In the reign of Henry VIII, a tavern called “The Running Horses” existed in Leatherhead, a place not exactly fitted for noble hunters, since a contemporary poet complains about the beer being served there “in rather disgusting conditions.” Not infrequently we find more or less happy portraits of famous race-horses, such as “The Flying Dutchman” and “Bee’s Wing”; sometimes even a hound was honored in this way, guarding the entrance of a tavern as his famous Roman colleague, pictured in mosaic, did in the days of antiquity. “The Blue Cap” in Sandiway (Cheshire) was such a sign.

In Chaucer’s time it was a popular fashion to decorate the horses with little bells, as we may infer from the Abbot’s Tale:—

Curiously enough, these bells, sometimes of silver and gold, are designated in old manuscripts by the Italian word campane, as if this custom had been adopted by the English gentry from Italy. The “gentyll horse” of the Duke of Northumberland, the old documents would tell us, was decorated with “campane of silver and gylt.” Most naturally such valuable bells were very welcome as prizes in the sporting world; in Chester, for instance, the great prize of the annual race on St. George’s Day consisted of a beautiful golden bell richly adorned with the royal escutcheon. But independent of this custom the bell has always been very popular in England. The great German musician Händel has even called it the national musical instrument, because nowhere else, perhaps, do the people delight so much in the chimes of their churches. We find it, therefore, everywhere on the tavern sign, sometimes in absurd combinations like “Bell and Candlestick” or “Bell and Lion”; very prettily in connection with a wild man, “Bell Savage,” which is changed under gallant French influence into “Belle Sauvage,” or even “La Belle Sauvage.” “Cock and Bell” points again to a popular sport, the cock-fight. Like the little slant-eyed Japanese, the small boys of Old England loved to watch this exciting game; on Lent-Tuesday special cock-fights were arranged for them, and the happy little owner of the victorious animal was presented with a tiny silver bell to wear on his cap. No wonder that “The Fighting Cocks” themselves appear on the signboard. We find them on taverns in Italy, too, where the popularity of this sport goes back to the Roman days. The Bluebeard King Henry VIII issued an order prohibiting all cock-fights among his subjects, all the while establishing for himself a cockpit in White Hall as a royal prerogative. In the days of Queen Victoria the rather cruel sport was definitely abolished.

Another not less cruel sport still lives in the tavern sign “Dog and Duck.” The birds were put into a small pond and chased by dogs. Watching the frightened creatures dive to escape their pursuers constituted the chief joy of the performance. We may still hear the wild cries of the spectators urging on the dogs, when we read the old rhyme:—

An old stone sign of such a “Dog and Duck” tavern, dated 1617, can still be seen in London outside of the Bethlehem Hospital in St. George’s Field. The popular name of this lunatic asylum is Bedlam—favorite word of Carlyle to designate confusion and chaos.

Here in South London special arenas were built for the spectacle of bear-baiting, and it is no chance that as early as in the time of Richard III the most popular tavern of this quarter was called “The Bear.” It stood near London Bridge, and was frequented especially by aristocratic revelers. In these scenes of rough amusements for the people the muse of Shakespeare introduced the gentle dramatic arts. Here his “Henry V” was introduced for the first time, perhaps, with its solemn chorus: “Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France?”

Still more than these artificial and butchery sports of the citizen, the real joys of the hunter found their echo in the productions of the sign-painters. There is hardly an English town without a “White Hart Inn.” Since the days of Alexander the Great, who once caught a beautiful white hart and decorated his slender neck with a golden ring, since Charlemagne and Henry the Lion, the white hart has been a special favorite of the hunter, whose joys no poet perhaps has sung so charmingly as Shakespeare in these lines of “Titus Andronicus” (ii, ii and iii):—

Another group of signs celebrates Master Reynard. We see him harassed by dogs and riders on the sign “Fox and Hounds” in Barley (Hertfordshire). We miss only the sportive ladies who dip their kerchiefs of lace in the poor devil’s blood to show that they, too, were in at the finish. This sign, by the way, was used long centuries ago, since we hear of a “Fox and Hounds Inn” in Putney that claims to be over three hundred years old.

