WHITTINGTON AND HIS CAT is still very common, not only in London but in the country also. Sometimes the cat is represented without her master, as on the token of a shop in Longacre, 1657, and on the sign of ---- Varney, a seal-engraver in New Court, Old Bailey, 1783, whose shopbill[99] represents a large cat carved in wood holding an eye-glass by a chain. The story of Whittington is still a favourite chapbook tale, and has its parallel in the fairy tales of various other countries. Straparola, in his “Piacevole Notte,” is, we believe, the first who mentions it. The earliest English narrative occurs in Johnson’s “Crown Garland of Golden Roses,” 1612, but there is an allusion to “Whittington and his Puss” in the play of “Eastward Hoe!” 1603. For more than a century it was one of the stock pieces of Punch and his dramatic troop. Sept. 21, 1688, Pepys went to see it: “To Southwark Fair, very dirty, and there saw the puppet-show of Whittington, which is pretty to see; and how that idle thing do work upon people that see it, and even myself too.” Foote, in his comedy of the “Nabob,” makes Sir Matthew Mite account for the legend by explaining the cat as the name of some quick-sailing vessels by which Whittington imported coals, which should have been the source of the Lord Mayor’s wealth. In the Highgate Road there is a skeleton of a cat in a public-house window, which by the people who visit there is firmly believed to be the earthly remains of Whittington’s identical cat. The house is not far distant from the spot where the future Lord Mayor of London stopped to listen to the city bells inviting him to return. It is now marked by a stone, with the event duly inscribed thereon. King Arthur’s ROUND TABLE is to be seen on various public-houses. There is one in St Martin’s Court, Leicester Square, where the American champion, Heenan, put up when he came to contest the belt with the valiant Tom Sayers. The same sign is also often to be met with on the Continent. In the seventeenth century there was a famous tavern called _la Table Roland_ in the Vallée de Misère at Paris. JOHN-O’-GROAT’S HOUSE is also used for a sign; there was one some years ago in Windmill Street, Haymarket; and at present there is a JOHN-O’-GROAT’S in Gray Street, Blackfriars Road. Both these and the Round Table contain, we conceive, some intimation of that even-handed justice observed at the houses, where all comers are treated alike, and one man is as good as another. DARBY AND JOHN, a corruption of Darby and Joan, and borrowed from an old nursery fable, is a sign at Crowle, in Lincolnshire; and HOB IN THE WELL, with a similar origin, at Little Port Street, Lynn; whilst SIR JOHN BARLEYCORN is the hero of a ballad allegorical of the art of brewing, &c.