Mr. Editor,--The Edinburgh Reviewer, cited by your correspondent Mr.
W.J. Thoms, seems to have sought rather too far for the origin of a
pawnbroker's golden balls.
He is right enough in referring their origin to the Italian bankers,
generally called Lombards; but he has overlooked the fact that the
greatest of those traders in money were the celebrated and eventually
princely house of the Medici of Florence. They bore pills on their
shield, (and those pills, as usual then, were gilded,) in allusion
to the professional origin from whence they had derived the name of
Medici; and their agents in England and other countries put that
armorial bearing over their doors as their sign, and the reputation
of that house induced others to put up the same sign.