This admiration of strong men, which procured the signboard honours to Samson, also made Goliah, or Golias, a great favourite. In the Horse Market, Castle Barnard, he is actually treated just like a duke, admiral, or any other public-house hero, for there the sign is entitled the Goliah Head. Some doubts, however, may be entertained whether by Golias or Goliah, (for the name is spelt both ways,) the Philistine giant and champion was always intended. Towards the end of the twelfth century there lived a man of wit, with the real or assumed name of Golias, who wrote the “Apocalypsis Goliæ,” and other burlesque verses. He was the leader of a jovial sect called Goliardois, of which Chaucer’s Miller was one. “He was a jangler and a goliardeis.” Such a person might, therefore, have been a very appropriate tutelary deity for an alehouse.[383]
Goliah’s conqueror, King David, liberally shared the honours with his victim, and he still figures on various signboards. There is a King David’s inn in Bristol, and a David and Harp in Limehouse; whilst in Paris, the Rue de la Harpe is said to owe its name to a sign of King David playing on the harp. David’s unfortunate son, Absalom, was a peruke-maker’s very expressive emblem, both in France and in England, to show the utility of wigs. Thus a barber at a town in Northamptonshire used this inscription:
“Absalom, hadst thou worn a perriwig, thou hadst not been hanged.”
Which a brother peruke-maker versified, under a sign representing the death of Absalom, with David weeping. He wrote up thus:
“Oh Absalom! oh Absalom!
Oh Absalom! my son,
If thou hadst worn a perriwig,
Thou hadst not been undone.”
Psalm xlii. seems to be very profanely hinted at in the sign of the White Hart and Fountain, Royal Mint Street, which, if not a combination of two well-known signs, apparently alludes to the words, “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God.” The Panting Hart (het dorstige Hert, or het Heigent Hert,) was formerly a very common beer-house sign in Holland. In the seventeenth century there was one with the following inscription at Amsterdam:—
“Gelyk het hert by frisch water sig komt te verblyden,
Komt also in myn huys om u van dorst te bevryden.”[384]
Another one at Leyden had the following rhyme:—
“Gelyk een hart van jagen moe lust te drinken water rein,
Also verkoopt men hier tot versterking van de maag, toebak, bier en Brandewyn.”[385]
The wise king Solomon does not appear to have ever been honoured with a signboard portrait, but his enthusiastic admirer, the Queen of Saba, figured before the tavern kept by Dick Tarlton the jester, in Gracechurch Street. This Queen of Saba, or Sheba, was a usual figure in pageants. There is a letter of Secretary Barlow, in “Nugæ Antiquæ,” telling how the Queen of Sheba fell down and upset her casket in the lap of the King of Denmark—when on his drunken visit to James I.—who “got not a little defiled with the presents of the queen; such as wine, cream, jelly, beverages, cakes, spices, and other good matters.”