“ON Tuesday next, being Shrove Tuesday, will be a fine hog barbygu’d whole at the house of Peter Brett, at the Rising Sun, in Islington Road, with other diversions. It is the house where the ox was roasted whole at Christmas last.”—Mist’s Journal, February 9, 1726.
To barbecue a hog, was a West Indian term for roasting a whole pig, stuffed with spice, and basted with Madeira wine.
The Rising Sun and Seven Stars was the very appropriate sign, at which was printed a work on “Astrological Optics;” but better still, it was printed for R. Moon, whose shop was “in Paul’s Churchyarde, in the New Building, between the two North Doors. 1655.” An old jest-book says that an Irishman, seeing the sign of the Rising Sun was kept by A(nthony) Moon, accused the said Moon of having made a bull, for saying that the Sun was kept by the Moon.
One of the learned questions propounded by Hudibras to that cunning man, Sidrophel, the Rosicrucian, was:—
“Tell me but what’s the natural cause
Why on a sign no painter draws
The full moon ever, but the half.”—Hudibras, part iii., c. 3.
This might be true in Butler’s time, but is no longer so; at Leicester, for instance, there are two signs of the Full Moon, and it occurs in many other places. The Crescent, or Half-Moon, was the emblem of the temporal power, as the Sun was the distinction of the spiritual.
Ben Jonson once desiring a glass of sack, went to the Half-Moon Tavern, in Aldersgate Street, but found it closed, so he adjourned to the Sun Tavern, in Long Lane, and wrote this epigram:—
“Since the Half Moon is so unkind,
To make me go about,
The Sun my money now shall have,
And the Moon shall go without.”
The Half-Moon, Upper Holloway, was famous in the last century for excellent cheesecakes, which were hawked about the streets of London, by a man on horseback, and formed one of the London cries. This circumstance is noticed in a poem in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1743, entitled “A Journey to Nottingham.” In April 1747, the following advertisement appeared in the same magazine:—
“HALF-MOON Tavern, Cheapside, April 13. His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland having restored peace to Britain, by the ever memorable Battle of Culloden, fought on the 16th of April 1745, the choice spirits have agreed to celebrate that day annually by A Grand Jubilee in the Moon, of which the Stars are hereby acquainted and summoned to shine with their brightest Lustre by 6 o’clock on Thursday next in the Evening.”