The sign of the Jolly Brewer—Who’d ha’ thought it? occurs in the Jersey Road, Hounslow. Originally, it seems to have implied that, after a hard struggle in some other walk of life, the landlord had succeeded in opening the long-wished-for ale-house. So in Holland: many country retreats of retired tradespeople bear such names as “Nooit gedacht,” (never expected,) &c.

Why not, the name of a public-house at Essington, in Staffordshire, seems to imply quite the reverse, and to have been adopted as the motto of a more sanguine landlord; unless it may be considered as a ready answer to the often-repeated question, before “popping in round the corner,” “Shall we have a drop?”

The Lame Dog is very common; but is particularly appropriate at Brierley Hill, near Dudley, the establishment being kept by a collier, rendered lame in a pit accident. Under a pictorial representation of a lame dog trying to get over a stile, the following appeal is made to the thirsty and benevolent public:—

Sometimes, as at Bulmer, Essex, we see a somewhat similar idea expressed by a man struggling through a globe—head and arms protruding on one side, his legs on the other—with the inscription, “Help me through this World.” The same allegory might have been seen on a beer-house in Holland in the seventeenth century, but the inscription was different—“Dus na ben ik door de wereld,” (“Thus far I have got through the world.”) This sign is also called the Struggler, or the Struggling Man, and at Hampton, where the house is kept by a widow, the Widow’s Struggle. In Salop Street, Dudley, the struggle is represented by a man, with a dog beside him, walking against a strong head wind. The Live and let Live has a somewhat similar meaning; it occurs at North End, Fulham, and in many other places. To this class, also, the following seems to refer:—“A witty, though unfortunate, fellow having tryed all trades, but thriving by none, took the pot for his last refuge, and set up an ale-house, with the sign of the Shirt, inscribed under it, ‘This is my last shift.’ Much company was brought him thereby, and much profit.”[645] Nathaniel Oldham, the friend of Sir Hans Sloane, Doctor Mead, and the leading virtuosi of that time, himself a collector, as well as a sporting man, at last got so reduced in circumstances that he had to dispose of his curiosities and superfluities. He opened his house, therefore, as a curiosity shop, and wrote over the door, Oldham’s last Shift. Unfortunately, it was his “last shift,” for scarcely had he opened his shop when one of his innumerable creditors had him arrested and sent to King’s Bench Prison, where he died. J. T. Smith, in his “Cries of London,” tells a similar device of a sailor, maimed at the battle of Trafalgar, who used to go about town with a wheelbarrow of ginger nuts, which he called “Jack’s last shift.”

The uncertainty of success in trade is expressed by the sign of the Two Chances; and Hit or Miss, the good and the bad chance which innkeepers, as well as all other mortals, have to run in this transitory world. This sign occurs at Hannington, Northampton, and at Clun, in Salop. At Openshaw, near Manchester, a similar idea is expressed by a sign representing two men running a race, which seems to promise a dead heat, with the inscription, Luck’s all.

Others have a sort of satirical humour in them, such as the well-known Four Alls, representing a king who says, “I rule all;” a priest who says, “I pray for all;” a soldier who says, “I fight for all;” and John Bull, or a farmer, who says, “I pay for all.” Sometimes a fifth is added in the shape of a lawyer, who says, “I plead for all.” It is an old and still common sign, and may even be seen swinging under the blue sky in the sunny streets of La Valette, Malta. In Holland, in the seventeenth century, it was used, but the king was left out, and a lawyer added; each person said exactly the same as on our signboards, but the farmer answered:—

The author of “Tavern Anecdotes” observes that he used to notice in Rosemary Street, the sign of the Four Alls, but passing that way some time after, he found it altered into the Four Awls; the sign painter who renewed the picture had probably found himself not equal to a representation of the four human figures. In Ireland, a similar corruption may be observed, the four shoemaker’s awls taking the place of the four representatives of society. Although having no connexion with the Four Alls, it may be mentioned that three and four awls constitute the charges in the shoemakers’ arms of some of the continental trade societies or guilds.

