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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Night Side of London, by J. Ewing Ritchie
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Night Side of London
+
+
+Author: J. Ewing Ritchie
+
+
+
+Release Date: June 11, 2010  [eBook #32774]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NIGHT SIDE OF LONDON***
+
+
+Transcribed from the 1858 William Tweedie edition by David Price, email
+ccx074@pglaf.org
+
+
+
+
+
+                                   THE
+                          NIGHT SIDE OF LONDON.
+
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                    BY
+                            J. EWING RITCHIE,
+                   AUTHOR OF THE "LONDON PULPIT," ETC.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+    "In cities vice is hidden with most ease.
+    Or seen with least reproach.
+    * * *
+    I do confess them nurseries of the arts.
+    * * *
+    Such London is, by taste and wealth proclaim'd
+    The fairest capital of all the world,
+    By riot and incontinence the worst."
+
+                                                                   COWPER.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                         Second Edition, revised.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                 LONDON:
+                      WILLIAM TWEEDIE, 337, STRAND.
+                               MDCCCLVIII.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                      JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS.
+
+                                               PAGE
+INTRODUCTION                                      1
+SEEING A MAN HANGED                              34
+CATHERINE-STREET                                 45
+THE BAL MASQUE                                   52
+UP THE HAYMARKET                                 59
+THE CANTERBURY HALL                              67
+RATCLIFFE-HIGHWAY                                75
+JUDGE AND JURY CLUBS                             85
+THE CAVE OF HARMONY                              92
+DISCUSSION CLUBS                                 99
+THE CYDER CELLARS                               108
+LEICESTER-SQUARE                                115
+DR JOHNSON'S TAVERN                             123
+THE SPORTING PUBLIC-HOUSE                       131
+THE PUBLIC-HOUSE WITH A BILLIARD-ROOM           137
+THE RESPECTABLE PUBLIC-HOUSE                    143
+NIGHT-HOUSES                                    149
+HIGHBURY BARN                                   160
+BOXING NIGHT                                    166
+THE MOGUL                                       173
+CALDWELL'S                                      180
+CREMORNE                                        191
+THE COSTERMONGER'S FREE-AND-EASY                200
+THE POLICE-COURT                                208
+THE EAGLE TAVERN                                218
+THE LUNATIC ASYLUM                              227
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION.
+
+
+It is said of a stranger who came to London for the first time, and took
+up his quarters in one of the most crowded city streets, that he remained
+standing at the door the whole of the first day of his London existence,
+because he waited until the crowd had gone.  A man, says Max Schlesinger,
+who would do that, ought to rise and go to bed with the owl.  The owl is
+the symbol of wisdom; for once I would prevail upon the reader to do as
+the owls do, and become wise as they.  You may live at Clapham all your
+life, come into the city every day, attend on a gospel ministry, as the
+slang phrase is,--for it is not only wicked people that talk slang,--and
+know no more of London than the British public do of Timbuctoo.
+
+Think of what London is.  At the last census there were 2,362,236 persons
+of both sexes in it; 1,106,558 males, of whom 146,449 were under 5 years
+of age; and 1,255,678 females, of whom 147,173 were under 5 years of age.
+The unmarried males were 679,380, ditto females 735,871; the married men
+were 399,098, the wives 409,731; the widowers were 37,080, the widows
+110,076.  On the night of the census there were 28,598 husbands whose
+wives were not with them, and 39,231 wives mourning their absent lords.
+In 1856 the number of children born in London was 86,833, only one in 25
+of which is illegitimate; in the same period 56,786 persons died.  The
+Registrar-General assumes that, with the additional births, and by the
+fact of soldiers and sailors returning from the seat of war, and of
+persons engaged in peaceful pursuits settling in the capital, sustenance,
+clothing, and house accommodation must now be found in London for about
+60,000 inhabitants more than it contained at the end of 1855.  Think of
+that--the population of a large city absorbed in London, and no
+perceptible inconvenience occasioned by it!  Houses are still to let;
+there are still the usual tickets hung up in windows in quiet
+neighbourhoods, intimating that apartments furnished for the use of
+single gentlemen can be had within; the country still supplies the town
+with meat and bread, and we hear of no starvation in consequence of
+deficient supply.  London is the healthiest city in the world.  The city
+death-rate, according to Dr. Letheby's report for 1857, is 22.5 per 1000,
+and in all England it is 22.2.  During the last ten years the annual
+deaths have been on the average 25 to 1000 of the population, in 1856 the
+proportion was 22 to 1000; yet, in spite of this, half of the deaths that
+happen on an average in London between the ages of 20 and 40 are from
+consumption and diseases of the respiratory organs.  The Registrar traces
+this to the state of the streets.  He says: "There can be no doubt that
+the dirty dust suspended in the air that the people of London breathe
+often excites diseases of the respiratory organs.  The dirt of the
+streets is produced and ground now by innumerable horses, omnibuses, and
+carriages, and then beat up in fine dust, which fills the mouth, and
+inevitably enters the air-passages in large quantities.  The dust is not
+removed every day, but, saturated with water in the great thoroughfares,
+sometimes ferments in damp weather, and at other times ascends again
+under the heat of the summer sun as atmospheric dust."
+
+London, says Henry Mayhew, may be safely asserted to be the most densely
+populated city in all the world; containing one-fourth more people than
+Pekin, and two-thirds more than Paris--more than twice as many as
+Constantinople--four times as many as St. Petersburg--five times as many
+as Vienna, or New York, or Madrid--nearly seven times as many as
+Berlin--eight times as many as Amsterdam--nine times as many as
+Rome--fifteen times as many as Copenhagen--and seventeen times as many as
+Stockholm.  "London," says Horace Say, "c'est une province couverte de
+maisons."  It covers an area of 122 square miles in extent, or 78,029
+statute acres; and contains 327,391 houses.  Annually 4000 new houses are
+in erection for upwards of 40,000 new-comers.  The continuous line of
+buildings stretching from Highgate to Camberwell is said to be 12 miles
+long.  It is computed if the buildings were set in a row they would reach
+across the whole of England and France, from York to the Pyrenees.
+
+When the stone in Panyer's Alley was placed on its site three centuries
+since, the circumference was about five miles.  At present, however, to
+make a pedestrian expedition around the metropolis would, to most
+persons, be an undertaking of some importance, as may be seen by
+referring to the following particulars, which have been gathered from a
+recently published map:--From Chiswick to Kentish-town, 12 miles; from
+Kentish-town to Millwall, 17.5 miles; from Millwall to Chiswick, 28
+miles--total, 57.5 miles, very nearly three days' journey, at the rate of
+20 miles a day; and it will be observed that in the line drawn,
+Battersea, Clapham, Canning-town, and many other places, which even at
+present can be scarcely said to be separated from London, have been left
+out.  "As the crow would fly" across streets and houses from the point
+whence we started at Chiswick to the farthest east, the distance is
+nearly eleven miles, and the greatest width from north to south upwards
+of seven miles.  The metropolis is divided into 38 different poor-law
+districts, some of them parishes, and some of them unions, but each
+managing separately their own poor.  Of these, 27 are in Middlesex, two
+in Kent, and nine in Surrey.  Of the 27 in Middlesex, 10 are unions of
+various extent; 17 are single parishes, many of them of great extent, and
+comprising a large amount of property and population.  The unions in
+Middlesex consist of a small number of parishes, two consisting of two
+parishes, two of three, one of five, one of four, one of six, one of
+seven, and one of nine parishes.  The city of London consists of 98
+parishes, some of them small in extent, but containing a large amount of
+property and population.  The unions in Kent consist of four and seven
+parishes.  Of the nine in Surrey three are unions, consisting, one of two
+parishes, another of three, and the third of six parishes.  The remaining
+six are all single parishes, each administering its own affairs.  The
+total population of these districts is 2,500,000; the average number of
+paupers to be dealt with 105,000; the amount of expenditure for the year
+ending Lady-day, 1856, was 875,000 pounds; and the net rateable value of
+the property contributing to the relief of the poor was 10,900,000
+pounds.  The proportion which the metropolis bore to the whole of England
+and Wales was, as to population, one-eighth; as to pauperism,
+one-twelfth.
