In this advertisement we touch upon the joint-stock mania then raging. Newspapers of the time teemed with advertisements of insurance companies of all sorts: the above paper, with less than a dozen advertisements, offers four schemes, by which on payment of 10s. per week £1000 were eventually to be received! Among the badges of the Tudors, Henry VII. and Henry VIII. left us the still common sign of the PORTCULLIS. “A portcullis, or porte-coulisse, is French for that wooden instrument or machine, plated over with iron, made in the form of a harrow or lozenge, hung up with pullies in the entries of gates or castles, to be let down upon any occasion.”--_Anstis Garter._ It is the principal charge in the arms of the city of Westminster, and is to be seen everywhere within and without the beautiful chapel of Henry VII., whose favourite device it was as importing his descent from the house of Lancaster. It was also one of the badges of Henry VIII., with the motto, _Securitas Altera_, and occurs on some of his coins. To this same family we also owe the ROSE AND CROWN, which sign, at the present day, may be observed on not less than forty-eight public-houses in London alone, exclusive of beer-houses. One of the oldest is in the High Street, Knightsbridge, which has been licensed above three hundred years, though not under that name, for anciently it was called the OLIVER CROMWELL. The Protector’s bodyguard is said to have been quartered here, and an inscription to that effect was formerly painted in front of the house, accompanied by an emblazoned coat of arms of Cromwell, on an ornamental piece of plaster work, which last is all that now remains of it. It is the oldest house in Brompton, was formerly its largest inn, and not improbably the house at which Sir Thomas Wyatt put up, while his Kentish followers rested on the adjacent green. Corbould painted this inn under the title of “The Old Hostelrie at Knightsbridge,” exhibited in 1849, but he transferred its date to 1497, altering the house according to his own fancy. During the persecutions, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, of booksellers suspected as publishers of the mysterious Martin Marprelate tracts, we find one Bogue, at the loyal sign of the Rose and Crown, in St Paul’s Churchyard, who fell into the category of the suspected, and who was so severely persecuted that he was almost ruined by it.