With Illustrations by the Author   Published by Houghton Mifflin Company Printed at The Riverside Press Cambridge Mdccccxvi COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Published November 1916 THIS EDITION, PRINTED AT THE RIVERSIDE PRESS, CAMBRIDGE, CONSISTS OF FIVE HUNDRED AND FIFTY NUMBERED COPIES, OF WHICH FIVE HUNDRED ARE FOR SALE. THIS IS NUMBER 5...

For a sign! as indeed man, with his singular imaginative faculties, can do little or nothing without signs. Carlyle The author’s love of the subject is his only apology for his bold undertaking. First it was the filigree quality and the beauty of the delicate tracery of the wrought-iron signs in the picturesque villages of southern Germany that attracted his attention; then their deep symbolic significance exerted its influence more and more over his mind, and tempted him at last to follow their

Without a question, the first journey that ever mortals made on this round earth was the unwilling flight of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden out into an empty world. Many of us who condemn this world as a vale of tears would gladly make the return journey into Paradise, picturing in bright colors the road that our first parents trod in bitterness and woe. Happy in a Paradise in which all the beauties of the first creation were spread before their eyes, where no enemies lurked, and where eve

We must now take leave of “holy hospitality” which is written in the hearts of men and truly needs no outward sign, and must follow Iago’s counsel: “Put money in thy purse!” For our journey is no longer from friend to friend, but from host to host and from sign to sign. Regret it as we may, a hospitality for profit’s sake had to succeed the old free hospitality of friends. The widening commerce of the Roman world-empire could hardly have existed without a well-regulated business of entertainment

Rome was to conquer the northern Germanic world once more, not with the sword as had been the case in the olden days of a pagan Rome, but with the cross and its exponent, the monk. The northward surging wave of Roman Cæsarism had been followed by the tidal wave, southward-roaring, of Germanic barbarians. The orderly life of one vast empire gave way to the restlessness and insecurity of the period of migration and a shattered empire. Not individuals but whole peoples go a-traveling with household

The heavy castle gates in mediæval times were gladly opened to the minstrels who came to charm with their art the banquets of the noble lords and ladies—troubadours and minstrels, the ancestors of that vast and still thriving fraternity of poets whose blood runs too quickly through their veins to keep them content in the quiet monotony of a home. With the sailing clouds, with the migrating birds, and the rising sun they wander through woods and fields “to be like their mother the wandering world

Little William, already in the days when he went “with his satchel and shining morning face creeping like a snail unwillingly to school,” had ample leisure and opportunity to gaze admiringly at the many signs which adorned the narrow streets of the quiet little town on the Avon. The memory of them still lives in some of the Stratford hotels. The landlady of the “Golden Lion,” for instance, remarks on her bill: “Known as Ye Peacocke Inn in Shakespeare’s time 1613.” Even the “Red Horse,” to-day ex

Carlyle once complained that the artists preferred to paint “Corregiosities,” creations of their own fancy, instead of representing the historic events of their own times. Only the Dutch painters of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in so far as they keep clear of the Italian influence, may justly be called true historical painters, certainly with greater reason than the school of historical painting in the nineteenth century, which tried to reconstruct events of epochs long past with th

Good old Diderot, who to-day sits so peacefully in his armchair of bronze on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and observes with philosophical calm the restless stream of Parisian life passing him by day and night, was once a severe critic. We might call him the father of critics, since he reviewed the first French Art Exhibition arranged in the Salon carré of the Louvre. From this salon the modern French Expositions in Paris derive their name, although they have grown into bewildering labyrinths of a

Like a prophetic star the sign seems to stand over the birth-house of many a poet. Or shall we not agree with Chateaubriand who saw in the eagle on the house in Bread Street, London, where Milton was born, an “augure et symbole”? And is it not a curious coincidence that the greatest French comedy-writer was born “à l’enseigne du Pavillon des Cinges dans la Rue des Étuves Saint-Honoré” in Paris? One of the most ingenious reconstructions of Robida (the architect of Vieux Paris, never to be forgott

“Au-dessus de ma tête, Charles Quint, Joseph II ou Napoléon pendus à une vieillie potence en fer et faisant enseigne, grands empereurs qui ne sont plus bons qu’à achalander une auberge.” Victor Hugo , Le Rhin . At the first glance our peaceful sign seems to have nothing to do with politics whatsoever, except perhaps in so far as under its symbol the Philistines assemble, not only to drink and be merry, but, as a side-issue, to solve the world’s problems. The contrast of human strife and battle o

“Ici toute liberté, Monsieur, comme si nous étions au cabaret.” Frederic the Great. There is a surprising parallelism between the fathers of these two greatest men of the eighteenth century. These fathers, whom narrow-minded critics usually call pedants, transmitted to their sons the great gift of “life’s serious conduct.” Rarely has the old Councillor Goethe found so much just appreciation as Carlyle has shown for Frederic William I. The character of both the sons constitutes a happy combinatio

We cannot resist the temptation to quote as an introduction the ipsissima verba of England’s classical historian Macaulay on the evolution of public hospitality in his country. Most naturally the evolution of the sign runs parallel to the evolution of the tavern, and in a time of flourishing inns we may expect to find highly developed tavern signs. “From a very early period,” says Macaulay, in a chapter on the social condition of England in 1685, “the inns of England had been renowned. Our first

“Ne songez pas même à réformer les enseignes d’une ville!” In mediæval times the signs were not only charming or pious decorations of the snug narrow streets, but they were also very useful and practical guides for the wayfarer through the labyrinth of crooked lanes. Even the uneducated understood their pictorial language like illustrations in a book which give even to a child a certain clue to its meaning. For this very reason the learned Sebastian Brant decorated his edition of Virgil of 1522

“I am here in a strange land and have perhaps the seat of honor at table in this inn; but the man down there on the end has just as good a right here and there as I, since we are both here only guests.” Martin Luther : Sermons. Jubilate, 1542. It is not very much the fashion in these modern days to ask for the moral meaning of things, but we are old-fashioned enough to hold with those who believe that things have not only a soul, but that they give us a lesson too in revealing their soul to us,