The German Nimrod took no less pleasure than his English cousin in seeing a hunter’s sign on the tavern door, as is amply proved by the many golden harts, flying in great bounds, or our George sign from Degerloch, daintily wrought in iron. The German poets, too, sang many a song celebrating the adventures of the chase.

Not so often do we find on the Continent the so-called “punning sign,” which might well be called an English specialty, since England’s greatest poet used to indulge a great deal in punning,—“mistaking the word” as he calls it. In a dialogue full of quibbles in the “Two Gentlemen of Verona” he admits himself that it is a weakness to yield to it:—

“Speed. How now, Signior Launce? What news with your mastership?

“Launce. With my master’s ship? Why, it is at sea.

“Speed. Well, your old vice still: mistake the word. What news then in your paper?

“Launce. The blackest news that ever thou heard’st.

“Speed. Why, man, how black?

“Launce. Why, as black as ink.”

And thus he goes on against his better judgment and “the old vice” triumphs, not only here, but in nearly all his plays. Following the illustrious example of the great poet the English landlord puts all kinds of puns and puzzles on his signs, and the private citizen of simple birth and aristocratic ambitions created for himself the most ridiculous escutcheons by childish plays upon his own name. Thus, Mr. Haton would put a hat and a tun in his coat of arms and Mr. Luton a lute and a tun without giving a thought to etymology. Likewise the landlord’s name would account for such curious signs as “Hand and Cock,” which was simply the punning sign of a certain John Hancock in Whitefriars.

Diligent authors like Frederic Naab—who, together with Thormanby, made a special study of sign puzzles—are indefatigable in searching out the deep meaning of all these tavern sign absurdities. “The Pig and Whistle” alone has been explained in twelve different ways. We mentioned above how “The Cat and Fiddle” was a mutilation of the old religious sign of “Catherine and Wheel.” In similar fashion the noble-sounding “Bacchanals” were degraded to a common “Bag of Nails.”

Topers and tipplers, whose forte was certainly not orthography, loved to confuse “bear” and “beer,” words that might very well sound alike when pronounced by beery voices. A certain Thomas Dawson in Leeds, who evidently sold a rather heavy beer, warned his customers on his sign: “Beware of ye Beare.” Lovers of cards invented the amusing distortion of “Pique and Carreau” into “The Pig and Carrot.” The popular political sign of “The Four Alls,” representing a King (“I rule all”), a Priest (“I pray for all”), a Soldier (“I fight for all”), and John Bull as farmer (“I pay for all”), was changed into “Four Awls,” a sign which presented infinitely less difficulties to a painter of few resources. Sometimes the Devil is added as fifth figure saying, “I take all.”

Cromwell’s soldiers once took offense at the sign of a tavern where they were obliged to put up for the night. They took it down and in its place wrote over the door the words, “God encompasses us.” The next day, when they were gone, the landlord had the brilliant idea to change the pious words to the punning sign, “Goat and compasses.” Maybe, too, the compasses were a commercial trade-mark, as we see them still to-day on boxes and casks.

Very popular was the joking sign, “The Labor in Vain,” representing a woman occupied in the hopeless task of washing a colored boy:—

This particular sign was imported from France, where the calembour sign flourished. Some even say that the punning sign became popular in England only “after Edward ye 3 had conquered France.” The French have two interpretations of the “Labor in Vain”: one corresponds with the English version; the other, “Au temps perdu,” represents a schoolmaster teaching an ass. As counterpart we find “Le temps gagné,” a peasant carrying his donkey. The French calembours were decidedly less reverential than the English punning signs. Neither religion nor good morals are sacred to the Gallic wag, who is allowed to say anything if he understands how to turn it gracefully. “Le Signe de la croix” is depicted by a swan (cygne) and a cross, and even the tragic scene of Jesus taken prisoner in the Garden of Gethsemane—le juste pris—is turned into the shameless words, “Au juste prix,” to advertise the cheapness of drinks and victuals. More innocent is the distortion of the “Lion d’or” into the undeniable truth, “Au lit on dort,” or the inscription on a white-horse sign: “Ici on loge à pied et à cheval.” The temptation to use such calembours no trader could resist. A corset-maker praised his goods thus: “Je soutiens les faibles, je comprime les forts, je ramène les égarés.” We shall see in the following chapter how such pointed jokes and blasphemies roused the righteous indignation of the honorable and pious citizens and increased the enemies of the sign, who finally gave it the coup de grâce.