This enumeration of the various performances coupled with the word all has been used in numerous different epigrams: an address to James I. in the Ashmolean MSS., No. 1730, has:—

This again seems to have been imitated from a similar description of the State of Spain in Greene’s “Spanish Masquerade,” 1589:—

The Naked Boy was a satirical sign reflecting upon the constant changes of the fashions of our ancestors. William Herbert has this observation in his manuscript memoranda, “I remember very well when I was a lad seeing on Windmill Hill, Moorfields, a taylor’s sign, a naked boy with this couplet:—

The same idea is expressed in the “Introduction to Knowledge,” by Andrew Borde, (the original “Merry Andrew,”) Doctor of Physick, 1542, where a naked man is introduced undecided as to the style of dress he should adopt on account of the continual change in the fashions:—

Coryatt also reflects upon this ever-varying change in his “Crudities:”—“For whereas they [the gentlemen of Venice] have but one colour, we use many more than are in the rainbow; all the most light garish and unseemly colours that are in the world. Also for fashion we are much inferior to them: for we weare more phantastical fashions than any nation vnder the Sunne doth, the French onely excepted; which hath given occasion to the Venetians and other Italians to brand the Englishmen with a notable mark of levity by painting him stark naked with a pair of shears in his hand, making his fashion of attire according to the vain conception of his brain sick head, not to comeliness and decorum.”

So ancient is this complaint as to the versatility of our fashions that we verily believe even our tattooed forefathers must have been constantly altering the hue of their blue stencilling, and bedaubing themselves with new patterns. John Harding, in his “Chronicles,” of the reign of Richard II., describing the various materials and cuts of the “unpayed doublettes and gownes,” even long before his time, says, ch. 193:—

Douglas, the monk of Glastonbury, wrote not less angrily in the days of Edward III:

“Englyshmen hawnted so moche unto the folye of strawngers that fro that tyme every yere thei chaungedde them in diverse schappes and disgisingges of clothengge now long, now large, now wide, now streite, and every day clothingges newe destitute and deserte from alle honeste of holde array and gode usage.”[648]

Indeed so angry does the good monk become about these extravagant fashions, that he says,—“If I sethe shalle say, they weren more like to turmentours and Diviles in their clothing and also in schoyng and other aray that they semed no menne.”

Not only did we invent, but we borrowed absurd foreign fashions. Samuel Rowland, in “The Letting of Humours Blood in the Head Vaine,” 1611, says:—

And Heywood, in the “Rape of Lucrece,” 1638, epigr. xxvi., has:—

Shakespeare seems to allude to the sign of the Naked Boy in his “Comedy of Errors,” act iv., scene 3, where Dromio says, “What, have you got the picture of old Adam new apparell’d.” At Skipton-in-Craven, there is still a stone bas-relief of the Naked Boy, fixed in the front of a house, with the date 1633.

The Good Woman, or the Silent Women, and at Pershore, in Worcestershire, the Quiet Woman, represent a headless woman carrying her head in her hand. Brady, in his “Clavis Calendaria,” vol. ii., p. 203, says, “The martyrs who had been decapitated were, therefore, usually represented with headless trunks, and the head on some adjoining table, or more commonly in their hands; and it was easy for ignorance and credulity not only to mistake that type, but to be led into belief that those holy persons had actually carried their heads about for the benefit of believers.” The sign, yet preserved, particularly by the oilshops, of the Good Woman, although originally meant as expressive of some female saint, holy or good woman, who had met death by the privation of her head, has been converted into a joke against the females whose alleged loquacity is considered to be satirised by this representation, which, to conform to such meaning, they now more commonly call the Silent Woman. The fact, however, of it being particularly an oilman’s sign, makes it possible that it may have some reference to the heedless [head anciently was pronounced heed] or foolish virgins of the parable, who had no oil in their lamps when the bridegroom came. Where is your head? is still a question addressed to forgetful people.

There is a very curious example of this sign at Widford, near Chelmsford, representing on one side a half-length portrait of Henry VIII., on the reverse, a woman without a head, dressed in the costume of the latter half of the last century, with the inscription Forte Bonne. The addition of the portrait of Henry VIII. has led to the popular belief that the headless woman is meant for Anna Boleyn, though probably it is simply a combination of the King’s Head and Good Woman.

