until its destruction in the Great Fire. It has been suggested that on the rebuilding of the premises, the new tenant, to ridicule the character of the former business, chose as his sign a goose stroking the bars of a gridiron with her foot, and wrote below "The Swan and Harp." This explanation of the origin of the sign is at least ingenious. Larwood and Hotten think that it was a homely rendering of a charge in the coat of arms of the Musicians' Company.

At the Goose and Gridiron Sir Christopher Wren presided over the St. Paul's Lodge of Freemasons for upwards of eighteen years. In that curious tavern book, the Vade Mecum of Maltworms, there is a drawing of the sign, and we are told in doggerel as rude that—

Dutch carvers from St. Paul's adjacent dome,
Hither to whet their whistles daily come.

The Goose and Gridiron, eighty years ago, was a famous house of call for coaches to Hammersmith, and various villages west of London.

A far more important and more picturesque hostelry was the Oxford Arms, approached by a passage from Warwick Lane, extending to Amen Corner on the south, and bounded on the west

REMINISCENCE OF OXFORD ARMS INN, WARWICK LANE, 1875

One of the finest of the galleried inns of London was the Oxford Arms, which had been rebuilt shortly after the Great Fire, and in the palmy days of coaching was connected with the Bull and Mouth, St. Martin's-le-Grand, both being in the hands of Mr. Edward Sherman, the great coach proprietor. It was destroyed in 1876.