CHAPTER XII
THE ENEMIES OF THE SIGN AND ITS END

“Ne songez pas même à réformer les enseignes d’une ville!”

In mediæval times the signs were not only charming or pious decorations of the snug narrow streets, but they were also very useful and practical guides for the wayfarer through the labyrinth of crooked lanes. Even the uneducated understood their pictorial language like illustrations in a book which give even to a child a certain clue to its meaning. For this very reason the learned Sebastian Brant decorated his edition of Virgil of 1522 with elaborate pictures,—expolitissimis figuris atque imaginibus nuper per Sebastianum Brant superadditis,—firmly hoping that now even the unlearned would easily understand the beauties of his beloved author: “Nec minus indoctus perlegere illa potest.” While the learned men in general continued to despise pictures in their editions of the classics, the first popular books tried through their wood-cuts to speak to the fancy of the common people and thus win their applause. Just as these pictures in the old books, so the signs in the streets spoke to the indoctus. Therefore, if somebody wished to send a letter to his banker in Fleet Street, London, he needed only to tell his messenger that it was at the “Three Squirrels,” and he was sure that even the greatest numskull could find it. Unfortunately the owners of this old banking-house have withdrawn the sign, so it took me quite a while before I found it safely hung up on a modern iron arm in the office of Messrs. Barclay & Co., No. 19, Fleet Street. The characteristic interpretation of the sign, given to me by the banker himself, was: “May you never want a nut to crack.”

In the old times the streets were not yet numbered, as Macaulay tells us, not even at the end of the seventeenth century. “There would indeed have been little advantage in numbering them; for of the coachmen, chairmen, porters, and errand-boys of London, a very small proportion could read.... The shops were therefore distinguished by painted signs, which gave a gay and grotesque aspect to the streets. The walk from Charing Cross to Whitechapel lay through an endless succession of Saracens’ Heads, Royal Oaks, Blue Bears, and Golden Lambs, which disappeared when they were no longer required for the direction of the common people.” As a useful guide to find one’s way the sign was expressly recognized by the state authorities; so in a privilege granted by Charles I to the inhabitants of London to hang out signs “for the better finding out such citizens’ dwellings, shops, arts, or occupations.” For the landlords, it was even made obligatory so as to facilitate the police in determining if the laws concerning the liquor trade were properly observed. An Act of Parliament in the reign of Henry VI forced the brewers to hang out signs and an ordinance of Louis XIV for Paris distinctly demands: “Pour donner à connoître les lieux où se vendent les vins en détail et si les réglements y sont observez, nul ne pourra tenir taverne en cette dite ville et faubourgs sans mettre enseigne et bouchon.” Similar regulations we find in Switzerland; as, for instance, in Maienfeld where the city fathers punished every one who kept tavern without an “open sign.” Through such restrictions they hoped to stop the competition of the simple burgher, “the temporary landlord,” who tried to sell the surplus product of his own vineyard, and thus to secure the patronage of all thirsty souls for the legal “Schildwirt,” the landlord with a sign, even if he lived only from the “bouchon” or cork and could not accommodate guests overnight.

