PAWNBROKERS' THREE BALLS

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 E…