This sign is equally common on the Continent; the book of Dutch signboard inscriptions of the seventeenth century, from which we have constantly quoted, gives several verses which figured under various signs of the Good Woman. Amongst them the following are worth noticing:—

Another had:—

In Italy, also, it is known, and serves as a sign to many an inn. Readers who may have visited Turin will remember the kind reception of “la buona Moglie” in that town. In Paris it gives its name to a street, Rue de la Femme sans Tête. The picture in France is generally accompanied by the legend, “Tout en est bon,” the absence of the head probably implying “fors la tête,” except the head; ergo, everything is good in woman except her head—her ever-changing whims and fancies. At the present day there is, in the Rue St Marguerite, a pork butcher who has made the following use of this sign: Under the usual representation of the Good Woman he has written in golden letters, “Tout en est bon, depuis les” (a representation of four pigs’ feet) “jusqu’à la,” (a representation of an enormous boar’s head.) This ungallant association of ideas of a woman and a pig is, we are sorry to say, not without an example in our nation, though fortunately our rudeness was two hundred years ago, and we have grown more refined since:—

“One Ambrose Westrop, vicar of the Parish church Much to Sham (?) in the county of Essex, taught in a Sermon That a Woman is worse than a sow in two respects; First: because a sowskin is good to make a cart saddle and her bristles good for a sowter. Secondly: because a sow will run away if a man cry but hoy, but a woman will not turn her head, though beaten down with a leaver, and that all the difference between a woman and a sow is in the nape of the neck, where a woman can bend upwards, but a sow cannot, etc. The said Westrop is a great malignant and very envious and full of venome against the Parliament. But his benefit is sequestered, as well he deserves, from his filthiness and unfitnesse to the place.”—Remarkable Passages and Occurrences of Parliament, &c. December 8 to 15, 1644.

Lawyers, priests, and women have, at all times and in all countries, received a liberal share of abuse and slander; no wonder, then, that the Lawyer kept the Good Woman in countenance. In a sign derived from the Good Woman the man of law is “damned to fame” as the Honest Lawyer, the sign representing him with his head in his hand, as the only condition in which by any possibility he could be honest. Another sign abusive of the softer sex is the Man loaded with Mischief, the sign of an ale-house in Oxford Street. The original, said to be painted by Hogarth, is fastened to the front of the house, and has the honour of being specified in the lease of the premises as one of the fixtures. An engraving of it is exhibited in the window. It represents a man carrying a woman, a magpie, and a monkey, the woman with a glass of gin in her hand. In the background, on the left-hand side, is a public-house with a pair of horns as a “finial” on the gable end; this house is called “Cuckhold’s Fortune;” a woman is passing in at the door, and a sow is asleep in a pot-house, with a label above, “She is as drunk as a sow,” whilst two cats are making love on the roof. On the right-hand side is the shop of S. Gripe, Pawnbroker, which a carpenter enters to pledge his tools. The engraving is signed: “Drawn by Experience; engraved by Sorrow.” Under it is the following rhyme:—

This sign has been imitated in other places, sometimes called the Mischief, as at Blewbury, Wallingford, or the Load of Mischief, as at Norwich. About twenty years ago there was one to be seen in the neighbourhood of Cambridge, with this expressive addition, that the man was tied to the woman by a chain and padlock. A similarly malicious reflection on the “softer sex” is seen in many parts of France, as in Paris, Troyes, and various other towns. It is called “Le trio de Malice,” (the three bad ones,) the trio being composed of a cat, a woman, and a monkey.

Nobody was the singular sign of John Trundell, a ballad-printer in Barbican in the seventeenth century. In one of Ben Jonson’s plays Nobody is introduced, “attyred in a payre of Breeches, which were made to come up to his neck, with his armes out at his pockets and cap drowning his face.” This comedy was “printed for John Trundle and are to be sold at his shop in Barbican at the sygne of No-Body.” A unique ballad, preserved in the Miller Collection at Britwell House, entitled “The Well-spoken No-Body,” is accompanied by a woodcut representing a ragged barefooted fool on pattens, with a torn money-bag under his arm, walking through a chaos of broken pots, pans, bellows, candlesticks, tongs, tools, windows, &c. Above him is a scroll in black-letter:—

“Nobody . is . my . Name . that . Beyreth . Every . Bodyes . Blame.”

The ballad commences as follows:—

In J. O. Halliwell’s “Shakespeare,” vol. i., p. 450, from whence we borrow the above, the subject is still further illustrated by the following quotation:—

“Nobody keeps such a rule in every bodies house that from the mistresse to the basest maide, there is not a shrewde turne done without him: for if the husband finde his study opened and enquire who did it? he shall finde Nobody: if the goodwife see her utensils disordered and demand who displast them, the issue of every servant’s reply will bee, Nobody: if the servants discover the beds towsed and the chambers durtied it will bee, Nobody; when every child is examined; nay, if the children fall and break their noses, or scratch one another’s faces, and either mother or nursse seeme angry and aske, who hurt them, they will quickly answer Nobody toucht them; and their desire of excuse hath brought lying to a custom.”—Rich Cabinet furnished with Variety of Excellent Description, 1616.