+
+London has 10,500 distinct streets, squares, circuses, crescents,
+terraces, villas, rows, buildings, places, lanes, courts, alleys, mews,
+yards, rents.  The paved streets of London, according to a return
+published in 1856, number over 5000, and exceed 2000 miles in length; the
+cost of this paved roading was 14 millions, and the repairs cost
+1,800,000 pounds per annum.  The Post Office employs 3200 officials in
+London alone.  London contains 1900 miles of gas pipes, with a capital of
+nearly 4,000,000 pounds spent in the preparation of gas.  The cost of
+gas-lighting is half a million.  It has 360,000 lights; and 13,000,000
+cubic feet of gas are burnt every night.  Last year along these streets
+the enormous quantity of upwards of 80 millions of gallons of water
+rushed for the supply of the inhabitants, being nearly double what it was
+in 1845.  Mr Mayhew says, if the entire people of the capital were to be
+drawn up in marching order, two and two, the length of the great army of
+Londoners would be no less than 670 miles, and supposing them to move at
+the rate of three miles an hour, it would require more than nine days and
+nights for the average population to pass by.  To accommodate this crowd,
+125,000 vehicles pass through the thoroughfares in the course of 12
+hours; 3000 cabs, 10,000 private and job carriages and carts, ply daily
+in the streets; at the present time there are upwards of 800 omnibuses
+running along various routes in the metropolis, and of this number 595
+are the property of a single and mostly foreign proprietary, the London
+General Omnibus Company.  600 omnibuses, with horses and harness and
+goodwill, were purchased by the company for a sum of 400,000 pounds, or
+for very nearly 700 pounds for each vehicle.  The 595 omnibuses of the
+company ran in London, in the week ending 31st of October, 1857, not less
+than 222,779 miles, or nearly ten times the circumference of the globe,
+and they carried not less than 920,000 passengers.  Assuming that the
+remaining one-fourth of the London omnibuses, not belonging to the
+company, carried an equal proportion, we shall have, as the travelling
+portion of the population of London, 1,115,000 persons.  3000 conveyances
+enter the metropolis daily from the surrounding country.  In the year
+1856 the total revenue derived from the duty on omnibuses within the area
+of the great metropolis amounted to 74,270 pounds against 85,965 pounds
+in 1855, and 108,051 pounds in 1854.  The revenue from cabs in the
+metropolis was 82,110 pounds against 75,281 pounds, and 64,210 pounds in
+1854.  Of the revenue on omnibuses last year, 69,493 pounds accrued from
+mileage duty, 3791 pounds from license duty, and 983 pounds from drivers'
+and conductors' licenses.  As regards the cab duty, 74,736 pounds accrued
+from weekly duty, 5292 pounds from license duty, and 2081 pounds from
+drivers' and watermen's licenses.
+
+Speaking generally, Tennyson tells us--
+
+    "Every minute dies a man,
+    Every minute one is born."
+
+In London, 169 people die daily, and a babe is born every five minutes.
+The number of persons, says the Registrar-General, who died in 1856, in
+116 public institutions, such as workhouses and hospitals, was 10,381.
+It is really shocking to think, and a deep stigma on the people,--or on
+the artificial arrangements of society, by which so much poverty is
+perpetuated,--that nearly one person out of five, who died that year,
+closed his days under a roof provided by law or public charity.  In 1856
+the police report 147 suicides.  Dr. Wakley says, 4000 infants die
+annually of neglect.  It is calculated 500 people are drowned in the
+Thames every year.  In the first week of last year there were five deaths
+from intemperance alone.  How much wretchedness lies in these facts,--for
+the deaths from actual intemperance bear but a small proportion to the
+deaths induced by the immoderate use of intoxicating liquors; and of the
+500 drowned, by far the larger class, we have every reason to believe,
+are of the number of whom Hood wrote--
+
+    "Mad with life's history,
+    Glad to death's mystery
+    Swift to be hurled--
+       Anywhere, anywhere,
+    Out of the world!"
+
+A meeting was held last year of the unemployed, chiefly the carpenters,
+bricklayers, and bricklayers' labourers of the metropolis, in which it
+was stated that their number--though very probably there may be some
+exaggeration here--is 35,000.  If these men are married and have
+families, we get a further idea of the deep distress in this wealthy and
+luxurious capital,--this capital where the gold of Australia, the jewels
+of Golconda, the silks and spices of the East, come for sale, and are
+lavished as freely on the most questionable purposes and persons as on
+the noblest specimens of humanity and the most glorious objects for which
+men care to live.  Then think of the inmates of the lunatic asylums, and
+the poor-houses, and the hospitals, in most cases sent there as the
+result of their own ignorance or imprudence.  Last Christmas day the
+dinners provided at the workhouses for the inmates fed between 30 and
+40,000.  Add to these our prison population, and our criminal classes,
+and our prostitutes,--and what a picture we get of the Night Side of
+London, of the classes whose existence is a reproach or a curse.  In
+London one man in every ninety belongs to the criminal class.
+
+According to the last reports, there were in London 143,000 vagrants
+admitted in one year into the casual wards of the workhouses.  In 1856 it
+appears that in all 73,240 persons were taken into custody, of whom
+45,941 were males, and 27,209 females; 18,000 of the apprehensions were
+on account of drunkenness, 8160 for unlawful possession of goods, 7021
+for simple larceny, 6763 for common assaults, 2914 for assaults on the
+police; 4303 women were taken into custody as prostitutes.  The period of
+life most prolific of crime is that between the 20th and 25th years.  The
+convictions upon trial in 1856 were in the following proportions:--Under
+10 years of age, 1; 10 years and under 15 years, 91; 15 years and under
+20 years, 610; 20 years and under 25 years, 770; 25 years and under 30
+years, 390; 30 years and under 40 years, 410; 40 years and under 50
+years, 188; 50 years and under 60 years, 90; 63 years and upwards, 37.
+The committals for murder in the year 1856 were 11; they were 12 in 1855,
+10 in 1854, 7 in 1853,11 in 1852, 8 in 1851, 11 in 1850, 19 in 1849, 11
+in 1848, and 10 in 1847.  Of the larcenies in dwelling-houses last year,
+only 315 were committed by means of false keys, as many as 2175 through
+doors being left open, 679 by lifting up a window, or breaking glass, and
+31 by entering attic windows from empty houses.  Again, 1595 such
+larcenies were committed by lodgers, 1701 by servants, and as many as 673
+by means of false messages.  The cases enumerated under the last three
+heads are such as the police could hardly be expected to prevent.  2371
+persons were reported last year to the police as lost, and of these the
+police restored 1084.  The City returns, for which I am indebted to the
+kindness of G. Borlase Childs, Esq., surgeon to the force, are for 1856,
+as follows: number of persons taken into custody; males 3030, females
+1014; of these, 1083 males and 450 females were discharged; 1628 males,
+517 females were summarily convicted or held to bail; 319 males and 77
+females were committed for trial: 8 males and 1 female under 10 years of
+age; 322 males and 37 females under 15; 755 males and 152 females under
+20; 645 males and 235 females under 25; 341 males and 165 females under
+30; 497 males and 220 females under 40; 300 males and 116 females under
+50; 125 males and 78 females under 60; and above that age 41 males and 20
+females.  Tried by the education test of the whole number taken into
+custody, 782 males and 421 females could neither read nor write; 1925
+males and 570 females could read and write imperfectly; 317 males and 23
+females could read and write well; 6 males come under the head of
+superior instruction.  The value of property stolen was 11,425 pounds; of
+property recovered 3829 pounds; the return of destitute persons taken in
+charge by the police is, men 141, women 115, children 79.  During the
+same period 1603 males and 1097 females were brought to the station
+house.  Children missing and found by the police; males 496, females 319.
+The return of the metropolitan police for 1857, was 2825 brothels, and
+8600 prostitutes.  In the City, the number of such houses and persons is
+very small; the prison population at any particular time is 6000, costing
+for the year 170,000 pounds.  Our juvenile thieves cost us 300 pounds
+a-piece.  The average income of the London thief is estimated at 2 pounds
+per week.
+
+Again, let us look at the classes whose labours and occupations and modes
+of life are inconsistent with health, or not favourable to any great
+development of moral principle.  Almost 20,000 persons are engaged in
+Sunday trading; the number of ragged children is nearly 30,000, the
+number of families living in one room is estimated as high as 150,000.
+It appears from a report by Mr. Goderich, officer of health in the parish
+of Kensington, that in a place called the Potteries there are 1147 human
+beings and 1041 pigs congregated within a space of less than nine acres,
+the present number of pigs being below the usual average.  The dwellings
+of a large proportion of the inhabitants of this locality are mere hovels
+with shattered roofs and unglazed windows, the floor is below the level
+of the external soil, which has been raised by excessive accumulations of
+filth of all kinds, and the walls are at all times partially damp and
+giving out pestilential gases, intolerable to those who have not been
+born among them, fatal to the health of those who have.  Another portion
+of the miserable population has converted old caravan bodies, removed in
+some cases from their wheels, into houses; others have no other dwelling
+than ruinous post-chaise bodies, for which a rent of sixpence per week is
+paid.  In one of the caravans eight persons dwell, among whom a child
+suffering from small-pox was battling with death at the time of Mr.
