A still earlier Club, more renowned than any for its marvellous powers of suction, was the Everlasting Club, instituted during the Parliamentary wars; it was so called because it sat night and day, one set of members relieving another. It is recorded of them early in the eighteenth century that “since their first institution they have smoked fifty tons of tobacco, drank thirty thousand butts of ale, one thousand hogsheads of red port, two hundred barrels of brandy, and _one kilderkine of small beer_. They sang old catches at all hours to encourage one another to moisten their clay, and grow immortal by drinking.” No work on the Curiosities of Ale and Beer would be complete without some notice of signboards. Their connection with taverns and alehouses is so ancient and intimate, and many of them are in themselves so exceedingly curious, that they may be said to constitute some of the chief curiosities of the subject. The history of signboards has been so exhaustively written by Mr. Larwood and Mr. Hotten that it would be superfluous, even if space did not forbid, to present to our readers anything but a slight sketch of so voluminous a subject. {215} Signboards at the present day may be said to inspire their historian with something of a melancholy feeling. A history of them is a history of a bygone art, which has long passed its zenith, which has served its purpose, and which is destined to decay more and more before the advance of modern education. Truly the glory of signboards is departed! Though one sees here and there a barber’s pole, a golden fleece, and a few other signs of divers trades, innkeepers and alehouse-keepers are the only persons who as a class keep to their old distinctive marks. Formerly, when persons who could read and write were few, every craft and occupation had its own peculiar sign, for the huge letters and notice-boards, now so common, would at that time have been of little use. There seems to be no doubt that we derived the signboard from the Romans; the old Latin proverb _Vino vendibili suspensa hedera non opus est_ finds its counterpart in the English _Good wine needs no bush_, and the common sign of the Bush is the lineal descendant of the old Roman bunch of ivy. In the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii many examples have been brought to light of signs appropriate to various trades: thus, a goat is the sign of a dairy; a mule driving a mill is the sign of a miller or baker; and two men carrying a large amphora of wine is the sign of the vintner, and brings to mind the well-known English sign of the _Two Jolly Brewers_ carrying a barrel of ale strung on a long pole.