At present there is an inn in Plymouth called No Place inn; and formerly there was at Norwich a public-house called Nowhere—a name which would, to the truant husband returning home in the small hours of night, suggest a ready answer to the warm reception of his partner for better and for worse, who, for the last few hours, has been

Another ancient sign, to which constant allusions are made in the old writers, is the Three Loggerheads, which, old as it is, and stale as the joke may be, has not yet lost its charms for the inhabitants of many of our villages and quiet inland towns. It represents two silly-looking faces, with the inscription—

—the unsuspecting spectator being, of course, the third. Douce, in his “Illustrations to Shakespeare,” suggests that the original picture should have represented three fools. Thus, in Shirley’s “Bird in Cage,” Morello, who counterfeits a fool, says, “We be three of old, without exception to your lordship, only with this difference, I am the wisest fool.” In Day’s “Comedy of Law Tricks,” 1608, Julia says, “Appoint the place prest,” to which the answer is, “At the three fools.” Sometimes, as Mr Henley has stated, it was two asses. Thus, in Beaumont and Fletcher’s “Queen of Corinth.” ac. iii., sc. 1:—

In this form it is still seen on valentines and humorous cartes de visite. Shakespeare, too, alludes to this sign in “Twelfth Night,” ac. ii., sc. 2:—“How now, my hearts? did you never see the picture of We Three?” Decker, ridiculing the manners and customs of his day, speaks of the fast men sitting on the stage at theatrical representations—“but assure yourself, by continual residence, you are the first and principal man in election, to begin the number of We three.”[651] In a pamphlet, entitled, “Heads of all Fashions; being a plain Disection or Definition of Divers and Sundry Sorts of Heads,” London, 1642, the Loggerheads are thus mentioned:—

This alludes to one of the jokes in “Mother Bunch’s Merriments,” 1604, where a country fellow asks a poor scrivener, sitting in his shop, “I pray you, master, what might you sell in your shop, that you have so many ding-dongs hang at your dore?” “Why, my friend,” quoth the obligation-maker, “I sell nothing but loggerheads.” “By my fay, master,” quoth the countryman, “you have a fair market with them, for you have left but one in your shop, that I see;” and so, laughing, went his way, leaving much good sport to them that heard him. This old anecdote may have given rise to scriveners using the Loggerheads as their sign, which otherwise seems a not very pleasant reflection on their customers. We can scarcely think that any symbolism was intended, and that the Loggerheads were emblematical of the secretary’s silence and discretion. In the seventeenth century the sign might have been seen in London. There was one in Tooley Street in 1665, having on its trades token the inscription, “We are 3;” another variety had “We three Logerheads” underneath the usual heads. In the ballad of the “Arraigning and Indicting of Sir John Barleycorn, Knt., printed for Timothy Tosspot,” the trial takes place at the Three Loggerheads, by the Justices Oliver and Old Nick. The witnesses are cited at the sign of the Three Merry Companions in Bedlam—viz., Poor Robin, Merry Tom, and Jack Lackwit.

The Labour in Vain occurs among the trades tokens, and such a sign gave its name to Old Fish Street, which Hatton, in his “New View of London,” 1708, p. 405, calls “Old Fish Street, or Labour in Vain Hill.” The sign represented two women scrubbing a negro; hence it was called by the lower classes, the Devil in a Tub. “To wash an Æthiop,” is a proverbial expression, often met with in ancient dramatists, for labour in vain.[652] The Case is Altered, generally alludes to some alteration in the affairs of the landlord, either “for better or for worse.” A public-house near Banbury was so called on account of being built on the site of a mere hovel. Another house of the same name was, in 1805, erected on the road between Woodbridge and Ipswich, to meet the demand of the thirsty sons of Mars then quartered in those two towns. Its sign in those days was the Duke of York, or some such name. But when, after the downfall of the “Corsican Tyrant,” and the subsequent declaration of peace, the barracks were pulled down, the soldiers disbanded, and the benches of the ale-house remained empty, the old sign was removed, and in its place put up the sad truth—“The Case is Altered.” In another instance, the sign was adopted at Oxford as a quiet hint by a sharp business man, who succeeded as landlord to an easy-going Boniface, under whose sway the customers had been allowed to run up debts; but the case was altered under the new regulations. A correspondent of Notes and Queries (Nov. 21, 1857) gives the following example:—“I saw this sign once pictorially represented in the West of England thus:—A person, with a large wig and gown, and seated at a table; another, dressed like a farmer, stood talking to him. In the distance, seen through the open door, was a bull. The story, of course, is that related of Plowden, the celebrated lawyer,[653] and which is now in most books of fables. The farmer told Plowden that his (the farmer’s) bull had gored and killed the latter’s cow. ‘Well,’ said the lawyer, ‘the case is clear, you must pay me her value.’ ‘Oh! but,’ said the farmer, ‘I have made a mistake. It is your bull which has killed my cow.’ ‘Ah! the case is altered,’ quoth Plowden. The expression had passed into a proverb in Old Fuller’s time.” This sign also occurs in some London localities, as at Upper Kensal Green, and elsewhere.

