UNTIL the early part of the eighteenth century, when the plan of numbering came into vogue, not only inns and taverns, but shops and other houses, were distinguished by signs. The wholesale traders, indeed, were as a rule sufficiently well known not to require this distinctive mark. In the ‘Little London Directory’ for the year 1677--the oldest printed list of the kind--hardly any of the merchants have signs. The reverse is the case with the bankers, who, as ‘goldsmiths that keep running cashes,’ had then hardly emerged from the shopkeeper class. Nevertheless, signs were exceedingly common; on the rebuilding of the city, immediately after the Great Fire, many of them, instead of being painted and hung out--though this continued to be the more usual method--were carved in stone and built into the plain brick fronts of the new houses, generally above or below a first-floor window. In some cases also, the name of a court or alley was thus indicated--a useful method when a large number of the population could neither read nor write. It is curious that signs of a very similar description were used by the Romans; for instance, the well-known terra-cotta bas-relief of two men carrying an amphora, and a figure of a goat, both found at Pompeii; the former almost identical in design with our conventional representation of the Two Brewers. These, however, were cast in a mould which was probably used again and again. They therefore, perhaps, indicated a trade rather than a particular house; like our modern pawnbrokers’, tobacconists’, and gold-beaters’ signs. I shall presently call attention to a London seventeenth-century sign repeated in the same way.