If they had not a sign out, how could the watchman, after the night-bell—sometimes called “Lumpenglocke” in Germany—had sounded, investigate properly if the tavern-keepers really stopped to furnish the guests with new wine? And was it not the duty of the city fathers to look after the morals of their subjects and to teach them the wisdom of the German saying:—

So the sign was in many ways a useful institution topographically, politically, and morally. Its merits are not yet exhausted: it was a good weather prophet, too. When the old iron things began to moan and to squeak, storm and rain surely were not far, as an English rhyme whimsically says:—

How was it possible, then, that such an institution as our amiable sign, approved and furthered by the State, such a popular, often artistically charming creation, could have enemies? The first reason, as we have seen in our chapter on “Religious Signs,” was that pious signs were used by impious innkeepers or that religious themes were represented in a manner insulting to all religious feeling. No wonder, if a French landlord called his tavern “Au sermon,” and illustrated the word “sermon” by a deer (cerf) and a mountain (mont), that the really pious citizen protested and exclaimed indignantly: “Ne devrait-on pas condamner à une grosse amende un misérable cabaretier qui met à son enseigne un cerf et un mont pour faire une ridicule équivoque à sermon? Ce qui autorise des ivrognes à dire qu’ils vont tous les jours au sermon ou qu’ils en viennent.”

Surely the really pious signs subsisted beside their frivolous brothers, as the English doctor-sign of 1623, beautifully carved and gilded and now a treasure of a collector, proves by its inscription: “Altissimus creavit de terra medicynam et vir prudens non abhorrebit illam.” Curiously enough, the schoolmaster souls took offense at the sign’s absurd combinations, its lack of “sound literature and good sense,” its impossible orthography and ridiculous mottoes, which, by the way, were added only later to the pictures. All this was extremely shocking to these people and many of them thought it a noble life-task to reform the signs. One of these reformers developed his programme in one of the oldest English periodicals, “The Spectator,” in an April number of the year 1710, fully aware of attempting an herculean labor. Combinations, such as “Fox and Goose,” he deigns to admit; but what sense, asks he, in logical indignation, “is in such absurdities as ‘Fox and the Seven Stars,’ or worse still, in the ‘Three Nuns and a Hare’?” Molière, in “Les Fâcheux,” has ridiculed these sign reformers, a species not unknown in Paris either, in the person of Monsieur Caritidès, who humbly solicited Louis XIV to invest him with the position of a General Sign Controller. His petition reads, in Molière’s inimitable French, as follows:—

Sire:

Votre très-humble, très-obéissant, très-fidèle et très savant sujet et serviteur Caritidès, Français de nation, Grec de profession, ayant considéré les grands et notables abus qui se commettent aux inscriptions des enseignes des maisons boutiques, cabarets, jeux de boule et autres lieux de votre bonne ville de Paris, en ce que certains ignorants, compositeurs des dites inscriptions, renversent, par une barbare, pernicieuse et détestable orthographe, toute sorte de sens et de raison, sans aucun regard d’etymologie, analogie, énergie ni allégorie quelconque au grand scandale de la république des lettres et de la nation Française, qui se décrie et déshonore, par les dits abus et fautes grossières, envers les étrangers, et notamment envers les Allemands, curieux lecteurs et inspecteurs des dites inscriptions ... supplie humblement Votre Majesté de créer, pour le bien de son État et la gloire de son empire une charge de contrôleur, intendant-correcteur, réviseur et restaurateur général des dites inscriptions et d’icelle honorer le suppliant....

In all impartiality we have to admit that really the sign lost by and by its usefulness as a street-guide, since the trades and crafts occupying a house changed often, while the old signs, especially those which formed a part of its architecture, remained unchanged, thus producing the most ridiculous contradictions against which the above-mentioned reformer of “The Spectator” protested not without reason, saying: “A cook should not live at ‘The Boot’ nor a shoemaker at ‘The Roasted Pig.’”

But the most ruthless enemy of the sign became the police itself, who once protected it. As early as the year 1419 we find an English police regulation, threatening with a fine of forty pence—in those days quite a sum—“that no one in future should have a stake bearing either his sign or leaves, extending or lying over the King’s highway, of greater length than seven feet at most.” As every innkeeper tried to outdo the other by the size and the magnificence of his sign, one arrived finally at absurdly great constructions which really hampered the traffic: as in England, where we find wrought-iron signs which, like arches of triumph, reached from one side of the street to the other. A precious old book, “A Vademecum for Malt-Worms” (British Museum), in a quaint woodcut, “The Dog in Shoreditch,” gives us a picture of such a sign monument. To the artist’s eyes they were charming things, combining happily great lanterns with the sign into a harmony which we so often find lacking in modern days, where beautiful old signs through the addition of ugly modern lamps lose all their artistic charm of yore.

