A word or two about these double signs before we pass on, as I cannot but think much ingenious nonsense has been written thereon. There can be no difficulty in accounting for these strange combinations, some of which still exist. A partnership in business would be readily understood by the conjoining of two hitherto separate signs. An apprentice who, on the death of his master, had succeeded to his business, would gladly retain the previous well-established badge, and simply show the change of hands by adding thereto his own. I cannot but think that such ingenious derivations as ‘God encompasseth us’ for the ‘Goat and Compasses,’ or the ‘Satyr and Bacchanals’ for the ‘Devil and Bag-o’-nails,’ or the ‘Boulogne Mouth’ for the ‘Bull and Mouth,’ are altogether unnecessary. A clever and imaginative mind could soon produce similar happy plays upon the conjunctions contained in the above lines, and yet the originations I have suggested for them all I think my readers will admit to be most natural. There is no more peculiarity about these than about the ordinary combinations of names we are accustomed to see in the streets every day of our lives, denoting partnership. Thus the only difference is that what we now read as ‘Smith and Wright,’ in an age when reading was less universal was, say, ‘Magpie and Crown.’ Partnerships, or business transactions, often bring peculiar conjunctions of names. So early as 1284, I find a ‘Nicholas Bacun’ acknowledging a bond to a certain ‘Hugh Motun,’ _i.e._ Mutton. (Riley’s ‘London,’ p. 23.) I have myself come across such combinations as ‘Shepherd and Calvert’—_i.e._ ‘Calveherd,’ or ‘Sparrow and Nightingale,’ or ‘Latimer and Ridley.’ During the early portion of my residence at Oxford the two Bible-clerkships connected with my college were in the hands of two gentlemen named ‘Robinson’ and ‘Crusoe.’ They lived on the same staircase, and their names being (as is customary) emblazoned above the door, the coincidence was the more remarkable. ‘Catchem’ and ‘Cheetham’ is said to have been the title of a lawyer’s firm, but I will not vouch for the accuracy of the statement. A story, too, goes that ‘Penn, Quill, and Driver’ once figured over a scrivener’s office, but this is still more hypothetical.