ADDISON, _Spectator_, April 2, 1711.

Shop-signs were one of the most conspicuous features of the streets of
old London. In days when the numbering of houses was unknown, the use
of signs was indispensable for identification; and greatly must they
have contributed to the quaint and picturesque appearance of the
streets. Some projected far over the narrow roadway--competition to
attract attention and custom is no modern novelty--some were fastened
to posts or pillars in front of the houses. By the time of Charles II
the overhanging signs had become a nuisance and a danger, and in the
seventh year of that King's reign an Act was passed providing that no
sign should hang across the street, but that all should be fixed to
the balconies or fronts or sides of houses. This Act was not strictly
obeyed; and large numbers of signs were hung over the doors, while
many others were affixed to the fronts of the houses. Eventually, in
the second half of the eighteenth century, signs gradually disappeared
and the streets were numbered. There were occasional survivals which
are to be found to this day, such as the barber's pole, accompanied
sometimes by the brass basin of the barber-surgeon, the glorified
canister of a grocer or the golden leg of a hosier; and inn signs have
never failed us; but by the close of the eighteenth century most of
the old trade signs which flaunted themselves in the streets had
disappeared.

The sellers of tobacco naturally hung out their signs like other
tradesfolk. Signs in their early days were, no doubt, chosen to
intimate the trades of those who used them, and in the easy-going
old-fashioned days when it was considered the right and natural thing
for a son to be brought up to his father's trade and to succeed him
therein, they long remained appropriate and intelligible. Later, as we
shall see, they became meaningless in many cases. But in the days when
tobacco-smoking first came into vogue, the signs chosen naturally had
some reference to the trade they indicated, and one of the earliest
used was the sign of the "Black Boy," in allusion to the association
of the negro with tobacco cultivation. The "Black Boy" existed as a
shop-sign before tobacco's triumph, for Henry Machyn in his "Diary,"
so early as December 30, 1562, mentions a goldsmith "dwellying at the
sene of the Blake Boy, in the Cheep"; but the early sellers of tobacco
soon fastened on this appropriate sign. The earliest reference