Mercier’s “Tableau de Paris” tells us of ridiculously great signs: spurs as large as a wheel, gloves big enough to house a three-year-old babe, and the like. In old Germany, too, the sight of the giant signs, as Victor Hugo describes them from Frankfurt-on-the-Main, must have been fantastic enough. “Under the titanic weight of these sign monuments caryatides are bowed down in all positions of rage, pain, and fatigue.” Some of them carry an impudent bronze negro in a gilded tin mantle; others an enormous Roman emperor—a monolith of twenty feet in height—“dans toute la pompe du costume de Louis XIV avec sa grande perruque, son ample manteau, son fauteuil, son estrade, sa crédence où est sa couronne, son dais a pentes découpées et à vastes draperies.”

Especially objectionable to the police in London were those signs that reached far out over the street and, shaken by the wind, constituted a real danger to the passer-by. So the fall of such a huge inn sign in Fleet Street, London, in 1718, caused the death of two ladies, a court jeweler, and a cobbler. Similar dangers threatening an innocent public were vividly set forth in a Parisian police ordinance in 1761, in an amusing bureaucratic French: “Les enseignes saillantes faisaient paraître les rues plus étroites et dans les rues commerçantes elles nuisaient considérablement aux vues des premiers étages, et même a la clarté des laternes, en occasionnant des ombres préjudiciables à la sureté publique; elles formaient un péril perpetuellement imminent sur la tête des passants, tant par l’inattention des propriétaires et des locataires sur la vétusté des enseignes ou des potences, qui en ont souvent abattu plusieurs et causé les accidents les plus funestes.”

If the police had contented itself in eliminating the offensive or really dangerous signs, nobody could have blamed it. Unfortunately it was much more aggressive, especially in France, the paradise of the “ronds de cuir,” and attempted to cut down every individual or artistic invention on the part of the signmakers. We are, therefore, not surprised to find so little in modern France that could remind us of the old abundance. The officials of the Revolution proved themselves just as narrow-minded as those of royal times. Both, animated by the bureaucratic instinct to confine everything to narrow rules, tried to suppress all individual poetical invention that once was the charm of the sign. A royal edict of 1763 prescribes a very uninteresting design as a binding model for all signs, giving at the same time the exact measurements of the same and warning the public not to dare to make any changes on the “dessein cy-dessus marqué.” It was a poor consolation for the owners of beautiful old signs that the same edict granted them the great privilege of giving their art-treasures in account as old iron—“quinze deniers la livre”—when paying the bill for the new sign patented by the State. Still more radically acted the men of the Revolution, who sincerely hated the signs, with their crowns and heraldry, as abominable “marques du despotisme.” They made short work, and simply ordered: “Toutes les enseignes qui portent des signes de royalisme, féodalité et de superstition seront renouvelées et remplacées par des signes républicains: les enseignes ne seront plus saillantes mais simplement peintes sur les murs des maisons.”

Another danger for the sign resulted from the attempt to number the houses of which we hear, perhaps for the first time in France, as early as 1512. This first attempt failed, but in the enlightened eighteenth century the new and certainly more reasonable method of distinguishing a house from its neighbor decidedly gained ground. In 1805 it was made obligatory by the Parisian police. A similar development we observe in England. Nobody will deny the practical progress and no business man would like to return to the old times when an English bookseller, for instance, had to give the address of his shop in the following way: “Over against the Royal Exchange at the Sugar Loaf next Temple Bar.” In Germany, where the centralization in large capitals made slower progress and a multitude of small social and political centers kept their own, the rational institution of numbering the houses, so necessary in great cities like Paris or London, was not accepted so quickly. In 1802 Dresden, for instance, had not even on the street corners signs indicating their names; “an institution that facilitates topography and topography facilitates business,” remarks a judicious contemporary. Here in Germany the cold number did not conquer so easily over the poetical warmth of the dear old sign. In the quiet, imperial towns of the south the artistic sign of the Rococo period and the Empire style, unpersecuted and unmolested, keep their place in the sun up to the present day in spite of some ill-advised landlords who thought it necessary to hide the humble oxen or lamb in the garret and call their house by some new pretentious French name like “Hotel de l’Europe” or the like.

