“Near to the jail, and by consequence near to Smithfield also, and the Compter and the bustle and noise of the city; and just on that particular part of Snow Hill where omnibus horses going eastwards seriously think of falling down on purpose, and where horses in hackney cabriolets going westwards not unfrequently fall by accident, is the coach-yard of the Saracen’s Head Inn, its portals guarded by two Saracens’ heads and shoulders, which it was once the pride and glory of the choice spirits of this metropolis to pull down at night, but which have for some time remained in undisturbed tranquillity, possibly because this species of humour is now confined to Saint James’s parish, where door-knockers are preferred as being more portable, and bell-wires esteemed as convenient toothpicks. Whether this be the reason or not, there they are, frowning upon you from each side of the gateway; and the inn itself, garnished with another Saracen’s Head, frowns upon you from the top of the yard; while from the door of the hind boot of all the red coaches that are standing therein, there glares a small Saracen’s Head with a twin expression to the large Saracen’s Head below, so that the general appearance of the pile is of the Saracenic order.”
Blackamoors and other dark-skinned foreigners have always possessed considerable attractions as signs for tobacconists, and sometimes also for public-houses. Negroes, with feathered headdresses and kilts, smoking pipes, are to be seen outside tobacco-shops on the Continent, as well as in England. Thus, in the seventeenth century, there was one in Amsterdam with the following inscription:—
“Josua badt den Heere van herten aan
Dat de zon en maan bleef stille staan.
Puik van Verinis en gœ Blaan
Haalt men hier in den Indiaan.”[620]
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Virginian was the most common in England, owing to the first tobacco having been imported from that country:—
“They returned homewards, passing by Virginia, a colony which Sir Walter Raleigh had there planted, from whence Drake brings home with him Walter Lane, who was the first that brought tobacco into England, which the Indians take against crudities of the stomach.”[621]
Publicans have a strange fancy for Indian Kings, Queens, and Chiefs, thus bearing out Trinculo’s assertion of the nation at large:—“When they will not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten to see a dead Indian.” There is a sculptured sign of an Indian Chief at Shoreditch, having all the appearance of an old ship’s figure-head; and, as a nomen ac præterea nihil, it figures in many places. In Dolphin Lane, Boston, (Linc.,) there used formerly to be a sign with some fanciful, masked-ball dressed figures on it, which were meant to represent the Three Kings of Cologne; but they conveyed so little the idea of those holy personages, that the profanum vulgus called them the Three Merry Devils. Eventually, by a metamorphosis more strange than any in Ovid, these three merry devils were transformed into one very strangely dressed female called the Indian Queen. The African Chief, in Sommerstown, is evidently a variety of these Indian chiefs.
Another sign of venerable antiquity is the Black Boy. That this is of old standing, appears from an entry in Machyn’s Diary: “The XXX day of Desember 1562, was slayne in John Street, Gylbard Goldsmith, dwellyng at the sene of the Blake Boy, in the Cheap, by ys wyff’s sun.”
This Black Boy seems to have been a tobacconist’s sign from the first; for in Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair” we find:—“I thought he would have run mad o’ the Black Boy in Bucklersbury, that takes the scurvy roguy tobacco there.”—Act i., Scene 1.
In the seventeenth century, it was the sign of a celebrated ordinary in Southwark:—
“Jove, and all his hous’hold a’ter
Him, yesterday went crosse the water,
To th’ signe of the Black Boy in Southwarke,
To th’ ordinary, to find his mouth worke.
Here he intends to fuddle’s nose
This fortnight yet, under the rose.”