In the second edition of Maitland’s ‘London,’ 1756, we are told that under the sign of the Boar’s Head, the following inscription was then to be seen: ‘This is the oldest tavern in London.’ Goldsmith was there in 1758, getting material for his charming ‘Reverie at the Boar’s Head,’ in which, however, he assumed that he was in the actual tavern immortalized by Shakespeare; and in 1818 another gifted author--Washington Irving--after a similar visit, wrote an essay as charming and as inaccurate. During their tour to the Hebrides in 1773, Boswell mentioned to Dr. Johnson a club held at the Boar’s Head, the members of which all assumed Shakespearean characters, one was Falstaff, another Prince Hal, another Bardolph, and so on. Johnson’s remark on the occasion was: ‘Don’t be of it, sir. Now that you have a name you must be careful to avoid many things, not bad in themselves, but which will lessen your character.’ Scruples of this kind do not seem to have troubled the great William Pitt, at any rate when he was young. In the ‘Life of William Wilberforce,’[30] by his son, the following anecdote is told by the philanthropist: ‘I was one of those who met to spend an evening in memory of Shakespeare at the Boar’s Head, Eastcheap. Many professed wits were present, but Pitt was the most amusing of the party, and the most apt at the required allusions.’ This social gathering took place in the year 1780. An interesting addition has lately been made to the Guildhall Museum, a bequest of the late Dr. Burgon, Dean of Chichester. It is a water-colour drawing of a figure from the house in Eastcheap, supposed to represent Falstaff, but so lean that it by no means embodies the idea contained in his words to the Lord Chief Justice: ‘I would that my means were greater, and my waist slenderer.’ The costume seems to be of the sixteenth century. This was copied no doubt from the figure carved in oak, 12 inches high, which was exhibited by Mr. Kempe to the Society of Antiquaries in December, 1833, and which once decorated the portal of the tavern. The figure had supported an ornamental bracket over one side of the door, a corresponding figure of Prince Henry sustaining that on the other. It was at that time the property of Mr. Thomas Shelton, brazier, Great Eastcheap, whose ancestors had lived in the shop he occupied since the time of the Great Fire. He well remembered the last grand dinner-party, which had taken place at the Boar’s Head about fifty years before. The guests came from the west end of the town, and the long string of carriages which conveyed them filled the street at Eastcheap. Hutton, writing in 1785, gives a somewhat different account of the figures. He says,[31] ‘On each side of the entrance to the Boar’s Head there is a vine branch carved in wood rising more than three feet from the ground, loaded with leaves and clusters, and on the top of each a little Falstaff eight inches high, in the dress of his day.’