But the coincidence is most amusing in the case of Longfellow. It is observed by a contributor to _Notes and Queries_,[282] that the verses may be a plagiarism; at any rate they have a strange _family_ resemblance to the following, said to have been written by a commercial traveller on an inside window shutter of the GOLDEN LION, Brecon, kept by a Mr Longfellow, alias Tom Longfellow:-- “Tom Longfellow’s name is most justly his due, Long his neck, long his _bill_, which is very long too; Long the time ere your horse to the stable is led, Long before he’s rubbed down, and much longer till fed. Long indeed may you sit in a comfortless room, Till from kitchen, long dirty, your dinners shall come. Long the often-told tale that your host will relate, Long his face while complaining how long people eat, Long may Longfellow long ere he see me again, Long ’twill be ere I long for Tom Longfellow’s inn.” And long, doubtless, was his face when he read the above. The RAVEN, or the BLACK RAVEN, is still a common inn sign. There is one in Bishopsgate yet in existence, of which trades tokens of the seventeenth century are extant; and on the Great Western Road between Murrell Green and Basingstoke, the Raven Inn is still, or was not many years ago, to be seen, in which Jack the painter, alias James Aitken, the man who set fire to Portsmouth Dockyard, Dec. 7, 1776, was taken prisoner. This house was built in 1653, and has preserved much of its original appearance. In 1711 the RAVEN or the BLACK RAVEN was the sign of S. Popping, bookseller in Paternoster Row; and about the same time John Dunton published at the BLACK RAVEN, in the Poultry, the earliest printed review of literary works, under the name of “Literature from the North, and News from all Nations.” What the work was worth we may judge from D’Israeli’s description of the man: “a crack-brained, scribbling bookseller, who boasted he had a thousand projects, fancied he had methodised six hundred, and was ruined by the fifty he executed.” Notwithstanding this, his autobiography, under the name of the “Life and Errors of John Dunton,” is one of the most curious works in existence. In Molesworth Street, Dublin, there is a sign of the THREE RAVENS, which may be called a living sign, for there are always some ravens kept on the premises. The Raven was the badge of the old Scotch kings, and thus may have been adopted as a kind of Jacobite symbol. To this may be attributed its frequency on the signboard as well as some other sable birds. The common occurrence of the BLACKBIRD and the COCK AND BLACKBIRD as signs had long puzzled us, till one day turning over some old Scotch ballads we came upon one, which Allan Ramsay gives as a favourite old Scotch song. We shall merely quote the first two stanzas, (there are six in all,)--quite sufficient, as far as the poetry is concerned:--