I dare not say what a large proportion of names in the London Directory that look like nicknames must be set down as the result of this old-fashioned custom. The fourteenth century saw London streets looking as if hung with bannerets, so crowded were they with signs. That was a period when half of the lower middle class were still without an hereditary surname. The consequence is, we find such entries as “Hugh atte Cokke,” or “Thomas atte Ram,” or “Thomas del Hat,” or “Margery de Styrop.” The reader must see at a glance that we have here the origination of half our “Cocks” and “Coxes,” “Rams,” “Roebucks,” “Tubbs,” “Bells,” “Crows.” There are three “Hatts” to forty-one “Heads,” three “Pates” and two “Crowns” in the London Directory, not to mention three “Harrows,” two “Plows,” four “Boots,” and ten “Pattens.” All these, and a hundred other names that appear difficult of origination, are easily explained when we recall this faded custom of a few centuries ago. The plan of having numbered doors came into use but very recently. The signboards were disused in many parts of London before numerals were instituted. The addresses on letters appeared very strange as a consequence. John Byrom, the great epigrammatist, writing to his wife from Cambridge in 1727, addresses his letter to “Mistress Eliz. Byrom, near the old Church, in Manchester.” That was the ordinary method, to choose some big well-known building, and state your friends’ position to it by the compass. The first Directory ever published, of any pretensions, was Kent’s, in 1736. “The Directory,” it is called, “sold by Henry Kent, in Finch Lane, near the Royal Exchange.” It contains about 1200 names, all the tradesmen and merchants of London. There are such entries as “Samuel Wilson, hardwareman, in Cannon Street, the corner of Crooked Lane,” or “John Bradshaw, opposite the Monument, at a barber’s.” Manifestly this could not go on. In the edition for 1770 occurs the following: “The Directory . . . with the numbers as they are affixed to their houses, agreeable to the late Acts of Parliament.” The Legislature had had to take the matter into hand. London was getting far too big for indistinct addresses such as these. The first street in the metropolis to possess numbered doors was New Burlington Street. This was accomplished in June 1764. Other important throughfares followed suit, and before ten years had gone by, we find the Directory particularizing as follows: “John Trelawney, haberdasher, No. 22, Nightingale Lane,” or “Hamnett Townley, hop merchant, No. 69, Great Tower Street.” Occasionally a “Vincent Trehearn, hatmaker, behind St. Thomas’s,” comes, but rarely; and by-and-by such entries disappear altogether. Manchester began the same practice in 1772, at the request of the borough reeve and constable, and was the second town in the kingdom to adopt the practice.