That the Earl of Essex, who had taken up arms against his queen, should have continued more than a century after his death, is easily accounted for by the immense popularity he enjoyed, exceeding that of any of his cotemporaries. More difficult to explain is the presence on English signboards of the Dutch ADMIRAL VAN TROMP; yet we find him in Church Street, Shoreditch, and in St Helen’s, Lancashire. His countryman, Mynheer van Donck, would certainly make a much more appropriate public-house sign. Names of battles and glorious _faits d’ armes_ have also been much used as signs,--thus, GIBRALTAR, PORTOBELLO, the BATTLE OF THE NILE, the MOUTH OF THE NILE, TRAFALGAR, the BATTLE OF WATERLOO, the BATTLE OF THE PYRAMIDS, are all more or less common. The BULL AND MOUTH is said to have a similar origin, being a corruption of Boulogne Mouth, the entry to Boulogne Harbour, which grew into a popular sign after the capture of that place by Henry VIII. The first house with this sign is said to have been an inn in Aldgate. In less than a century the name was already corrupted into the “Bull and Mouth,” and the sign represented by a black bull and a large mouth. Thus it appears on the trades tokens, and also in a sculpture in the façade of the Queen’s Hotel, St Martin’s-le-Grand, formerly the Bull and Mouth Inn. Of the same time also dates the BULL AND GATE, a corruption of the Boulogne Gates, which Henry VIII. ordered to be taken away, and transported to Hardes, in Kent, where they still (?) remain. The Bull and Gate was a noted inn in the seventeenth century in Holborn, where Fielding makes his hero Tom Jones put up on his arrival in London. It is still in existence under the same name, though much reduced in size. There is another in New Chapel Place, Kentish Town; and a few imitations of it were carried to distant provincial towns by the coaches of old times. Another sign of the same period, although not commemorative of a battle, was the GOLDEN FIELD GATE, mentioned by Taylor the water-poet, in 1632, as the sign of an inn at the upper end of Holborn. It was put up in honour of the Champ du Drap d’Or, where Henry VIII. and Francis I., “Those suns of glory, those two lights of men, Met in the vale of Arde.”--_Henry VIII._, a. i. s. 1.