+Goderich's visit in March.
+
+Mr. Timbs calculates the number of professional beggars in London at
+15,000, two-thirds of whom are Irish.  30,000 men, women, and children
+are employed in the costermonger trade; besides, we have, according to
+Mr. Mayhew, 2000 street sellers of green stuff, 4000 street sellers of
+eatables and drinkables, 1000 street sellers of stationery, 4000 street
+sellers of other articles, whose receipts are three millions sterling,
+and whose incomes may be put down at one.  Let us extend our survey, and
+we shall not wonder that the public-houses--and the gin palaces--and the
+casinos--and the theatres--and the penny gaffs--and the lowest and vilest
+places of resort in London, are full.  In Spitalfields there are 70,000
+weavers with but 10_s._ per week; there are 22,479 tailors, 30,805
+shoemakers, 43,928 milliners; seamstresses, 21,210; bonnet-makers, 1769;
+cap-makers, 1277.  What hard, wretched work is theirs!
+
+In the first week of January this present year, a poor woman named Martha
+Duke was brought up at the Thames police office, charged with attempting
+to commit suicide.  She was a poor needle-woman, and found the misery of
+that mode of life greater than could be borne.  Speaking not of this case
+in particular, but of needlewomen in general, Mr. Burch, the resident
+medical officer of the London Hospital, stated that "a large number of
+patients had been under his care, and he had carefully investigated a
+considerable number of cases, and was satisfied that needle-women were
+the most ill-paid class of people and the most hard-working on earth.
+They were miserably paid," he added, "and he knew that numbers of them,
+with constitutions broken down, earned from 3_s._ to 4_s._ per week only,
+and for that scanty pittance were compelled to work from three o'clock in
+the morning till ten at night.  They soon became enfeebled by
+insufficient diet and over-work, and when broken down either had recourse
+to suicide or prostitution."  In 1844 the operative tailors instituted an
+inquiry into the sweating system, and then it was found that there were
+at the West End 676 men, women, and children working under sweaters, and
+occupying 92 small rooms, the majority of which measured eight feet by
+ten.  The sweater, it may be as well to state, is the man who contracts
+with the large houses to supply them with shirts, or clothes, or any
+other kind of slop work; the more his victims sweat, the more are his
+gains.  The sweater is often a Jew, never a Christian.
+
+Let the reader walk with us to a fashionable clothing establishment--a
+mart, we believe, as it is called.  The building, as you approach it,
+seems a palace.  It is redolent with polished mahogany and plate-glass
+and gilt.  You pass it when the lamps are lit, and you think of the
+Arabian Nights.  It is illuminated as if peace had just been proclaimed,
+or some great national desire had been realised.  You enter with cash,
+and all is fair and smooth within.  Whatever you want in the way of
+apparel is there, and at a price for which no honest tradesman can afford
+to sell it.  Honest! asks the reader, is not the man honest?  Does he
+steal the cloth?  Certainly not.  Does he not pay rent, and taxes, and
+wages?  Most certainly he does.  Do not his creditors all get twenty
+shillings in the pound?  Most undoubtedly they do; the law protects them,
+and with them the man, willing or not, must keep himself right.  So far
+as they are concerned, honesty is the best policy.  How, then, does he
+make his profit?  How is this monster establishment maintained?  Out of
+what fund is it that its glitter and glare are paid for?  We shall now
+see.  Come down this stinking court.  Go up those creaking stairs.  Enter
+that miserable garret.  Look at those men, who know nothing of labour but
+its curse, and of life but its misery.  Mark the haggard faces already
+stamped with the impress of death.  If you can bear the polluted
+atmosphere, you will hear from these men how they toil from early morning
+far into the night for two shillings a day; how for them the fine air and
+the golden sunshine, and the rest of the sabbath, exist not; and it is by
+them, by their sweat and blood and sinew, that the profit is made.  And
+now go back and look into the gilded shop, and it will seem to you a
+Golgotha--a place of skulls.  Is another illustration needed?  Up in yon
+miserable chamber, without fire--without food--without furniture--almost
+without clothes, Martha Duke is stitching to earn the few pence by which
+she prolongs life, and its misery.  Once, youth was hers, with its bright
+hopes and joys; but they are gone, and with an aching heart and pallid
+brow she plies her daily task.  Is it wonderful that, wanting coals or
+something better than dry bread, the shirt or the waistcoat should be
+pawned?  Is it not more wonderful that such bleak and hopeless poverty
+should be so honest as it is?  And yet from such poor forlorn, forgotten
+women as these, proceed the profits which pay for dazzling window and
+gorgeous pile.  Is it strange that the city missionaries for last year
+show an increase of fallen women in their districts of 1035?
+
+Bear in mind also that corporal labourers are shorter lived and endure
+more physical evil than the mental labourers.  The coal-whippers'
+work--the most wasteful, unscientific, and pernicious expenditure of
+human muscle ever devised, writes Dr Chambers--overstrains the fibres of
+the heart, and the organs become diseased.  Painters again are liable to
+palsy and colic, from the use of white lead.  The tailor sits till the
+stomach and bowels becomes disordered, the spine twisted, the gait
+shambling, and the power of taking the exercise necessary to health
+obliterated.  Shoemakers and bootmakers suffer equally from a constrained
+position and the pressure of the last against the stomach.  Heart-burn
+and indigestion are so common among them, that a pill in the Pharmacopeia
+is called the cobbler's pill.  Then there is the baker's malady, which
+carries off a large proportion of its victims.  Dressmakers are
+peculiarly subject to the attacks of consumption; workwomen constantly
+suffer from varicose veins.
+
+There are two worlds in London, with a gulf between--the rich and the
+poor.  We have glanced at the latter; for the sake of contrast let us
+look at the former.  Emerson says the wealth of London determines prices
+all over the globe.  The revenue of the corporation of the city of London
+for 1856 was 2,595,216 pounds 16_s._ 4.5_d._  In 1853 the money coined in
+the mint was 11,952,391 pounds in gold, and 701,544 pounds in silver.
+The business of the Bank of England is conducted by about 800 clerks,
+whose salaries amount to about 200,000 pounds.  The Bank in 1857 had
+26,683,790 pounds bank notes in circulation.  In the same year there were
+about 5 millions deposited in the Savings Banks of the metropolis.  The
+gross Customs revenue of the port of London in 1849 was 11,070,176
+pounds.  65 millions is the estimate formed by Mr M'Culloch of the total
+value of the produce conveyed into and from London.  The gross rental as
+assessed by the property and income tax is 12.5 millions.  The gross
+property insured is 166,000,000 pounds, and only two-fifths of the houses
+are insured.  The amount of capital at the command of the entire London
+bankers may be estimated at 64 millions; the insurance companies have
+always 10 millions of deposits ready for investment.  78 millions are
+employed in discounts.  In 1841 the transactions of one London house
+amounted to 30 millions.  In 1840 the payments made in the clearing house
+were 974,580,600 pounds,--an enormous sum, which will appear still
+greater when we remember all sums under 100 pounds are omitted from this
+statement.  All this business cannot be carried on without a considerable
+amount of eating and drinking.  The population consumes annually 277,000
+bullocks, 30,000 calves, 1,480,000 sheep, 34,000 pigs, 1,600,000 quarters
+of wheat, 310,464,000 pounds of potatoes, 89,672,000 cabbages.  Of fish
+the returns are almost incredible.  Besides, it eats 2,742,000 fowls,
+1,281,000 game.  Exclusive of those brought from the different parts of
+the united kingdom, from 70 to 75 millions of eggs are annually imported
+into London from France and other countries.  About 13,000 cows are kept
+in the city and its environs for the supply of milk and cream; and if we
+add to their value that of the cheese, and butter, and milk, brought from
+the country into the city, the expenditure on dairy produce must be
+enormous.  Then London consumes 65,000 pipes of wine, 2,000,000 gallons
+of spirits, 43,200,000 gallons of porter and ale, and burns 3,000,000
+tons of coal; and I have seen it estimated that one-fourth of the
+commerce of the nation is carried on in its port.  On Boxing Night it was
+estimated that 60,000 persons visited the various theatres and places of
+amusement in London.  In 1856, 361,714 persons visited the British
+Museum; 161,764, Hampton Court; 344,140 went to Kew Gardens.  The total
+number of bathers in the Serpentine were 20,000 persons.  On the last
+Derby, the South Western Company alone conveyed 37,700 passengers.  In
+London in 1853, according to Sir R. Mayne, there were 3613 beer shops,
+5279 public houses, 13 wine rooms.  The theatres and saloons licensed by
+the Lord Chamberlain are, the Haymarket Theatre, Adelphi, Olympic,
+Princess's, Strand, Surrey, Queen's, Soho, City of London, Marylebone,
+Standard, Pavilion, Victoria, Sadler's Wells, St James's, Lyceum,
+Astley's, Her Majesty's, Drury Lane, Grecian Saloon, Albert, Britannia,
+Bower, Earl of Effingham.  Literary Institutions shut up.  The Great
+Globe itself is a doubtful property.  That beautiful building, the
+Panopticon in Leicester-square, was a failure, and the Adelaide Gallery
+has long been closed.  An attempt was made to form an educational
+association in Charing Cross, where, by means of a library and cheap
+lectures, the popular mind could be improved and instructed and amused,
+but the attempt did not succeed; dancing, drinking, theatrical
+representations,--most of them adaptations from the French,--music, are
+the only pleasures which a London population cared for.  Even as in the
+old Hebrew days, Wisdom lifts up her voice in our streets, and no man
+regards her testimony.
