Confirming this statement there is a notice of the medicine dating from 1673. It occurs in Martindale’s autobiography (printed by the Chetham Society), where we are told of his daughter, who seems to have fallen into a decline: ‘That which seemed to do her most good was Elixir Salutis, for it gave her much ease (my Lord Delamer having bestowed upon her severall bottles that came immediately from Mr. Daffie himselfe) and it also made her cheerful; but going forth and getting new cold, she went fast away. I am really perswaded that if she had taken it a little sooner, in due quantities, and beene carefull of herselfe, it might have saved her life. But it was not God’s will.’
CHAPTER VI.
VARIOUS CRESTS AND COATS OF ARMS.
‘Coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.’
Shakespeare: Midsummer Night’s Dream.
A VAST amount of property in London is owned by the City Companies, and houses which belong to them are as a rule marked by their arms or crest. These were formerly carved in stone, and a few fine old specimens still remain, similar in style to the ordinary sculptured house signs. Sometimes, no doubt, a citizen put up on his own house, as a sign, the arms of the guild of which he was a member; and this seems to have been the case with the stone bas-relief of Adam and Eve, which was formerly imbedded in the front wall of No. 52, Newgate Street, a house now rebuilt. Eve appeared handing the fatal apple to Adam, the tree in the centre, round its stem the serpent twining; at the upper corners were the initials l s, below the date 1669. It represented the arms of the Fruiterers’ Company, but I have not been able to discover that the house had ever belonged to them. At Milton next Sittingbourne, on a public-house formerly the Fruiterers’ Arms, now misnamed the Waterman’s Arms, is a similar carved sign, one of the few I have found out of London. Beneath is inscribed ‘The Fruiterers.’ The design appears on a seventeenth-century trade-token issued from Rosemary Lane. The arms of the Fruiterers’ Company, as blazoned in Hatton’s ‘New View of London’ (1708), are: azure, on a mount in base vert, the tree of Paradise environed with the serpent between Adam and Eve, all proper. Motto, ‘Deus dat incrementum.’ What Ruskin calls the ‘fig-tree angle’ of the Doge’s Palace, Venice, is adorned by a famous piece of sculpture representing this subject.