Ben Jonson, who loved to discuss with Shakespeare in the Siren Club and to "anatomize the times deformity," may have been stimulated to write his comedy "The Silent Woman" by the tavern sign of that name. In Jonson's play, a Mr. Morose, an original old fellow, who holds all noise in detestation, weds a young lady, whose barely audible voice and scant replies have charmed him. When after the ceremony she reveals herself a loquacious scold and he gives vent to his disappointment, she replies with these endearing words: "Why, did you think you had married a statue, or a motion only? one of the French puppets, with the eyes turned with a wire? or some innocent out of the hospital that would stand with her hands thus, and a plaise mouth, and look upon you?"
But to comfort the feminists we should speak of a host truly gallant, who had a great white sign made, with the inscription below, "The Good Man." To the universal inquiry, "Where is the good man? I can't see him," he made answer, "Well, you see that is why I have left the blank space; if only I could find him."
Since there is a saint for every day of the calendar, we must not be astonished to find names among those adopted for tavern signs which to us bear no relation to sanctity; such as St. Fiacre over a drivers' bar, which seems rather the invention of some wag.
We must needs realize that all these religious signs have their origin in a time when popular imagination was mainly filled with the happenings of the Bible and the legends of the saints; when religion had not yet grown to be a Sunday occupation of a couple of hours, but was most intimately interwoven with the life of every day. Hence we find among subjects for signs not the saints only, whose human errors and sufferings have riveted a bond between them and the common people, but also the Deity itself. "La Trinité" was one of the latter in mediæval France, as evidenced by this passage in the song of a pilgrim:--
"De la alay plus oultre encore En un logis d'antiquité Qui se nomme la Trinité."
Other pilgrim taverns styled themselves "A l'image du Christ." We also meet with such inscriptions as "L'Humanité de Jesus Christ, notre sauveur divin"; the birth of Christ as a child, as in the charming old Swiss sign "Hie zum Christkindli"; the Madonna and scenes of her life like the "Annunciation," called Salutation in England. These and many other signs, such as "Purgatory," "Hell," and "Paradise," which have been revived in modern Paris on fantastic cabarets, meet our eyes on tavern signs. An old enumeration of London bars of the seventeenth century begins with the words:--