Peter Cunningham says that the Boar’s Head stood in Great Eastcheap, between Small Alley and St. Michael’s Lane, four taverns filling up the intervening space--the Chicken, near St. Michael’s Alley, the Boar’s Head, the Plough, and the Three Kings. The statue of King William IV. is considered to be a few feet east of the site. The house had ceased to be a tavern before Pennant wrote in 1790. It was divided into two tenements, and became Nos. 2 and 3, Great Eastcheap. Part was occupied by a gunsmith, when in June, 1831, the building, having been bought by the Corporation for £3,544, was immediately pulled down to make room for the approaches of new London Bridge. It is a curious fact that, on the opposite side of the river, at about an equal distance, stood another famous old Boar’s Head Inn, the site of which is also now covered by the approaches to London Bridge, and this had without doubt once belonged to that notable man, Sir John Fastolfe,[32] who must at least have furnished the name to Shakespeare’s matchless creation. The back part of the City inn looked upon the burial-ground of St. Michael’s, Crooked Lane, as did the other on the Flemish burial-ground in Southwark. Of this latter and of the man who owned it, a rather full account is given in the ‘Inns of Old Southwark and their Associations,’ by Rendle and Norman. From J. T. Smith and others I learn that in the early part of this century, not far from the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, and nearly facing Miles Lane, there was a bold and animated figure of a Mermaid carved in relief, with her dishevelled hair about her shoulders, and holding in her right hand something resembling ‘a bundle of flax or a distaff’; more likely a looking-glass. I mention the sign here for the sake of convenience, though I own its classification is a difficulty, one writer placing it with human signs, and another with ‘fishes and insects.’ There still exists a Mermaid carved in relief at No. 21, East Street, Gravesend. The material seems to be cut brick or terra-cotta; it has an ornamental border with cleft pediment. Seafaring people are always more or less attracted by the supernatural, and so the sign has been a favourite one here and in Holland, where also the merman, with helmet, sword, and buckler, was not uncommon. A merman and a mermaid are supporters of the arms of the Fishmongers’ Company, a fine carving of which is to be seen at the back of their present hall. The badge of the Byrons was a mermaid argent, crined and finned or, holding in the left hand a comb, in the right a mirror. It is recorded by Strype that ‘Boniface Tatam of London, vintner, buried in the parish of St. Peter’s Cornhill on the 3rd Feb., 1606, gave 40s. yearly to the parson for preaching 4 sermons every year so long as the Mermaid, a tavern in Cornhill so called, shall endure.’ But the most famous Mermaid, perhaps the most famous of all Elizabethan taverns, was that in Bread Street,