Music-shops always adhered to the primitive custom of using the instruments they sold as their signs; for instance, the Harp and Hautboy, the sign of John Walsh, “servant to his Majesty,” in Catherine Street in the Strand, in 1700.[497] Other music-shops had the French Horn and Violin; the Violin, Hautboy, and German Flute; the Hautboy and Two Flutes; all these instruments in the woodcut above the shopbill, which was a copy of the sign, are placed perpendicularly beside each other, without any attempt at grouping. The Hautboy was one of the most constant music-shop signs; it was formerly a favourite street instrument, and might be heard at the Christmas “waits,” and on occasions of popular rejoicing. Waits even are said to have derived their name from it, that, according to one authority, being the old English name of the hautboy.[498] This, however, we believe to be a mistake. The Waits were “watches”—guêts, who went round at certain hours of the night with music, to let it be known they were on the look-out, and make people feel secure.
Novello, the well-known music publisher, still adheres to the old tradition, and carries on business in the Poultry under the sign of the Golden Crotchet. Somewhat similar was the Sol La, or the Merry Song (le chant Gaillard) of Guyot or Guy Marchant, a bookseller and printer in Paris circa 1490. His colophon here represents the two notes sol la, surmounting two conjoined hands, in evident allusion to the words of the Pange Lingua “Sola Fides.” At the side are represented two merry cobblers, a class of mechanics, who, from time immemorial, have been noted above all others for merriment, and a habit of singing whilst at their work. It is a curious fact, that on the title-page of one of the books printed by Marchant, the “Epistola de Insulis de novo repertis,” his chant Gaillard is translated into “Campo Gaillardo,” which seems to lead to the inference that this work had been printed by some one who had heard of Marchant’s sign, but had never seen it, and merely adopted his name as being well known in the literary world,—a fraud frequently complained of by the old printers.
The French Horn was once a very common sign, and is still of frequent occurrence; thus, there is a French Horn and Rose in Wood Street, Cheapside; a French Horn and Half-moon at Wandsworth; and a French Horn and Queen’s Head in Smithfield. This last house was, for many years, kept by Peter Crawley, a noted member of the P. R., and there John Leech the artist, and a friend, used to study low life and boxiana under the tutelage of Black Sam. Finally, in the seventeenth century, there was a Horn and Three Tuns in Leadenhall Street. The trades tokens represent it as a French horn; but a drinking horn would certainly have been a more useful instrument in the company of three tuns. It was evidently a corruption of the Bottle-makers’ arms, which were argent on a chevron sable, three bugle-horns of the first between three leather-bottles of the second. These leather-bottles might easily be mistaken for tuns, and the bugle-horn be modernised into a musical instrument.
This frequency of the Horn rather jars with the unpleasant signification that instrument had in seventeenth century slang. Among the Roxburghe Ballads (ii. 138) there is one entitled “The Extravagant Youth, or an Emblem of Prodigality,” with a woodcut representing a youth jumping into the mouth of a large horn. On one side stands the father, seemingly in distress; on the other is a mad-house, with the sign of The Fool, two of the inmates looking out from behind the bars. The extravagant youth, after expatiating on his mad career, says:—
“But now all my glory is clearly decay’d,
And into the horn myself have betray’d.
......
All comforts now from us are flown,
My father in Bedlam makes his moan,
And I in the counter a prisoner thrown,
This Horn is a figure by which it is known.”
The Bugle Horn is fully as common; it occurs on a trades token of 1667 as the sign of a house in Aldersgate Street, and is still to be seen on many inns by the roadside, where the mail coach, in the good old coaching time, used to announce its arrival by a cheerful tune from the guard’s horn. Sometimes the Horn was used in a different sense. It was the sign and badge of the cattle doctor and village gelder, and came to be exhibited as such either from its use in drenching animals, or from the fact of such an instrument being blown by the doctor, to give notice to the villagers of his approach. At Messingham, Lincoln, the Horn Inn, a century ago, was kept by such a personage. Further on, at [p. 369], this professional is mentioned in connexion with Tom of Bedlam.
The Harp, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, was the sign of a bird-fancier, “over against Somerset House in the Strand;”[499] and is still used as the sign of many public-houses, generally denoting an Irish origin. The Jew’s Harp (an instrument formerly called jeu trompe, Jew’s trump, i.e., toy trumpet) was in former times the sign of a house with bowery tea-gardens and thickly-foliated “snuggeries,” in what was once Marylebone Park, near the top of Portland Place, but removed on the laying out of Regent’s Park. Mr Onslow the Speaker used to go there in plain attire, and sitting in the chimney-corner, join in the humours of the customers, until, being recognised by the landlord one day, as he was riding in his golden coach to the House in state, he found, on going in the evening for his quiet pipe and glass, that his incognito was betrayed. This broke the charm, and like the fairies in the legend, he never more returned after that day. At the end of the last century there was another Jew’s Harp Tavern [and Tea-gardens] in Islington. It consisted of a large upper room, ascended by a staircase on the outside for the accommodation of the company on ball nights, and in this room large parties dined. Facing the south front of the premises was a large semicircular enclosure, with boxes for tea and ale drinkers, guarded by deal-board soldiers, between every box, painted in proper colours. In the centre of this opening were tables and seats placed for the smokers; a trap-ball ground was on the eastern side of the house, whilst the western side served for a tennis court; there were also public and private skittle-grounds. We find a clue to this rather odd sign in Ben Jonson’s play of the “Devil is an Ass,” Act i., scene 1, from which it appears that it was formerly a custom to keep a fool in a tavern, who, for the edification of the customers, used to play on a Jew’s harp, sitting on a joint-stool.
One of the signs originally used exclusively by apothecaries was the Mortar and Pestle, their well-known implements for pounding drugs. Among the celebrities who sold medicines under this emblem was the noted John Moore, “author of the celebrated Worm Powder,” to whom Pope addressed some stanzas beginning:—
“How much, egregious Moore, are we
Deceived by shows and forms;
Whate’er we think, whate’er we see,
All human kind are worms.”