In our own enlightened times of general school education, nobody needs any more the sign as a guide through even the most modest town. Everywhere the number has taken its place for this purpose and we regret to admit for the history of the sign too the truth of Darwin’s words: “Progress in history means the decline of phantasy and the advance of thought.”

ENVOY AND THE MORAL?

“I am here in a strange land and have perhaps the seat of honor at table in this inn; but the man down there on the end has just as good a right here and there as I, since we are both here only guests.”

Martin Luther: Sermons. Jubilate, 1542.

It is not very much the fashion in these modern days to ask for the moral meaning of things, but we are old-fashioned enough to hold with those who believe that things have not only a soul, but that they give us a lesson too in revealing their soul to us, “la leçon des choses,” as the French, whom we are inclined to call condescendingly the immoral French, call it. Old Frederic the Great in his famous interview with the poet Gellert in Leipzig, after hearing from him one of his fables “The Painter of Athens,” did not fail to ask the all-important question: “And the Moral?”

Many a reader who has followed us but hesitatingly into regions that seemed to him at the beginning of doubtful moral value, will be perhaps surprised to see us conclude our investigations with this same question. But I am sure we will do it with good profit, since in doing so we shall have the chance to hear many a sermon of Doctor Martinus Luther, whose moral force we children of the twentieth century would love to dig out of his writings if its gold did not seem to us so hopelessly buried under the sand of antiquated dogmatical quarrels.

The tavern sign has its moral lesson for all concerned, guests and landlords alike. From its modest and unknown creators the modern artist too may receive many a valuable inspiration. When the poet Seume, in December, 1801, started from Grimma in Saxony on his long pilgrimage to Syracuse, his way seems to have led him soon to a knightly George, who fights the dragon in all Christian lands, over many a tavern door for centuries and whom Shakespeare celebrated in the verses:—

Looking at the great green beast our romantic pilgrim prayed: “May heaven grant me honest, friendly landlords and polite guardians at the city gates from Leipzig to Syracuse!” In those old days when the gate was dangerously near the tower and its dungeon, it was indeed of the highest importance to find polite officials at the city gates; just as we might sometimes pray to-day for polite customs officials, the successors of the old grumpy watchmen who guarded the city entrance and wrote the newcomer’s name in their big books. Still more important, too, is it for the modern traveler to find friendly landlords. They seem as in the old days a gift from heaven, for which we must pray and which we cannot buy. Truly many travelers seem to think a full purse buys everything, but they forget the old truth which Charles Wagner, in his book “La vie simple,” has expressed rightly in the following sentence: “Le travail d’un homme n’est pas une marchandise au même titre qu’un sac de blé ou un quintal de charbon. Il entre dans ce travail des éléments qu’on ne peut évaluer en monnaie.” And just these fine elements in the work of a landlord and his servants which we cannot weigh or pay for make the simplest inn so homelike and cozy. A good landlord does not need to fear even Death, who seems to seize only the dishonest one, if we believe the author of a “Dance of Death” from the fifteenth century in the Stuttgarter Hofbibliothek. In a few forceful lines the old artist traces the figure of the bad landlord sitting behind his counter and trying to win the good favors of the uncanny musician Death, by offering him a great stein of beer and humbly confessing: “Against God and against law I sought to win earthly goods, taking money unjustly from knights and peasants as a robber does. Oh, if I only should not die now, I could hope to improve and to win grace.”

Many a landlord would gladly follow the example of Abraham if only his guests would try to learn a little from the angels. But how often come to him such wild fellows who claim every good thing he has in cellar and kitchen, and when it comes to pay take French leave.