+
+And now to guard all this wealth, to preserve all this mass of industry
+honest, and to keep down all this crime, what have we?  5847 police,
+costing 434,081 pounds, 13 police courts, costing 67,006 pounds, and
+about a dozen criminal prisons; 69 union relieving officers, 316 officers
+of local boards, and 1256 other local officers.  We have 35 weekly
+magazines, 9 daily newspapers, 5 evening, 72 weekly ones.  Independently
+of the mechanics' institutions, colleges, and endowed schools, we have
+14,000 children of both sexes clothed and educated gratis, and the
+National and British and Foreign Schools in all parts of London, and
+Sunday schools.  We have Bartholomew's Hospital, relieving, in 1856,
+in-patients 5933, out-patients 78,443; Guy's Hospital; St Thomas's, with
+4531 in-patients, outpatients, 34,281; St George's; the Middlesex, last
+year relieving 2268 in-patients, and 16,844 out-patients; the London, the
+King's College, the University College, and many more.  In the Cancer
+Hospital last year 2500 patients were treated: then there are Bedlam, the
+Foundling Hospital, the Philanthropic Institution, the Magdalen.  In the
+report of the Statistical Society of London it is stated that 14 general
+hospitals in London possess an income from realised property to the
+amount of 109,687 pounds; annual subscriptions, 17,091 pounds; donations,
+16,636 pounds; legacies, 10,206 pounds; and their miscellaneous sources
+of income to 1996 pounds.  The total income of all these hospitals from
+every source is 155,616 pounds; and the annual contributions of the
+public amount to 45,929 pounds.  In addition to the above hospitals there
+are in this metropolis 36 special hospitals, possessing an aggregate
+income of 117,218 pounds; making the income of the general and special
+hospitals taken together amount to 272,834 pounds.  There are also
+returns from 42 general dispensaries, possessing incomes from all sources
+of 21,000 pounds; and 18 special dispensaries, with annual incomes of
+8064 pounds.  If these two sums, making 29,064 pounds, be added to the
+former, it gives the enormous amount of 301,898 pounds annually expended
+in medical charities in this metropolis; and this sum, large as it is,
+excludes Samaritan and other funds connected with hospitals and
+dispensaries, poor-law medical relief (28,776 pounds), cost of
+maintenance of pauper lunatics (79,988 pounds), vaccination (4292
+pounds), and nurses' training institutions.  All these sums would make a
+grand total of nearly half a million expended on our sick poor.  The City
+Missionaries now number 325, and every missionary visits once a month
+about 500 families or 2800 persons.  The Ragged School Union has its
+ramifications in every part of the metropolis.  Their returns are 128
+Sunday Schools with 16,937 scholars in attendance; 98 day ditto, with
+13,057; 117 evening schools with 8085; and 84 industrial classes with
+3224.  London has 12 societies for the reformation of life and public
+morals with a total income of 11,583 pounds; 18 for reclaiming the
+fallen, and staying the progress of crime, with 35,036 pounds; 14 for the
+relief of general destitution and distress, with 23,880 pounds; 12 for
+the relief of specified distress, with 29,881 pounds; 14 for aiding the
+resources of the industrious, with 7246 pounds; 11 for the blind, deaf,
+and dumb, with 34,762 pounds; 103 colleges, hospitals, and other asylums
+for the aged (exclusive of Chelsea and Greenwich Hospitals, 83,047
+pounds); 16 charitable pension societies, with 18,989 pounds; 74
+charitable and provident societies, chiefly for specified classes, with
+103,227 pounds; 31 asylums for orphans and other necessitous children,
+with 81,015 pounds; 10 educational foundations, exclusive of libraries,
+modern colleges, or proprietary schools, 93,112 pounds; 4 charitable
+ditto, with 13,300 pounds; 40 school societies, religious book,
+church-aiding, and Christian instructing, irrespective of government
+grants or establishments, with an income, taking the sale of
+publications, as much as 318,189 pounds.  Mr Low gives the total number
+of charitable institutions as 500; Mr Mayhew puts down their number as
+530.  Then there are 100 temperance meetings held weekly.  May we not
+hope that all these institutions have some effect, that by means of them
+some are reclaimed, and many saved?
+
+The more direct religious agency may be estimated as follows.  In the
+Handbook to Places of Worship, published by Low, in 1851, there is a list
+of 371 churches and chapels in connexion with the Establishment; the
+number of church sittings, according to Mr Mann, is 409,184; the
+Independents have about 140 places of worship and 100,436 sittings; the
+Baptists, 130 chapels, and accommodation for 54,234; the Methodists, 154
+chapels, 60,696; the Presbyterians, 23 chapels and 18,211 sittings; the
+Unitarians, 9 chapels and about 3300 sittings; the Roman Catholics, 35
+chapels and 35,994 sittings; 4 Quaker chapels, with sittings for 3151;
+the Moravians have two chapels, with 1100 sittings; the Jews have 11
+synagogues and 3692 sittings.  There are 94 chapels belonging to the New
+Church, the Plymouth Brethren, the Irvingites, the Latter-Day Saints,
+Sandemanians, Lutherans, French Protestants, Greeks, Germans, Italians,
+which chapels have sittings for 18,833.  We thus get 691,723 attendants
+on divine exercises.
+
+Those who know London life will know that I have not glanced at its
+darkest side: any man of the world will tell you infamies which I may not
+name here.  I do not go so far as Mr Patmore, and affirm that in the
+higher ranks of life a young man is obliged to keep a mistress to avoid
+being laughed at; but I can conceive of no city more sunk in
+licentiousness and rascality than ours.  Paris, Hamburgh, Vienna, may be
+as bad, but they cannot be worse.  The poor are looked after by the
+police--visited by the city missionary; their wants and woes are worked
+up into newspaper articles, and they live as it were in houses of glass.
+It is true that one half the world does not know how the other half
+lives; but it is not true in the sense in which it is generally affirmed.
+Who ever has an idea that a pious baronet, taking the chair at a
+religious meeting in Exeter Hall, will prove a felon; that that house,
+eminent in the mercantile and philanthropic world, will sanction the
+circulation of forged Dock warrants; that that manager, about to engage
+in prayer at a meeting of directors, will turn out to be the manager of
+the greatest swindle of modern times?  Who sees a dishonoured suicide in
+the patriotic Sadleir, or in the philanthropic Redpath a convict for
+life, or in the dashing Robson a maniac?  If I tell you that respectable
+old gentleman now coming out of his club is going to inspect a fresh
+victim, whom some procuress has lured with devilish art, you will tell me
+that I am uncharitable; or if I point you to that well-appointed equipage
+in the Park, and tell you that that fair young girl that sits within has
+crushed many a young wife's heart, and has sent many a man to the devil
+before his time, you will tell me I exaggerate: I do nothing of the kind.
+If I were to tell what most men know--what everyone knows, except those
+whose business it is to know it, and to seek to reform it--I should be
+charged with indelicacy, as if truth could be indelicate, and my book
+perhaps suppressed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice--if that
+abortion exists still.  We are choked up with cant; almost everything we
+believe in is a lie.  The prayer of Ajax should be ours,--Light--more
+light.
