The “Saracen’s Head,” Snow Hill, which must not he confounded with the other and equally celebrated “Saracen’s Head” in Aldgate High Street, was another very notable coaching establishment, and a galleried inn of picturesqueness and antiquity. Alas! that it has long since disappeared. Its history went back beyond the fifteenth century, and a reference made to it in 1522, when the suite of the Emperor Charles the Fifth lay here, speaks of the house as of some importance:—“The signe of the Sersyns hed: xxx beddes, a stable for xl horses.” The sign, of course deriving from the Crusades, itself gives the inn a very high antiquity. It was a sign of a gruesome and savage aspect, and had its origin in the pictures the returning Crusaders drew of their adversaries. As Selden says:—“Our countrymen pictured them with huge, big, terrible faces, when in truth they were like other men. But this,” he adds slyly, “they did for their own credits.” The inn owed its later celebrity to Dickens, who made it the London inn of Mr. Squeers. Thus he describes it:—“Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield, on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastward seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in hackney cabriolets going westward not unfrequently fall by accident, is the coachyard of the Saracen’s Head Inn; its portal guarded by two Saracens’ heads and shoulders frowning upon you from each side of the gateway. The inn itself, garnished with another Saracen’s head, frowns upon you from the top of the yard. When you walk up this yard you will see the booking-office on your left and the tower of St. Sepulchre’s Church darting abruptly up into the sky on your right, and a gallery of bedrooms upon both sides.”