We should be trying the reader’s patience were we to enter into a discussion as to the origin of the sign of the Belle Sauvage, the inn which once stood at the bottom of Ludgate, and whose site is now occupied by the establishment of Messrs. Cassell and Company. The name was derived either from one William Savage, who in 1380 was a citizen living in that locality, or, more probably, from one Arabella Savage, whose property the inn once was. The sign originally was a bell hung within a hoop. As already mentioned, inn-yards were anciently used as theatres. The Belle Sauvage was a favourite place for dramatic performances, its inner yard being spacious, and having handsomely carved galleries to the first and second floors at the back of the main building. An original drawing of it is in the Crace collection. In this yard Banks, the showman, so often mentioned in Elizabethan pamphlets, exhibited his trained horse Morocco, the animal which once ascended the tower of St. Paul’s, and which on another occasion delighted the mob by selecting Tarleton, the low comedian, as the greatest fool present. Banks eventually took his horse to Rome, and the priests, frightened at the circus tricks, burnt both Morocco and his master as sorcerers. Close by the inn lived Grinling Gibbons, and an old house, bearing the crest of the Cutlers’ Company, remains. The old Black Bull (now No. 122), Gray’s Inn Lane, was, in its original state, as shown by a woodcut in Walford’s ’Old and New London,’ a specimen, though of the meaner sort, of the old-fashioned galleried yard. The Black Lion, on the west side of Whitefriars Street, was a quaint and picturesque edifice, and its courtyard showed a gallery to the first-floor of the building, rather wider than usual, and with massive banisters, pillars supporting the roof. The old house was pulled down in 1877, and a large tavern of the ordinary uninteresting type now occupies its site. One of the once famous Southwark inns was the Boar’s Head, which formed a part of Sir John Fastolf’s benefactions to Magdalen College, Oxford. This Sir John was one of the bravest Generals in the French wars under Henry IV. and his successors. The premises comprised a narrow court of ten or twelve houses, and two separate houses at the east end, the one of them having a gallery to the first-floor. The property was for many years leased to the father of Mr. John Timbs, which latter, in his ’Curiosities of London,’ gives a lengthy account of the premises. They were taken down in 1830 to widen the approach to London Bridge. The court above mentioned was known as Boar’s Head Court, and under it and some adjoining houses, on their demolition, was discovered a finely-vaulted cellar, doubtless the wine-cellar of the Boar’s Head.