiography, where he tells us a charming story based on an ingenious and humorous interpretation of the two triangles which compose the sign. While still living as a young lawyer in Mutter Aja’s house, he entertained two distinguished visitors, the famous Lavater and the educational reformer Basedow. To amuse them he arranged carriage drives in the pleasant country around his native town. We see the young fire-brand sitting between these two dignified men:—

On one of these excursions Basedow had offended the pious and sweet-tempered Lavater by his cynical remarks about the Trinity and so spoiled the pleasant atmosphere of good comradeship. Goethe punished him in the following humorous manner. “The weather was warm and the tobacco smoke had perhaps contributed to the dryness of Basedow’s palate; he was dying for a glass of beer. Seeing a tavern at a distance on the road he eagerly ordered the coachman to stop there.” But Goethe urged him to go on without seeming to mind the furious protest of the thirsty Basedow, whom he simply calmed with the words: “Father, be quiet, you ought to thank me! Luckily you didn’t see the beer-sign! It was two triangles put together across each other. Now, you commonly get mad about one triangle, and if you had set your eye on two we should have had to put you in a strait-jacket.”

On his first journey to Switzerland, in company with the Stollbergs, he stayed at the hotel “Zum Schwert,” which is still standing. “The view of the lake of Zürich which we enjoyed from the Gate of the Sword is still before me.” On the Rigi they lodged in the “Ochsen,” and here from the window of his room, he sketched one Sunday morning the chapel of the “Madonna in the Snow.” In the evening they sat before the tavern door, under the sign, and enjoyed the music of the gurgling fountain and a substantial meal consisting of baked fish, eggs, and “sufficient” wine. On his second trip to Switzerland in 1779-80 we meet him, together with his noble friend the Duke of Weimar, in “The Eagle” at Constance, where Montaigne had lodged more than two hundred years before.

We could mention many other hospitable thresholds which the great genius crossed: “The Red Cock” in Nuremberg, now an elegant building that reminds us little of the ancient low house with its large gate; or the “Hotel Victoria” in Venice, whose owner recalls to the modern traveler Goethe’s visit in a proud memorial tablet. “I lodged well in the ‘Königin von England,’ not far from the market-place, the greatest advantage of the inn.” But if he could find private quarters he preferred them to public-houses; so in Rome, where he was very glad to be received in the home of the painter Tischbein.

There is sufficient evidence that Goethe took an artistic interest in signs, since he invented one himself for his puppet play “Hanswurst’s Hochzeit,” where we read the bewitching rhyme:—

In “Truth and Poetry” he has given us the scheme of the play, which was never really executed. Like a born stage manager, he proposed a kind of turning stage: “The tavern with its glittering insignia was placed so that all its four sides could be presented to view by being turned upon a peg.” This patent idea of a turning inn showing its golden sign and its door open to travelers from the four quarters of the globe, might please the modern landlord too, even if he did not care exactly for the super-sign of a “Golden Louse,” “magnified by the solar-microscope!”

CHAPTER XI
THE ENGLISH SIGN AND ITS PECULIARITIES

We cannot resist the temptation to quote as an introduction the ipsissima verba of England’s classical historian Macaulay on the evolution of public hospitality in his country. Most naturally the evolution of the sign runs parallel to the evolution of the tavern, and in a time of flourishing inns we may expect to find highly developed tavern signs. “From a very early period,” says Macaulay, in a chapter on the social condition of England in 1685, “the inns of England had been renowned. Our first great poet had described the excellent accommodation which they afforded to the pilgrims of the fourteenth century. Nine and twenty persons, with their horses, found room in the wide chambers and stables of the Tabard in Southwark. The food was of the best, and the wines such as drew the company on to drink largely. Two hundred years later, under the reign of Elizabeth, William Harrison gave a lively description of the plenty and comfort of the great hostelries. The continent of Europe, he said, could show nothing like them. There were some in which two or three hundred people could without difficulty be lodged and fed. The bedding, the tapestry above all, the abundance of clean and fine linen was a matter of wonder. Valuable plate was often set on the tables. Nay, there were signs which had cost thirty or forty pounds. In the seventeenth century England abounded with excellent inns of every rank. The travelers sometimes, in a small village, lighted on a public-house such as Walton has described, where the brick floor was swept clean, where the walls were stuck round with ballads, where the sheets smelled of lavender, and where a blazing fire, a cup of good ale, and a dish of trout fresh from the neighboring brook, were to be procured at small charge. At the larger houses of entertainment were to be found beds hung with silk, choice cookery, and claret equal to the best which was drunk in London.”