+
+What are we to do?--to stand stock still, looking to heaven "with a
+frenzied air, as if to ask if a God were there?"  One can almost believe,
+with George Gilfillan, that the earth needs a new gospel and a new
+manifestation of divine power.  From this low estate who is to rescue us?
+Not the aristocracy, a barbarous institution, perpetrating barbarous
+ideas in our midst,--that work is not honourable; whereas all true
+civilization points us to the fact, that man is only happy and virtuous
+as he is steadily industrious; and thus our most uncivilized classes are
+our upper and lower,--our lords and ladies on one side, and our rogues
+and prostitutes on the other.  Not our law-makers, who imprison our young
+lads in costly jails, where the criminals have luxuries denied to the
+poor; and then in Newgate, or at the public works, mix them all up
+together, that the comparatively innocent may learn to be adepts in
+crime.  Not our religious, I fear, when, from the Archbishop of
+Canterbury down to Dr Cumming, the cry is, If you have a proper
+translation of the Bible you will destroy the faith of the people.  Not
+our trading classes, becoming richer and more sunk in flunkeyism every
+day.  But it may be that these--
+
+    "Are graves from which a glorious phantom may
+    Burst to illumine our tempestuous day."
+
+Whom am I to blame?  Not the victims, but the fathers, and mothers, and
+divines, and schoolmasters, and governing classes.  Father, you have
+given your bold, manly son an emasculated religion,--a religion that
+wilfully shuts its eyes, and will not look upon life as it is; and,
+immediately he goes into the world, away vanish all the pasteboard
+defences with which you childishly sought to guard him; and yet you will
+not confess that in inculcating religious creeds,--that in teaching
+children catechisms,--that in vaguely telling them to be good,--that in
+leading them to believe in forms rather than truths, you are only damming
+up for a while the passionate impulses of young blood, that they may
+ultimately exert a more tumultuous and irresistible sway.  You take the
+little Arab of the streets, and, for acts of levity and wantonness which
+all boys commit, you send him to prison, at an age when you confess he is
+not a responsible creature, and then idiotically wonder that he turns out
+a criminal, and that he wars with society till he is hanged.  You are
+surprised that woman, fond of praise, of dress, and pleasure, should
+prefer to walk the street in silk and satin, to have a short life and a
+merry one, rather than slave and drudge, and end her days after all in a
+workhouse.  You tone down your fashionably educated daughters into
+automatons, and then wonder that hot youth finds domestic life tame and
+dull.  Above all, do not go away with the idea that we have reached the
+utmost height of civilization,--that we are a model people,--that it is
+our mission to set up as teachers of religion to all mankind.  Let us
+remember that the increase of crime and dissipation are facts; that there
+can be no corrupter city than London, and that it must be so, so long as
+we make professions our practice so scandalously denies.  I have heard
+Her Majesty's proclamation against vice and immorality read at
+quarter-sessions by men in whose reading it became a farce which the most
+ignorant bumpkin in court could relish.  Now we are going to do wonders,
+the policeman is to supplement the parson, the wicked are to be hunted
+down.  Is this the way seriously to set about moral reform?  Routine and
+officialism in church and state have made the outside of the sepulchre
+white enough; do we not need a little cleansing within?  How long will
+men look for grapes from thorns?
+
+
+
+
+SEEING A MAN HANGED.
+
+
+I am not about to give an opinion as to the propriety or impropriety of
+capital punishments.  On this point good men have differed, and will
+differ, I dare say, for some time to come.  What I wish to impress upon
+the philanthropic or Christian reader is the horrible nature and
+atrocious effect of a public execution.
+
+A few Sunday evenings since I was passing by Newgate, along the outside
+of which a considerable crowd had been collected.  Respectable mechanics,
+with their wives and children, were staring at its dreary stone walls.
+Ragged boys and girls were romping and laughing in the streets.  All the
+neighbouring public-houses were filled with a tipsy crowd.  Here and
+there a few barriers had been erected, and workmen were engaged in
+putting up more.  Why were these preparations made?  For what purpose had
+this crowd collected?  A man was to be hung, was the reply.  I resolved
+for once to see the tragedy performed.  To me or the living mass around,
+that man was an utter stranger.  I had never seen him or heard the sound
+of his voice; all I knew was that he had led an outlaw's life, and was to
+die as outlaws ofttimes do.  How strange the mysterious interest with
+which death clothes everything it touches!  Is it that looking at a man
+so soon to have done with life we fancy we can better pry into the great
+secret?  Do we deem that seeing him struggle we shall die more manfully
+ourselves, or is it merely the vague interest with which we regard any
+one about to travel into distant regions, all unknown to him or us, and
+the secrets of which he can never return to tell?  Be this as it may, I
+went back at twelve.  The public-houses had been closed, decent people
+had gone home to bed; but already the crowd had become denser, already
+had the thief and the bully from all the slums and stews of the
+metropolis been collected together.  You can easily recognise the
+criminal population of our capital.  The policeman knows them
+instinctively, as with their small wiry figures, restless eyes, and pale
+faces, they pass him by.  One can tell them as easily as one knows the
+child of Norman origin by his noble bearing, or the Anglo-Saxon by his
+blue eyes and rosy cheeks.  There is generally something fine, and
+genial, and hearty about an English mob.  On the night of the
+peace-rejoicing you might have taken a lady from one end of London to the
+other, and she would not have heard an objectionable word, or been
+inconvenienced in the least; but the mob of which I now write seemed
+utterly repulsive and reprobate; all its sympathies seemed perverted.  It
+is a hard world this, I know, and it has but little mercy for the erring
+and the unfortunate; but that they should regard it with such evil eyes,
+that they should be so completely estranged from all its recognised modes
+of thought and action, that it should seem to them such a complete curse,
+was what I was not prepared to expect.  It really made one's blood run
+cold to hear the mob around me talk.  The man to be hung had rushed into
+a jeweller's shop as it was being closed, beaten the shopman, who tried
+to defend his master's property, with a life-preserver, and then left him
+for dead.  But he had not said one word about his accomplices, and the
+crowd evidently admired him rather than not.  "The ticket-of-leave man
+was out on starvation," as one of them informed me.  "The Government," I
+drop the expressive adjective by which the noun was prefixed, "dodges
+him, and if he steals it is only what he must do, and if murder follows
+it is not his fault, and Government is unjust in hanging him for it."
+Such was the popular notion of the subject in my immediate neighbourhood.
+Government seemed to have planned the opportunity for the holders of such
+opinions to ventilate them.  Till eight o'clock these men were to be
+formed into one compact mass; and how were they to pass their time if
+they did not talk? and here who was there to lift up his voice on behalf
+of law and order? and if there were such, who would have listened?
+Realise the state of the case.  Look around!  Where do you see the clear
+front and unabashed presence of honesty and virtue?  The virtuous and the
+honest have long been in bed.  Here there is a fight.  That bundle of
+rags, with matted hair covering all the face so that you cannot clearly
+see a feature, is the Clare Market Pet, and she has just encountered
+Slashing Sal, between whom and herself there has been mortal enmity for
+years.  Both women--yes, they are women, nor so fallen are they but that
+the temperance agent or the city missionary may yet lead them to a
+diviner life, and _He_ may smile on them who never yet turned away
+repentant son or daughter of sin and shame--are very tipsy, very dirty,
+and very red.  Shrieking and cursing, the Clare Market Pet rushes on
+Slashing Sal, who is by no means loth for the encounter.  A ring is
+formed, men and boys halloo and encourage, and the battle rages
+furiously, though both women are far too drunk to do each other any
+serious harm.  At length the Clare Market Pet is vanquished and order is
+restored, just as we are told tranquillity reigns at Naples.  "Please
+give me a penny," says a girl of about fourteen, and I find myself in the
+midst of a group of youthful costermongers and their wives, who have come
+here for a lark, just as they frequent the penny gaff, or crowd the
+gallery in the Victoria.  I listen to their slang till I feel sick, as I
+think for what a future of crime and its result they are now rapidly
+ripening.  In this Christian land can no agency be formed that shall save
+these young heathens?  Again, I find a female standing by my side; she is
+horridly dirty; she stinks of gin; her face is that of the confirmed
+sot--of one who has given up home and husband, and comfort, and decency,
+for the accursed drink.  She looks very piteously in my face.  "And so
+they are going to hang the poor man," she exclaims; "they have no mercy
+on him."  "You forget," I reply, "the poor man whom he murdered, and on
+whom he had no mercy."  "No, I don't," she exclaims with tipsy gravity;
+"he had no right to kill the man, and ought to be punished; but ain't we
+all morally bad?"--but here the conversation ends, for she has sunk down,
+maudlin, stinking with gin, and overcome by it and weariness, on the
+doorstep.  Ah, these doorsteps, let us look at them.  To-night the police
+don't bid the _habitues_ move on.  What crowds are collected on
+them,--ragged boys, who, perhaps, have nowhere else to sleep,
+wild-looking women unbonnetted and shoeless, with red, uncombed hair,
+faces very much marked with the small pox, only seen on such occasions as
+these--old men crouch on them for whom home has no charm, and life no
+lustre, and girls whose rouged cheeks and shabby finery tell to what
+wretchedness and degradation, though young in years, they have already
+come.  Let them sleep on, if they can, on their stony mattress, beneath
+this inclement sky, out in this cold December night; they are happier now
+than they can be in their waking hours!  But look at the windows, all
+lighted up and filled with gay company.  Those two beautiful girls--let
+us hope they are not ladies--not English mothers or wives--who have just
+stepped out of the brougham, and are now gazing from a first-floor on the
+wild human sea beneath, will sit playing cards and drinking champagne all
+night; yet scarce have the sounds of Sabbath bells died away, and in a
+few hours a man is to be hung, and these girls, all sensibility and
+tears, will sit with their opera glasses during the fearful agony, as if
+merely Grisi acted or Mario sang.
