“Augurs and soothsayers, astrologers,
Diviners, and interpreters of dreams.”
In the last case he might have chosen it as being the ascendant of the city of London, which “stands in a benign and temperate climate, in the latitude of 52° and longitude of 19° 15´,—having (as artists reckon) the celestial twins, the house of Mercury, patron of merchandise and ingenious arts, for her ascendant.”[707]
The Rainbow, in Fleet Street, opposite Chancery Lane, is the oldest coffee-house in London:—
“I find it recorded that one James Farr, a barber, who kept the coffee-house, which is now the Rainbow, by the Inner Temple gate, (one of the first in England,) was, in the year 1657, presented by the inquest of St Dunstan’s in the West, for making and selling a sort of liquor called Coffee, as a great nuisance and prejudice to the neighboorhood, &c., and who would have thought London would ever have had near three thousand such nuisances, and that coffee would have been (as now) so much drank by the best of quality and physicians.”[708]
The presentation here alluded to is still preserved among the records of St Sepulchre’s Church. It says:—
“We present James Farr, Barber, for making and selling a drink called coffee, whereby, in making the same, he annoyeth his neighboors by evill smells, and for keeping of fire the most part night and day, whereby his chimney and chamber has been set on fire, to the great danger and affreightment of his neighboors.”
This danger of fire was so much the greater, as a bookseller, Samuel Speedal, had his shop in the same house. In 1682, the Phœnix Fire Office, one of the first in this country, was established at this place.
The Thunder Storm is the sign of a public-house at Framwellgate Moor, Durham; and the Hailstone, at Knowle, Staffordshire; both these houses may have taken their names from a severe storm, which visited the neighbourhood at or about the time of their opening, just as the Haylift, at Wansforth, Northampton, is said to owe its origin to the fact of a man floating a long way down the river on a haycock, during an inundation, and landing near that place.
As for the Wild Sea, the sign of John Horton, over against Parson’s Brewhouse, Croydon,[709] in 1718, no more plausible explanation occurs to us than that John Horton might have been a sailor in his younger days.