which bears on its two sides what are supposed to be portraits of ‘rare Ben’; as it is nailed against the wall, one side only is now visible. The person portrayed is a lean hungry-looking man, the very reverse of the poet; it seems likely, nevertheless, that this was the old signboard. A more ambitious effort is the full-length portrait of the Duke of Cumberland--the hero of Culloden--which is on a public-house at the corner of Bryanston Street and Great Cumberland Place, built about 1774. It is affixed to the wall in accordance with the law passed a short time previously. One is reminded of a letter by Horace Walpole to Conway, dated April 16, 1747, in which he thus moralizes: ‘I observed how the Duke of Cumberland’s head had succeeded, almost universally, to Admiral Vernon’s, as his head had left few traces of the Duke of Ormonde’s. I pondered these things in my heart, and said unto myself all glory is but a sign.’ Now that Hatchett’s Hotel in Piccadilly has passed away, it is worth while to record that over the bar of the Restaurant on this site (rebuilt 1886) was to be seen the old painted signboard of a white horse with flowing mane and tail, and the inscription, ‘The New White Horse Cellars, Abraham Hatchett.’ Last year, owing to further alterations, this was removed. The signs I have referred to are comparatively well known, but that of the Coach and Horses--No. 49, St. John’s Square, Clerkenwell--has, I think, hitherto escaped observation. This is a large picture representing a lioness attacking one of the leaders of a mail-coach; a yokel with a pitchfork, and a dog, advance intrepidly to the rescue. In the background is a wayside inn, in front a pond. The event depicted actually took place on October 20, 1816, and is described in ‘Cassell’s Popular Natural History,’ vol. ii., p. 119. It seems that the Exeter mail-coach was on its way to London, and the driver had pulled up at Winter’s-Low-Hut, seven miles from Salisbury, to deliver the bags, when one of his leaders was suddenly attacked by a ferocious animal, which proved to be a lioness. A large mastiff came to the rescue, but when she charged him he fled, and was pursued and killed about forty yards from where the coach was standing. It turned out that the lioness had escaped from a menagerie which was on its way to Salisbury Fair. She was eventually driven into a granary, carrying the dead mastiff in her teeth, and there secured by her keepers. A picture of this strange attack was long exhibited at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly; of this picture I imagine the sign to be a copy, it seems too well done to have been painted expressly for the public-house to which it belongs. In the course of 1889 a curious sign, the Whistling Oyster, disappeared from No. 13, Vinegar Yard, on the south side of Drury Lane Theatre. Here were formerly oyster and refreshment rooms, and it seems that about 1840 Mr. Pearkes, the then proprietor, discovered among his stock