A sign that costs one hundred and fifty to two hundred dollars would be, even in our days of high-paid labor, a thing worth looking at. In the times of the Renaissance it certainly was a work of excellent craftsmanship, sculptured in wood and richly gilded. On an extensive tour through England which brought us to the charming western fishing-village of Clovelly, with its “New Inn” and the more romantic “Red Lion” down by the little harbor, and to Chester, in the north, founded by the Romans, we were disappointed to find so few old signs of artistic value. We found very few carved in wood like “The Blue Boar” in Lincoln or “The Swan” in Wells, from whose windows the beautiful western façade of the cathedral, unusually rich in sculptures, is seen through the green veil of huge old trees. This swan sign shows certain characteristics of the period of the First Empire, and surely does not date back beyond 1800. Also the famous “Four Swans” in the little town of Waltham Cross, north of London, perhaps the only existing example of an old English custom to construct the sign like a triumphant arch across the street, are not so old as the tavern, which a bold inscription dates in the year 1260. How could a sign delicately carved in wood resist the inclemency of the weather, when the stone sculptures of the cathedrals,—as in Exeter, for instance, or in Salisbury,—although leaning against the protecting walls of these gigantic structures, suffered so much? To please the lovers of antiquity some owners of old houses put the most arbitrary dates of their foundation on the neatly-painted fronts. In the street in Chester that leads down to “The Bear and Billet,” one of England’s oldest frame houses, we saw the date 1006 painted on a façade, evidently built in Renaissance times. Other burghers and house-owners who have more respect for exact historic truth, see, of course, in such misleading inscriptions an unfair competition.

Signs wrought in iron seem to have been rare in England, the art of forging being less developed there than in the south of Germany. Curiously enough the South-Kensington Museum in London, an enormous storehouse of old works of arts and crafts, contains not a single English sign, but a very beautifully forged iron sign from Germany, dated 1635,—a baker’s sign, as the great crown and the heraldic lions reveal to us. A friendly assistant at the Museum showed us another German sign dating from the end of the seventeenth century, charmingly carved and gilded, representing the workshop of a shoemaker. These two were the only signs that the Museum possessed.

The old London signs have all found a very dismal refuge in the dimly lighted cellar of the Guild Hall. Some of them are stone sculptures of considerable size like the giant sign “Bull and Mouth.” Here too we find certain technical curiosities, as, “The Dolphin” of 1730 painted on copper, and more unusual still, “The Cock and Bottle,” a neat and dainty design composed of blue-and-white Dutch tiles. The foggy and damp climate has often injured not only the carved woodwork of the signboard, but still more the painting on it. The beam on which it hangs might be very old; the painting itself is always of recent date even if the artist, following an old tradition, sometimes produces quaint effects. As an example of how quickly the work of the sign-painter darkens beyond recognition, we may cite “The Falstaff” in Canterbury. It was not a year since the landlady had hung out this picture of the blustering knight in a bold fencing-pose that we saw it last, and it was already very difficult to distinguish the details of the composition; while another painting—the immediate predecessor of the sign in the street—which the friendly Dame showed us on the staircase was as black and bare as a slate. Sometimes the frames of the pictures are carved and allow us to guess the date of their origin; but, as a rule, the perfectly plain signboard hangs out on a strong beam. A typical example is “The Falcon” in Stratford-on-Avon.

