A curious stone bas-relief of Bel and the Dragon is preserved by Messrs. Corbyn and Co., the eminent chemists, at No. 7, Poultry, being let into the wall of a back room; the idol is represented by an actual bell. Larwood and Hotten say that the sign was not uncommon, especially among apothecaries; it is alluded to in the _Spectator_, No. 28. At Messrs. Corbyn’s there is also a very handsome mortar of bell-metal, said to have been used by the firm in early days, with an inscription in Flemish or old German, and the date 1536. Messrs. Corbyn have had a copy of the above sign inserted in the wall of their new establishment, at the corner of Bond Street and Oxford Street; it came originally from their old house of business in Holborn. [Illustration] The stone sign of the house which succeeded the Shakespearean Boar’s Head has happily been preserved, and is now in the Guildhall Museum. It is well designed and tastefully coloured, that fact having come to light when a thorough process of cleansing took place some time since. Above the snout are the initials I. T., and date 1668; size 18-1/2 by 16 inches. The Boar’s Head tavern will be famous for all time, as the scene of the revelries of Falstaff and Prince Hal; how far it was really connected with Shakespeare’s immortal creation has been discussed at length by the late Mr. Halliwell Phillipps. In the time of Henry V., Eastcheap was noted for its cooks’ shops, as appears from the ballad of London Lickpenny, by John Lydgate, monk at Bury St. Edmunds, in which, while giving a countryman’s description of London, he says: ‘Then I hyed me into Est-Chepe; One cryes rybbs of befe, and many a pye; Pewter pottes they clattered on a heape. There was harpe, pype, and minstralsye. Yea, by cock! nay, by cock! some began crye; Some songe of Jenken and Julyan for there mede; But for lack of mony I myght not spede.’ Stow, mentioning an affray in which King Henry IV.’s sons Thomas and John were concerned, adds in a note, ‘there was no taverne then in Eastcheape.’