The amusing catalogue of this extraordinary Exhibition has been published in full in the Appendix of Larwood and Hotten’s “History of Signboards.” It mentions many of our old acquaintances like “The Salutation, or French and English manners”; others are new to us, as “The Barking Dogs,” “a landscape at moonlight, the moon somewhat eclipsed by an accident.” The peruke-maker’s sign, “Absalom hanging,” is again an old friend of ours. But the rhyme underneath-- “If Absalom had not worn his own hair Absalom had not been hanging there”-- seems to us not quite equal in poetical value to the following we read somewhere else:-- “Oh Absalom! oh Absalom! Oh Absalom! my son, If thou hadst worn a periwig Thou hadst not been undone.” Some of Hagarty’s contributions have moralizing titles--as, “The Spirit of Contradiction,” representing two brewers with a barrel of beer, pulling different ways--which do not amuse us any more to-day. “The Logger-Heads,” or, “We are Three” (add: fools), is an old sign to which Shakespeare alludes in his “Twelfth Night” (II, iii), where the Fool comes between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and, taking each by the hand, says: “How now, my Hearts, did you never see the picture of We Three?” In country taverns sometimes two asses were painted on the wall, with the inscription: “We three asses.” The newcomer used to spell these words with great seriousness, to the delight of the old customers. Another sign by Hagarty, “Death and the Doctor,” evidently goes back to the popular scenes of the “Dance of Death” and reminds us of other gruesome signs, the above-mentioned French signs, “La Mort qui trompe,” “La Fête de Mort” in Lyon and “La Cave des Morts” in Geneva. This physician’s sign probably resembled the rude woodcuts of the first printed editions of the “Dance of Death” from the fifteenth century: the doctor very unwilling to follow his colleague, “the sure Physician,” as Shakespeare has called Death. Some such picture was in the poet’s mind when he wrote the words in “Cymbeline,” V, v:-- “By medicine life may be prolong’d, yet death Will seize the doctor too.”