+
+Let us take another stroll through this living mass.  The workmen have
+put up the last barriers--the clock strikes three--a crowd, dense and
+eager, has planted itself by the Old Bailey.  The yard is thrown open,
+and three strong horses, such as you see in brewers' drays, drag along
+what seems to be an immense clumsy black box.  It stops at the door of
+Newgate nearest to St Sepulchre's.  Women shriek as it rumbles over the
+stones, and you shudder, for instinctively you guess it is the gallows.
+By the dim gas-light you see workmen first fix securely a stout
+timber--then another--and then a beam across from which hangs a
+chain--and now the crowd becomes denser.  Let us leave it and enter the
+house, at the top of which we have previously engaged a seat.
+
+We are some eight or nine in a very small room, and most of us are
+amateurs in hanging, and it seems to us a very pleasant show.  Some of us
+have come a long way, and most of us have been up all night.  We have
+seen every execution for the last ten years, and boast how on one day we
+saw one man hung at Newgate, and took a cab and got to Horsemonger-lane
+in time to see another.  A rare feat that, and one of which we are justly
+proud.  We talk of these things, and how we have seen criminals die, till
+some of us get very angry, and flatly contradict each other.  Altogether
+there is somewhat too much mirth in the house, though we could not have
+had a better place had we paid 5 pounds for it.  The women are too
+exuberant and full of fun.  It is true, as the girls say to each other,
+"they don't hang a man every day," but the gaiety is discordant.  Over
+the way _he_ is just waking up from his troubled sleep.  A thin waif of
+smoke goes up from the dark dreary building opposite--are they boiling
+him his last cup of tea?  See, there is a light in the press-room!  Ah,
+what are they doing there?  St Sepulchre's strikes six.  The door at the
+foot of the scaffold opens, and very stealthily, and so as to be seen by
+none but such as are high up like ourselves, a man throws sawdust on the
+scaffold, and disappears again; we see him this time with a chain or
+rope.  All this while the hydra-headed mob beneath amuses itself in
+various ways.  It sings songs, chiefly preferring those with a chorus--it
+hoots dogs--it tosses small boys about on its top.  As we look from the
+window, we think we never saw such a mob before.  Far as the eye can
+reach towards Ludgate-hill on one side, and Giltspur-street on the other,
+it is one mass of human heads; the very air is tainted with their
+odour--we smell it where we are.  Our amateur friends are in excellent
+spirits; they have not seen so many people at an execution for some
+years.  They are agreeably surprised; they all thought the man would not
+have been hung, and had backed their opinions by bets.
+
+A long wearisome night was it, even to us--and it is not yet eight.  The
+roar of the crowd is so great--can _he_ hear it within?--that we cannot
+catch the sound of the neighbouring chimes; but we see signs that the end
+is approaching.  The police have filled up the intervening space between
+the scaffold and the crowd.  A bell tinkles dismally, horridly.  We look
+beyond the scaffold down into the open doorway, and there they are,
+ascending the stairs.  First the chaplain, then the criminal, and then
+Jack Ketch.  Marley walks steadily, with pale face and eyes cast down,
+and places himself immediately under the rope.  He trembles slightly as
+his legs are being fastened, his hands had already been pinioned behind.
+A nightcap is drawn over his face, the rope is adjusted round his neck,
+Jack Ketch hastens down the ladder, the chaplain, reading the burial
+service all the while, steps back, down goes the drop, a woman or two
+shrieks, there is a slight convulsive movement of the body, and what was
+a minute back a living man is now a dishonoured corpse.  There he dangles
+in the cold north wind for an hour.  We cannot get away, as the crowd is
+determined to see the last of it, and will not move.  It stops to hoot
+Jack Ketch, as he comes to cut Marley down at nine o'clock.  Till then,
+there he hangs, a tall, well-made man, with fine dark whiskers, in his
+very prime, heedless of the sixty thousand glaring eyes all round, with
+hands clasped as if supplicating that divine mercy which all born of
+woman need, and which may God grant us in our dying hour.  Away hastes
+the crowd to its business or its pleasure; and when a short time after I
+pass by the very spot where that hideous throng had stood, blaspheming in
+the very presence of death, butchers' and carriers' carts filled up the
+vacant space, and the past night seemed a ghastly dream.
+
+
+
+
+CATHERINE-STREET.
+
+
+Strand, is a busy place by day-time (it does a great business in the
+newspaper line, and about four or five in the afternoon it is used by the
+acute newsboys of the metropolis as a kind of Change), but it is busier
+far by night, and the later the hour the more active and lively it grows.
+As you walk along the Strand any time in the afternoon and evening, have
+you not seen (to our shame be it said) a sight not visible in the chief
+thoroughfare of any other capital in Europe?  The sight I allude to is
+that of girls, whose profession is but too evident from their appearance,
+stopping almost every man they meet, mildly, perhaps, in the early part
+of the evening--but, under the influence of drink, with greater rudeness
+and freedom as the night wears on.  These girls, as you observe, are
+dressed in finery hired for the purpose; and following them, as a hawk
+its prey, you will perceive at a respectful distance old hags, always
+Jewesses, whose business it is to see that these girls do not escape with
+their fine dresses, and that they are active in their efforts to entrap
+young men void of understanding.  Well, these women all live in the
+neighbourhood of Catherine-street.  What a filthy trade the Jews and
+Jewesses of London drive!  You may go into Elysiums, and wine-rooms, and
+saloons, in this district, and you will find them belonging to Jews--the
+waiters Jews--the wine, the women, the cigars, all in the hands of
+Jews--true to their ancient vocation of "spoiling the Egyptians."  Let me
+not be understood as joining in vulgar prejudices against the Jews.
+Without reading "Coningsby," or "Lord George Bentinck, a Political
+Biography," I am ready to confess that there have been, and still are,
+great and gifted men born to the Jewish race; but I am speaking of the
+vile crew who earn an infamous livelihood by pandering to all that is
+degraded in man or woman--whose vulture eyes follow you up and down
+Catherine-street, and who, if they could, would rob you of your last
+farthing, and tear off from your back its last rag, and who by fair means
+or foul rear up prostitutes, and trade in flesh and blood.  But pardon
+the digression, and yet not exactly is the subject a digression, when we
+remember Catherine-street and its neighbouring courts would be a very
+different locality, had not the Jews selected it as a fitting place for
+operation.  In the days Consule Planco, as Mr Thackeray would write, in
+the hot youth of the Regency, before George IV. had become prematurely
+used up, and a moral people had erected a statue to the memory of the
+most dissolute king in Christendom as a lesson for England's ingenuous
+youth and as an example for future royal princes, Catherine-street was
+gay indeed, if wine and profligacy in the lowest and worst reality of
+forms are ever gay.  There was Mother H.'s, where bucks assembled, and
+reckless women danced and drank for a few short years ere they died
+wretchedly in parish poor-houses, or sought oblivion and repose in the
+dark waters of the neighbouring Thames.  Up and down Catherine-street
+what wretchedness masked in smiles has walked--what sin in satin--what
+devilish craft and brutal lust, aye, and, what is worse than all, what
+unavailing repentance and regret!
