Friday Street, and Cheapside, for they were all one and the same--the house standing back from Bread Street, with passage entrances from Cheapside and Friday Street. ‘Souls of poets dead and gone, What Elysium have ye known, Happy field or mossy cavern, Choicer than the Mermaid Tavern?’ Another famous hostelry in old days was the Bull, Bishopsgate Street Within, which stood on the west side, opposite St. Helen’s Place. This was one of the inns used for theatrical purposes in the sixteenth century. In 1594, Anthony Bacon, brother of Francis, was lodging in Bishopsgate Street, to the regret of his mother, because he was near the Bull Inn, where plays and interludes were acted, which might corrupt his servants. It was the house frequented by old Hobson, the Cambridge carrier, on whom Milton wrote his famous lines. Here, as the _Spectator_ tells us, there was a portrait of Hobson, with a hundred-pound bag under his arm, having on it the inscription: ‘The fruitful mother of a Hundred more.’ At the Bull Inn a mutiny broke out in a troop of Whalley’s regiment on April 26, 1649, for which one of the troopers was shot in St. Paul’s Churchyard, and others were condemned but pardoned. The inn was pulled down in 1866. A curious relic then rescued from the ruins consisted of a stone 9-1/2 inches wide at the top, 7 inches at the bottom, and 10 inches deep, shaped therefore like a keystone, and having a narrow margin, within which was a carving of a bull with a vine and its tendrils, and a bunch of grapes; it was dated 1642. This stone had doubtless served as a sign or commemorative decoration, and was the oldest of its kind in London: I have not been able to find out what became of it. The _Herts Guardian_ for March 11, 1865, records that ‘under the yew-tree, against the steeple of All Saints’ Church, Hertford, is a small ordinary-looking gravestone having the following quaint inscription: ‘Here lyeth Black Tom of the Bull Inn in Bishopsgate, 1696.’ From the Bull in Bishopsgate it is not a far cry to the Bull and Mouth in Aldersgate. There are two versions of this sign, and though comparatively modern they are worth describing, partly for their quaintness, partly from their interesting associations; they are both preserved in the Guildhall Museum. One was placed over the front entrance of the Queen’s Hotel, St. Martin’s-le-Grand, formerly known as the Bull and Mouth, which was built in 1830 on the site of the old coaching inn with that sign. A statuette of a bull appears within the space of a gigantic open mouth; below are bunches of grapes; above, a bust of Edward VI. and the arms of Christ’s Hospital, to which institution the ground belonged. Beneath is a tablet, perhaps from the old inn, inscribed with the following doggerel rhyme: ‘Milo the Cretonian an ox slew with his fist, And ate it up at one meal, ye Gods what a glorious twist.’