“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:—
“Upon a fair morning for soft recreation,
I heard a fair lady was making her moan,
With sighing and sobbing, and sad lamentation,
Saying, my blackbird most royal is flown.”
My thoughts they deceive me,
Reflections do grieve me,
And am o’erburthen’d with sad misery.
Yet if death should blind me,
As true love inclines me,
My blackbird I’ll seek out wherever he be.
“Once in fair England my blackbird did flourish,
He was the chief blackbird that in it did spring,
Prime ladies of honour his person did nourish,
Because he was the true son of a king.
But since that false fortune,
Which still is uncertain,
Has caused this parting between him and me,
His name I’ll advance,
In Spain and in France,
And I’ll seek out my blackbird wherever he be.”
To which dark-haired prince of the Stuart family the song alludes is not known; but there is a passage in a letter of Sir John Hinton, physician to Charles II., which seems to imply that the black boy was a nickname for Charles II.
“The day before General Monk went into Scotland he dined with me; and after dinner he called me into the next room, and after some discourse, taking a lusty glass of wine, he drank a health to his bonny black boy, (as he called Your Majesty,) and whispered to me, that if ever he had power, he would serve Your Majesty to the utmost of his life.”[283]
What lends strength to the supposition is the occurrence of such a sign as the Crow in the Oak, at Foleshill, Coventry, which seems to have been a covert way of representing the royal oak during the times of the Commonwealth, the disguise continuing after there was no more need of it, similar to the “Cat and Wheel,” and other signs dating from the same period, for no other reason than because the house had become known by them. In the same manner the Oak and Black Dog, (at Stretton on Dunsmoor,) if not a combination of two signs, may have been put up in derision of the Prince in the Royal Oak. The Crow or the Black Crow, is also a common sign; so are the Three Blackbirds;[284] then there is the Chough, at Chard in Sommerset, the Three Choughs at Yeovil; the Three Crows,—all of which belong to the same family, and seem to have the same origin.
On Friday, August 27, 1770, at the Three Crows in Brook Street, Holborn, the coroner sat on the body of Thomas Chatterton, and the ten jurymen returned a verdict of felo de se. One cannot think of this sign and the crowner (as the vulgar still term this officer) sitting on the body of poor Chatterton without calling to mind the ballad of the three corbies; but the poor suicide had no “fallow doe” that