It is well known that, as the old Bible saying goes, the sun is shining over good and bad, over just and unjust, but Luther thought he does not do it gladly. Perhaps the Doctor, who knew so many roads from his own experience, even thought of the golden tavern sun when he said: “The sun would prefer that all the bad fellows should get not a single little gleam from him and it is a great grief and cross to him that he must shine over them, wherefore he sighs and moans.”

Nobody has admonished us so heartily as Doctor Martinus to hold ourselves as pious guests in this inn of Life, to live honestly and decently in it as it becomes a guest. “If you wish to be a guest, be peaceful and behave yourself as a Christian; otherwise they will soon show you the way to the tower.” It is characteristic for Luther to remind the unruly guest of the tower, i.e., the prison. In other connections too he readily refers to Master John the Hangman who is to his mind a very useful, nay, even charitable man.

Since we did not hesitate to threaten the landlord with the ghastly musician of the “Dance of Death,” it will seem only fair to remind the guests of the tower, which in the old days was used as prison for the peace-breakers. Luther, like all good Germans, was not a prohibitionist; he recognized “a drink in honor,” “einen Trunk in Ehren,” but he was a fierce enemy of all “drunkards and loafers” who lie in taverns Sunday and week-day and pour the beer down their throats as cows gulp water, saying: “What do I care about God, what do I care about death? You miserable hog, you shall get what you are striving for, you shall die too and be swallowed up by the mouth of Hell.” To every decent landlord such guests are a curse. To chase them from his threshold the owner of the “George and Dragon” in Great Budworth (Cheshire) invented the fine rhyme which should stand over every tavern door:—

A decent behavior surely, but no melancholy teetotalism, such is Luther’s standpoint. “Those have not been of the devil who drank a little more as their thirst required and became joyful.”—“It is not the fault of the eating and drinking, that some people degrade themselves to swine.” Just as dancing in itself is no sin: “Why not admit an honorable dance at a marriage feast? Go and dance! The little children dance too without sin; do the same and be like a child whose soul is not injured by dancing.”

The whole world appears to Luther like an inn in a strange town, in which the pilgrim lies. In his nightly dreams he does not think of becoming a citizen or a major of this town, his thoughts wander away through the gate to the far city where his home is.

To the pretentious traveler his description of “Christ’s Inn,” which reminds us of our Swiss sign, “Hie zum Christkindli,” might serve as a little lesson in modesty. Thus he speaks about it in a Christmas sermon: “Look, how the two parents in a strange land in a strange city search in vain for good and hospitable friends. Even in the inns was no room, since the city at that time was so crowded. In a cow-stable they had to go and make the best of it as poor poor people! There was no couch, no linnen, no cushions, no feather-beds; on a bundle of straw they made their bed as close neighbours of the good cattle. There in a hard winter-night the noble blessed fruit was born, the dear child Jesus.” And in another Christmas sermon he says: “If you look at it with cow’s or swine’s eyes it was a miserable birth ... but if you open your spiritual eyes you will see countless thousands of angels, filling the heaven with their song and honouring not only the child but the manger too in which it lies.”

Everything depends finally upon the way we look at it, if with cows’ eyes or with spiritual eyes. Only these will enable us to see in the poorest inn the angel of hospitality covering us at night with gentle wings. Till finally Mother Earth shall cover us softly in our last quiet “Deversorium” in which we have at least the hangman’s comfort: “You shall be called to no more payments, fear no more tavern bills which are often the sadness of parting as the procuring of mirth.”

But we must not end without delivering a little sermon to the signs, too, that still glitter in the warm sunshine. To them, cocks, deer, bears, oxen, and horses, a church-tower cock, celebrated by the humorous clergyman poet Möricke of Schwabenland, gives this solemn warning:—

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38. Stephen Jenkins. The Old Boston Post Road. New York, 1913.
39. Weitenkampf. Lo, The Wooden Indian. (The art of making cigar-shop signs. Sculptors in wood who began by making the figureheads of ships.) New York Times, August 3, 1890.
40. Weitenkampf. Some Signs and Others. New York Times, July 3, 1892.