The higher the artistic value of the painting on the signboards was, the more we have to regret that so much art was wasted on such a perishable production. In the eighteenth century the coach-painters, whose craftsmanship on old equipages, sledges, and sedan-chairs we still admire in many a museum, used to produce most elegant signs and received for their work astonishingly high prices. Shaken by winds, whipped by rainstorms, their beauty was soon gone. Nowhere have we found them either in collections or in the light of the street. Only in literary tradition does there still live a part of the charm of all these burned and weather-killed things of beauty.

But one device we discovered in England to restore the old forms, namely, the so-called club signs. Just as the printer’s marks often reproduce en miniature the sign of the publisher, so the club signs give a reduced picture of the old tavern signs, especially of those that were cut as silhouettes in metal plates. The very first printers of the fifteenth century loved to introduce into their books these little designs symbolizing their names. Peter Drach in Speyer used two little shields, one containing a winged dragon and the other, as a friendly compensation, a Christmas tree and two stars. Johannes Sensenschmied, a proud “civis Nurembergensis,” had two crossed scythes (Sensen) in his escutcheon. These same designs appear later on the front page of a volume, neatly engraved on copper, often reproducing the sign of the bookshop to which one had to go if one wanted to buy this particular book. A Parisian publisher adopted “La Samaritaine,” which to-day has become the name of a great department store. Mr. Léonard Plaignard, of Lyon, called his shop “Au grand Hercule,” and put the Greek hero on the front page of his books with the inscription: “Virtus non territa monstris.” Just as these little engravings may give us an idea of the old publishers’ signs, so we may gain from the club signs some suggestions as to how the old signboards looked.

On Whitsunday the club members used to fasten these small brass imitations of their beloved tavern sign to poles and carry them in solemn procession through the astonished town. At the end of the club walking, it is whispered, many were unable to hold the poles as straight as they wished. The museum of the quiet little town of Taunton possesses a remarkable series of such club signs. It has become quite a fad in England to collect these little polished brass figures, since the public has got tired of the warming-pan craze.

Morris dancers sometimes joined in the club processions, among them the green or wild man, Robin Hood, famous in song and story; they amused the crowd with such charming airs as as—

Our design of two gentlemen saluting each other politely is such a club sign, reproducing in miniature the sign of the “Salutation Inn” in Mangotsfield, and representing the last link in the chain of salutation signs, which began with the old religious scene of Mary saluted by the angel.

Price Collier, in his book “England and the English,” has dedicated a whole chapter to English sport, on which the nation spends every year $223,888,725, more than the cost of her entire military machine, navy and army together. On fox hunting alone she spends $43,790,000. This love of sport is an old English trait, shared by both sexes. One of the first books printed in England was a book on sport, “The Bokys of Haukyng and Huntyng,” supposed to be written by a lady, Juliana Berners, the prioress of the nunnery of Sopwell, and published for the first time in the new black art in 1486. A schoolmaster of the abbey school of St. Albans had arranged the edition, and it is therefore sometimes quoted as “The Book of St. Albans.” No wonder, then, that such a popular subject was readily chosen by the sign painters, and that they love to picture the hunted animals, the white hart and the fox, and not less often the faithful companions of the hunter, dog and horse, hawk and falcon.

A great rôle is played by the horse, not only as the heraldic animal in the coat of arms of the Saxons and of the House of Hanover, but the real beast, from the good old pack-horse to the lithe-limbed racer. In the early Middle Ages, when the roads were so bad that it was impossible for heavy wagons to travel on them, the pack-horse was the only medium for the transportation of goods, post-packages, and mail. Those were hard days for impatient lovers, who would have preferred to send their billets-doux in Shakespearean fashion, “making the wind my post-horse.” Sometimes the horse’s burden, the wool-pack—the wool business being the chief trade in England in the twelfth century—appears on the signboard. In fact, in the time of Ben Jonson “The Woolpack” was one of the leading hostelries of London.

Another sign is the race-horse, celebrated by Shakespeare in such lines as:—

from “Titus Andronicus” (ii, ii), or those other lines in “Pericles” (ii, i):—