Few signs have undergone so many changes as the well-known SALUTATION. Originally it represented the angel saluting the Virgin Mary, in which shape it was still occasionally seen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as appears from the tavern token of Daniel Grey of Holborn. In the times of the Commonwealth, however, “sacrarum ut humanarum rerum, heu! vicissitudo est,” the Puritans changed it into the SOLDIER AND CITIZEN, and in such a garb it continued long after, with this modification, that it was represented by two citizens politely bowing to each other. The Salutation Tavern in Billingsgate shows it thus on its trades token, and so it was represented by the Salutation Tavern in Newgate Street, (an engraving of which sign may still be seen in the parlour of that old established house.) At present it is mostly rendered by two hands conjoined, as at the Salutation Hotel, Perth, where a label is added with the words, “You’re welcome to the city.” That Salutation Tavern in Billingsgate was a famous place in Ben Jonson’s time; it is named in “Bartholomew Fayre” as one of the houses where there had been “Great sale and utterance of wine, Besides beere and ale, and ipocras fine.” During the civil war there was a Salutation Tavern in Holborn, in which the following ludicrous incident happened,--if we may believe the Royalist papers:-- “A hotte combat lately happened at the Salutation Taverne in Holburne, where some of the Commonwealth vermin, called soldiers, had seized on an Amazonian Virago, named Mrs Strosse, upon suspicion of being a loyalist, and selling the Man in the Moon; but shee, by applying beaten pepper to their eyes, disarmed them, and with their own swordes forced them to aske her forgiveness; and down on their mary bones, and pledge a health to the king, and confusion to their masters, and so honourablie dismissed them. Oh! for twenty thousand such gallant spirits; when you see that one woman can beat two or three.”[387] At the end of the last century there was a Salutation Tavern in Tavistock Row, called also “Mr Bunch’s,” which was one of the elegant haunts, patronised by “the first gentleman of Europe,” otherwise the Prince Regent. Lord Surrey and Sheridan were generally his associates in these _escapades_. The trio went under the pseudonyms of Blackstock, Greystock, and Thinstock, and disguised in bob wigs and smockfrocks. The night’s entertainment generally concluded with thrashing the “Charlies,” wrenching off knockers, breaking down signboards, and not unfrequently with being taken to the roundhouse.