The Grinding Young is a very curious sign at Harold’s Cross, Dublin. The subject is taken from the old ballad of the “Miller’s Maid Grinding Old Men Young,” commencing—

It is also a favourite subject on old chap-prints, which represent a kind of hand-mill, into the funnel-shaped top of which various decrepit-looking old men creep by a ladder, most of them glass in hand, greatly elated at the prospect of a renewal of youth. Meanwhile, a young maid is turning the handle of the mill, from the bottom of which the patients come out, quite young and new—if not better—men. Pretty girls stand at the side, ready to receive the rejuvenated creatures and walk off with them, their arms affectionately twined round their necks, and evidently preparing to play the old game over again, for “the cordial drop of life is love alone”—the whole affair a very decided improvement upon the usual way of entering the stage of this world.

A somewhat similar sign, though not quite so anacreontic, is of frequent occurrence in France, namely The Fountain of Juvenca,—la Fontaine de Jouvence. A stone bas-relief of this subject, a carving of the sixteenth century, still remains in the Rue du Four, in Paris. The story was borrowed by the French romancers from the Eastern tales.

The sign of the last house in a row on the outskirts of a town, used frequently to be the World’s End. This was represented in various punning ways; sometimes by a globe in clouds, as on the trades token of Margaret Tuttlesham, of Golden Lane, Barbican, in 1666. Others rendered it by a fractured globe in a dark background, with fire and smoke bursting through the rents, and thus it was represented at the World’s End in the King’s Road, Chelsea, in 1825. At Ecton, Northampton, it is typified, with a truly classical notion of physical geography, by a horseman whose steed is rearing over an abyss on the edge of a world terminated perpendicularly. A fourth, and more homely, way of representing it was a man and a woman walking together on the margin of a landscape, with this distich:

The out-of-the-way sites of such houses was the cause of their not enjoying the very best of reputations. Those, at least, of the World’s End at Chelsea and at Knightsbridge were rather exceptionable. Both these houses were much patronised by the gallants of the reign of Charles II. when breaking the seventh commandment; hence the altercation between two sisters in Congreve’s play of “Love for Love:”

“Mrs Foresight. I suppose you would not go alone to the World’s End?

“Mrs Frail. The World’s End! What, do you mean to banter me?

“Mrs Foresight. Poor innocent; you don’t know that there is a place called the World’s End. I’ll swear you can keep your countenance—surely you’ll make an admirable player.

“Mrs Frail. I’ll swear you have a great deal of impudence, and in my mind too much for the stage.

“Mrs Foresight. Very well, that will appear who has most. You never were at the World’s End? eh.”

Pepys also honoured a World’s End, the “drinking-house by the Park,” with an occasional visit. On Sunday, the 9th of May 1669, for instance, he went to church at St Margaret’s, Westminster, and that duty performed, walked “towards the park, but too soon to go in, so went on to Knightsbridge, and there eat and drank at the World’s End, where we had good things, and then back to the park, and there till night, being fine weather and much company, and so home.” The “good things” evidently proved a strong attraction, for three weeks after he went again, “and there was merry, and so home late.” In 1708 Tom Brown thus alluded to its equivocal reputation. “The lady must take a tour as far as Knightsbridge or Kensington, stop, maybe, at the World’s End or the Swan; offer my spark a small treat,” &c.[654] Under the name of le Bout du Monde, the same sign was common in France, where in ancient Paris it gave a name to the street now called Rue du Cadran. With that inveterate weakness for punning inherent to sign-painters—those of the French nation in particular—it was sometimes represented by a he-goat (bouc) and a world.

