comitt to safe warde" certain actors who are about to perform in "a lewde Playe called a Sacke full of Newse" at the "Boar's Head" without Aldgate. A few years ago, at No. 25, the entrance might still be seen of another famous inn called the "Bull," formerly the "Black Bull." Above the gateway was a fine piece of ironwork, and the old painted sign was against the wall of the passage. This house flourished greatly a little before the advent of railways, when Mrs. Anne Nelson, coach proprietor, was the landlady, and could make up nearly two hundred beds there. Most of her business was to Essex and Suffolk, but she also owned the Exeter coach. She must have been landlady on the memorable occasion when Mr. Pickwick arrived in a cab after "two mile o' danger at eightpence," and it was through this very gateway that he and his companions were driven by the elder Weller when they started on their adventurous journey to Ipswich. The house is now wholly destroyed and the yard built over. A common sign in former days was the "Saracen's Head." We shall have occasion to refer to several in London. One of them stood by Aldgate, just within the limits of the city. Here a block of old buildings is in existence on the south side, which once formed the front of a well-known coaching inn, with this sign. The spacious inn yard remains, the house on the east side of its entrance having fine pilasters. From the "Saracen's Head," Aldgate, coaches plied to Norwich as long ago as 1681, and here there is, or was quite recently, a carrier's booking office. Another thoroughfare which, within the memory of some who hardly admit that they are past middle age, contained several famous inns, was that leading to the north, and known in its various parts as Gracechurch Street and Bishopsgate Street Within and Without. One of the best known was the "Cross Keys" in Bishopsgate Street, mentioned in the preface to Dodsley's _Old Plays_ as a house at which theatrical performances took place. It was here that, in the latter part of the sixteenth century, Bankes exhibited the extraordinary feats of his horse Marocco. One of them, if we may believe an old jest-book, was to select and draw forth Tarlton with its mouth as "the veriest fool in the company." In more modern times, until the advent of railways, the "Cross Keys" was a noted coaching and carriers' establishment. Destroyed in the Great Fire, and again burnt down in 1734, but rebuilt in the old style, it was still standing on the west side of the street, immediately south of Bell Yard, when Larwood and Hotten published their _History of Signboards_ in 1866. Another inn with this sign stood appropriately near the site of St. Peter's Church in Wood Street, Cheapside, and was pulled down probably about the same time as the more famous house in Gracechurch Street.