+
+A very fleeting population is that of Catherine-street.  These women,
+commencing their life at eighteen, are few of them supposed to last more
+than eight years; and if you see them in the day-time, before they are
+painted and dressed up--with their red eyes and bloated faces, you will
+think few of them will last even that short time; but they pass on one by
+one to the spirit land, not as did Antigone, conscious of duty done,
+though wailing her unwedded state, nor as Jephthah's high-souled
+daughter, for whom Hebrew maidens devoutly wept--but with body and soul
+alike loathsome and steeped in sin.  Here in Catherine-street vice is a
+monster of a hideous mien.  The gay women, as they are termed, are worse
+off than American slaves, and the men at the best are but drunken fools
+frittering away time and money and health, and rooting out from their
+hearts all trace of the divine that may be yet lingering there.  The West
+is the more fashionable quarter, and the glory of Catherine-street is
+fled.  Almost every house you come to is a public-house, or something
+worse.  Here there is a free-and-easy after the theatres are over; there
+a lounge open all night for the entertainment of bullies and prostitutes,
+and pickpockets and thieves, greenhorns from the country or London-born;
+here a dancing saloon, which we are told in the advertisement no visitor
+should leave London without first seeing, and there a coffee-house where,
+when expelled from gayer places of resort, half intoxicated men and women
+take an early breakfast.  All round you are bitter memories.  Every stone
+you tread is red with blood; you can almost hear the last dying shriek of
+virtue, before, by means of the tempting purse or the hocussed draught,
+the poor victim--feebler in her struggles every hour--be lost for ever.
+Yet the gas burns brightly by night, and there is dancing, and wine, and
+songs, and in the small hours you may hear a hollow laughter, sadder even
+than cries and tears.  Think what years and years of tedious culture must
+have elapsed to produce this concentrated essence of vice.  How many must
+have died in the seasoning--how many must have turned back shuddering as
+they saw the dark ending to their infatuated career--how many weeping
+parents must have won back to decency and the observance of moral and
+social law--how many the want of pecuniary means must have compelled into
+a reluctant abstinence!  Such a crop could only be reared in such a Sodom
+and Gomorrha as ours.  That landlord, gloating over his ill-gotten gains,
+could not have sunk into so fallen a condition rapidly.  It has taken
+years to make him what he is.  There is no excuse for him, and he knows
+it.  It is not for the honest refreshment of the weary or the _bona fide_
+accommodation of the public that his house is open.  The real public have
+been in bed for hours.  These men around us are here for immoral
+purposes.  These women are on the same bad errand, and that they may
+better pursue their vocation, here they come and drink; but he sells his
+poison, thinking not of the mischief it will do, but of the gain it will
+bring.  Is he not a degraded man, with his double chin, and dirty face,
+and low forehead? can you see in him one trace of benevolence or
+humanity?  Do you doubt this?--spend your last farthing in his bar, pawn
+every article of clothing you have, and go with an empty pocket and in
+rags, and you will soon be ordered to the door.  You see he is now
+turning out that wretched creature.  He has allowed her to drink till she
+has no more money; but she solicited chance customers, and they treated
+her to gin, and so the landlord let her stop; but now she is so drunk as
+to interfere with his business, and he turns her houseless and friendless
+out into the streets.  Let us watch her.  She is too far gone to have any
+decency left.  Drink and sadness combined have tortured her brain to
+madness.  Her curses fill the air; a crowd collects; the police come up;
+she is borne on a stretcher to Bow-street, and in the morning is
+dismissed with a reprimand, or sentenced to a month's imprisonment, as
+the sitting magistrate is in a good temper or the reverse.  The longer we
+stop here the more of such scenes shall we see, for with such publicans
+and sinners Catherine-street abounds.  I have known life lost here in
+these midnight brawls; yet by day it has a dull and decent appearance,
+and little would the passing stranger guess all its revelations of sorrow
+and of crime.
+
+
+
+
+THE BAL MASQUE,
+
+
+In foreign lands, we are told, is something refined and delicate.  I have
+been to some abroad which certainly were nothing of the kind; but in
+England, or rather in London, they are low, blackguard places, whether in
+the Holborn Casino, or Covent Garden, or the Grecian Saloon, or Vauxhall,
+or at Drury-lane.  In 1723 they were put down by government.  Steele
+wrote of them, that in his time, "the misfortune of the thing is, that
+people dress themselves in what they have a mind to be--and not what they
+are fit for."  I have seen the French men and women at Vauxhall, and if
+they do in Paris what they do there--why, then I doubt somewhat of the
+superiority even of French Bal Masques.  But in England a public Bal
+Masque is a disgusting exhibition, to enjoy which every moral sense must
+be deadened, and then a man must be drunk and have his pockets well
+lined.  The rustic flower-girls and simple hay-makers with whom you dance
+will drink champagne as if it were ginger-beer, and consume all the
+delicacies of the season as if they cost no more than bacon and beans.
+
+The fun, as it is termed, generally commences about 11 P.M., by an
+immense mob of costermongers, tag-rag and bob-tail, forming themselves in
+a row under the _surveillance_ of the police, to watch and criticise the
+appearance of the maskers, and specially to regale themselves with jokes
+should any unfortunate do the economical and arrive on foot.  I hear
+people say they like London--they can do anything they like without being
+observed.  I doubt that much.  I advise the strong-minded female who
+tells me that, to walk down Cheapside in a Bloomer costume, and I will
+warrant she will have as great a mob accompanying her as followed Kossuth
+or any other hero to Guildhall.  But to return to the Bal Masque.  I
+presume the company are arriving and the little boys are cheering, as
+only little boys can, right under cab wheels and in between the horses'
+legs.  Some of the company, to borrow an ancient witticism, go disguised
+as gentlemen--some buy a mask at the door for fourpence--others delight
+in monstrous noses and fearful moustache--others, especially those who
+have fancy dresses, appear as Charles II.s, Cardinal Wolseys,
+Shakspeares, Henry VIII.s, Scotch Highlanders, Australian Diggers, Monks,
+and look far better when they enter than they do when they make their
+exit in the early light of a summer morning.  The same remark holds true
+of their female companions, who are mostly the same ladies that you meet
+in Regent-street in the afternoon, or hanging about the Hay-market all
+night, a class at no time remarkable for modesty, but whom we shall see
+in the course of the evening becoming bold and brazenfaced with
+excitement and wine.  But the theatre is full--the guests are met--the
+band is assembled--the leader wields the baton--the sparkling chandeliers
+give a lustre to the scene, and away they bound to the music, whilst from
+the boxes and the gallery admiring crowds look down.  Yes, there is a
+wild excitement in the hour, which stirs even the pulses of old blood.
+The women, as debardeurs, flower girls, sailor boys--many of them with
+faces fitting them for diviner lives, look beautiful even in their
+degradation and shame.  Horace tells us, wherever we go black care gets
+up and rides behind.  Is it so?  Can there be sad hearts beneath those
+gay exteriors?  Do those cheeks flushed and radiant eyes indicate that
+they belong to those whom all moralists have held infamous, all religions
+condemned, and whose existence our modern civilization perpetuates and
+deplores?  Is man an immortal being, sent here for awhile to triumph over
+fleshly lusts and passions, to learn to trample as dross on the vanities
+of earth, and to set his affections on things above?  Is it true that the
+most successful votaries of pleasure, from kingly Solomon to lordly
+Byron, have borne the same testimony to them, that they are not worth the
+gathering, that they are but as apples gathered by the shore of the Dead
+Sea, fair to the eye but deadly to the taste, and that in no way can they
+answer the need and aspirations of the heart of man, which is greater and
+grander than them all?  Have we paid ministers of religion, bishops and
+archbishops, millions and millions of pounds to teach men these few
+self-evident truths, and yet do such orgies as those of which we write
+not merely exist but flourish, as if we had accepted the creed of the
+Atheist,--"Let us eat and drink and be merry, for to-morrow we die"?
+To-morrow! who around us now thinks of to-morrow?  Not the young rake
+chaffing and dancing before us, whose mirth is the delirium of
+forgetfulness and the intoxication of wine, whose to-morrow is
+Whitecross-street Prison or the Insolvent Debtors' Court.  Not that
+brazenfaced woman now arrayed in splendour, and surrounded by her
+admirers, whose to-morrow is old age, neglect, and a garret.  Not those
+grey-headed gouty old sinners in the boxes, who have not the excuse of
+youth for the follies with which they desecrate old age.  And certainly
+not that pale clerk, who has most probably embezzled his employer's
+money, and who is frantically exclaiming, "Waiter, another bottle of
+champagne," as he tells the women of his lot that he feels "a cup too
+low."  You say he has them to cheer him.  Yes, till his money is gone.
