In 1850, when Peter Cunningham wrote his handbook, the old house was yet standing; in it Thomas Southerne, the poet, had lodged, as pointed out by Mr. Hutton in his ‘Literary Landmarks of London.’ The heart has puzzled me; a similar mark was formerly on a house in Peter Street, Westminster. Can it have been a parish mark? An undoubted device of this kind appears on a house at the corner of West Street and Upper St. Martin’s Lane, and consists of two ragged staves crossed, with the date 1691, and the initials S. G. F., which indicate the parish of St. Giles’s in the Fields. A mark of the parish of St. Bride’s, dated 1670, is in Robin Hood Court, Shoe Lane. At the corner of Artillery Street, Bishopsgate Without, and Sandys Row, soon to be improved away, there is a flat stone having fastened on it a piece of iron, shaped like a broad arrow, and below the date 1682. Is this a parish mark, or can it have been connected in any way with the old artillery ground--the Tassel Close of an earlier time, when crossbow-makers used here to shoot at the popinjay? In Strype’s time ‘divers worthy citizens’ still frequented it for martial exercise. Of greater historic interest are the monogram of Henry VIII., the Tudor portcullis, and other devices carved on the spandrels of the arches which are under the gatehouse of St. James’s Palace. A general description of the painted signboards of London has formed no part of the scheme of this book, because much has already been written on the subject, and it would be too extensive to treat satisfactorily in the limited space at my command. It may, however, be useful to note a few signs of this kind still _in situ_. The Running Footman, of which there are two specimens in Hays Mews, Charles Street, Berkeley Square, is particularly interesting on account of the costume, and because it is a record of the days when carriages moved at little more than a foot’s pace,[78] and there were no police to regulate the traffic. It is supposed to date from about 1770. Such a servant as this would be singularly out of place in modern London; but in the East, retainers of the same kind, who run in front and clear the way, still naturally form part of a great man’s equipage. The Goat in Boots is to be seen in the Fulham Road in front of a public-house lately rebuilt. To Le Blond--a Flemish painter, who lived at Chelsea--was attributed the original design, which seems to have been painted or repainted by Morland. Since then, however, it has been daubed over again and again. Some ingenious person has conjectured that the sign originated from a corruption of the Dutch words: ‘der Goden Bode’ (the messenger of the Gods), said to have been applied to Mercury, and to have been formerly used on houses in Holland, to denote that post-horses were to be obtained; but this seems improbable, as the house in old deeds is called the Goat. At the Ben Jonson tavern in Shoe Lane a curious old wooden panel is preserved,