The World turned Upside down is still common, being generally represented by a man walking at the south pole; in that guise it was to be seen some twenty-five years ago on the Greenwich Road. But the meaning of the sign is a state of things the opposite of what is natural and usual,—a conceit in which the artists of former ages took great delight, and which they represented by animals chasing men, horses riding in carriages, and similar pleasantries. This also was a Dutch sign under the name of De Verkeerde Wereld, (the world reversed.) It was used by a publican in the seventeenth century in Holland, with this inscription:

Of the Moonrakers we only know one instance, that in Great Suffolk Street, Borough, where it has been for at least half a century. The original of this may have been one of the stories of the Wise Men of Gotham. A party of them going out one bright night, saw the reflection of the moon in the water; and, after due deliberation, decided that it was a green cheese, and so raked for it. Another version is, that some Gothamites, passing in the night over a bridge, saw from the parapet the moon’s reflection in the river below, and took it for a green cheese. They held a consultation as to the best means of securing it, when it was resolved that one should hold fast to the parapet whilst the others hung from him, hand-in-hand, so as to form a chain to the water below, the last man to seize the prize. When they were all in this position, the uppermost, feeling the load heavy, and his hold giving way, called out, “Halloo! you below, hold tight while I take off my hand to spit on it!” The wise men below replied, “All right!” upon which he let go his hold, and they all dropped down into the water, and were drowned.

A Moonraker is also the nickname for a native of Wiltshire, and a very silly story is told there as its origin. Some Wiltshire smugglers, on one of their nightly expeditions, being surprised by excisemen, were compelled to hide a barrel of brandy in a pond, which one of the gang at the first opportunity privately fished out for his own personal benefit. A few nights after, when the Argus eyes of the Excise were soundly closed, the rest of the band availed themselves of a clear moonlight to return to the spot in order to “call the spirits from the vasty deep,” and began raking the water to their hearts’ content, for, taking the reflection of the moon to be the top of the barrel, they could not be convinced that the “spirit was departed,” till morning came and showed them that their barrel was all “moonshine.” Another version substitutes thieves and a cheese for the smugglers and the brandy barrel.

The Cradle and the Coffin, or First and Last, was formerly a sign in Norwich, and one can still be seen on the South Quay, Yarmouth. This combination may have its moral; not so the equally serious Mortal Man, in the little village of Troutbeck, near Ambleside, for there the denomination is simply borrowed from the beginning of the inscription which has nothing of the memento mori about it:—

This imaginary dialogue is supposed to be held by the two figures on the signboard, the one a poor miserable-looking object, the other, who indulged in Burkett’s ale, the chubby picture of health, with a nose like that of Bardolph, “clothed in purple.” This sign was the work of Ibbetson; the picture is now gone, but the verses remain.[656]

At Hedenham, on the road between Norwich and Bungay, there is a sign called Tumble-down Dick, representing on one side Diogenes, on the other, a drunken man, with the following distich:

At Alton, in Hants, a drunken man is represented upsetting a table covered with cups and glasses. The verses underneath this picture are the same as at Hedenham, except that it is “Barnaby” who is said to be defunct, and not Diogenes. At Woodton in Norfolk, another sign with this name represents a jolly old farmer in a red coat, with bottle and glass in his hand, falling off his chair in a state of Bacchi plenus. The earliest mention we find of the sign is in the Original Weekly Journal for April 26—May 3, 1718, where a murder is reported to have been committed at the Tumbling-down Dick in Brentford. “Tumble-down Dick, in the borough of Southwark,” says the Adventurer, No. 9, 1752, “is a fine moral on the instability of greatness, and the consequences of ambition.” As such it was set up in derision of Richard Cromwell, the allusion to his fall from power, or “tumble down,” being very common in the satires published after the Restoration, and amongst others, Hudibras; thus, part iii., canto ii., 231:—

The same idea, and almost the identical words, occur again in his “Remains,” in the tale of the Cobbler and the Vicar of Bray:—

We meet it also in the ballad, “Old England is now a brave Barbary,” i.e. horse, from a “Collection of Loyal Songs,” reprinted in 1731, vol. ii., p. 231,—

Dick’s bacchic propensities are also sung in many an old song. Two of the Luttrell Ballads, vol. ii., pp. 11 and 36, allude to his weakness in this respect:—