+When he is at Bow-street, as assuredly he will soon be, I promise you
+they will not be the last to give evidence as to his possession of funds,
+or the manner of his spending them.  There may be honour among thieves,
+there is none among women when they have once lost their own.
+
+Still gaily goes on the dancing.  Then there is supper and wine--and more
+dancing, and more music, and more wine.  The reporters for the papers
+generally leave about supper-time, and state that the gaieties were
+prolonged till a late hour; it is well they do this.  In the earlier part
+of the evening the rioting and chaffing is somewhat of the coarsest, and
+the wit somewhat of the poorest; and the later it grows, and the more
+potent is the vinous influence, the less select, or rather the more
+obscene, is the phraseology.  In the wild saturnalia that ensues, all the
+restraints of decency and habit are thrown on one side.  It is time to
+close, and the conductor sees this.  Already Henry VIII. is right royally
+drunk, and Cardinal Wolsey is uttering flat blasphemy, and one monk has
+got a black eye, another a bloody nose.  Unless, as in the case of Covent
+Garden, the theatre is burned down, and the proceedings are abruptly
+terminated, there is a final dance,--a patriotic rendering of the
+national anthem,--and into the air walk, or rather tumble, the
+debauchees, some to go home quietly to bed, others to keep it up in the
+nearest coffee-houses and public-houses; and handmaidens rising early to
+take in the milk in various parts of the metropolis are astonished by the
+exceedingly unsteady gait and singular costumes of various dismal gents,
+who have, if they are not absolute fools, sworn that it will be a long
+time before they go to another masque bal.  Such, I believe, is the
+general conclusion, the only exceptions being the costumier who provides
+the dresses, generally a Jew, and the bigger Jew who furnishes the wine.
+
+
+
+
+UP THE HAYMARKET.
+
+
+If I take up the reports of our various religious societies, I find we
+are spending an enormous sum in sending the Gospel into foreign parts.  I
+don't say but what this is praiseworthy--Indians, Turks, Jews, Assyrians,
+bond and free, are they not all children of one common Father with
+ourselves?--but let us not overlook after all the claims of home.  I do
+not speak now of the lowest classes, of the refuse and outcasts of our
+towns, of the Pariahs of our civilization; I speak of the heathens in
+satin and broadcloth, of the vice that wears patent leather boots and the
+best French kid, of the intemperance that feasts at rich men's tables,
+and that is born of hock, and claret, and champagne.
+
+But what has all this to do with the Haymarket?  Wait awhile, and your
+curiosity will be satisfied.  It is day-time, and we will stroll up
+thither.  There is nothing peculiar about the place, except the unusual
+number of gin-palaces, hotels, French restaurants, oyster-shops,
+coffee-houses with the blinds drawn, as if to show they did not care to
+do business, and the general sleepy appearance of the waiters.  There is
+a cab-stand seemingly inclined to shut up shop, and if it were not for
+the omnibuses there would be but few indications of life.  On the
+right-hand side as you go from Pall Mall there are most respectable
+shops, but the wonder to me is how they manage to attract custom
+sufficient to enable them to pay what must be their very heavy rents.  At
+the top of the Haymarket we find the street from Leicester-square to
+Piccadilly always full of traffic, and just opposite are the
+oyster-shops, and Turkish divans and cafes, all quiet enough now, but at
+the witching hour of night destined to be filled to suffocation with fast
+men and flash women, with cabs and carriages, with old hags with fruit
+and flowers, male vendors of pencils and knives, policemen and bullies,
+fools and rogues.  Let us skip over a short interval of time, and suppose
+the neighbouring church bells to have chimed the midnight hour.  A few
+steps take us to the Lowther Arcade.  We take our stand with a crowd just
+opposite a building with an entrance lighted with gas, which we learn to
+be a handsome casino--one of the handsomest in London--devoted to dancing
+and drinking.  The hour of closing has arrived, and the votaries of
+pleasure, as it is called, are leaving.  There are an immense number of
+women all splendidly dressed--from the young girl who has not yet learnt
+the bitterness of the life she has ventured on, to the woman thoroughly
+dead to all feeling, all modesty, and shame.  It is a sad sight, though
+few see the snake in the grass for the flowers; and of the gay ones there
+none think they will ever become like the bloated, ragged women now
+standing in their path and asking with the true professional whine for
+alms.  Some are borne away in broughams, some in cabs, but the most on
+foot.  Let us now look at the men.  You cannot see a finer set anywhere.
+Are not the flower of our youth and manhood there?  Of course I refer
+merely to their physical formation.  Young fellows from the army and
+navy, men from all our universities and inns of court, gents from the
+city and the Stock Exchange, and respectable middle-aged country
+gentlemen stopping in town a night, and just dropping in to see what is
+going on.  Before us there is enough material to found a mighty empire,
+including even that pale melancholy little lordling dashing along in his
+cab, who has already, boy as he is, a regiment; and all this multitude is
+going headlong to the devil at express speed, in spite of the baptismal
+vow and the ministrations of the church.  But let us see what they are
+about.  Here a portion seeks supper at the neighbouring oyster-rooms, and
+a rush is made at the waiters as they bring in oysters and pale ale, as
+if the parties had been famishing all day.  Then we knock at the door of
+a place at one time much patronized by a certain marquis, and still
+bearing his name; and we find some that we saw leaving the casino here
+drinking; or we go into another, where the crowd is so dense we have
+scarce room to stand, and find the same occupation vigorously carried on.
+Of course at the places which do not have closed doors the bars are all
+filled, and drinking seems the order of the night.  In the mean while let
+us march up Piccadilly.  The small hours have now come, yet the place is
+redolent with life.  Young fellows are singing "We won't go home till
+morning"--policemen are bidding the unfortunates that won't fee them move
+on--hideous females are waiting to rob the drunkards they may meet in
+their path--and men with hawk eyes and hungry aspect are hovering all
+round like so many birds of prey; and boys--for they are everywhere, all
+dirt and rags, yet happy in the richness of young life, for childhood,
+even the most abandoned, can never be sad--dance round us, in the hope
+that "your honour" will find a copper for "poor little Jack," singing to
+us of that far-famed Ratcatcher's Daughter, who
+
+    "Didn't live in Vestministere,
+    But the t'other side of the vatere."
+
+Well, I'd rather be one of them than the proprietress of yon house, with
+the gas lamp over the door, who by this time has been borne by the Great
+Northern in a first-class carriage, side by side with senators, and city
+magistrates, and clergymen, and it may be your wife or mine, to her
+country seat.  We are standing in the very temple of vice--its ministers
+are all round us.  Not one unholy appetite but can be gratified here;
+gamblers, blacklegs, prostitutes, surround us on every side.  Here law,
+and order, and decency are alike all violated.  If it be in the
+prohibited hours, we can go into coffee-houses and get as much brandy as
+we like, which of course is easily removed when the signal is made that
+the inspector is coming, and is again brought out when he is gone.  But
+let us knock at this door; the glare of gas indicates that there is
+something going on, though the cold fowl in the window, and the cigar
+shop close by, scarcely inform us what.  We pay for admission, and,
+entering through a narrow passage, find ourselves in a large saloon, with
+a balcony all round.  On the ground-floor of course there is dancing, and
+at the end is a bar where drink is being rapidly supplied.  Up in the
+balcony are young fellows sitting with gaily-dressed women, drinking
+sherry-cobblers and smoking cigars.  In time the room gets crowded, and
+the people in it grow a little the worse for drink.  Though we can scarce
+see for the smoke, and hear on account of the roar of many tongues, it is
+not difficult to perceive in the hilariousness of some, in the bad temper
+of others, in the stupidity of most, and in the foul language of all,
+that the drink is producing its legitimate effect.  That girl in satin
+and rouge in another hour we shall see lying on the stone pavement with
+an unmeaning grin, till she is borne by policemen on a stretcher to the
+lock-up.  That fine manly lad, out to see life, will sleep to-night where
+the mother now praying for him in her dreams little imagines.  _She_
+would not have sunk so low, _he_ never would have blasted a mother's
+hopes, had it not have been for the drink.  Come out with me into the
+air.  What a crowd there is round us, all looking pale and seedy in the
+clear light of a summer morn!  What has kept them out all night?  What
+has made them what they are but the drink?  You start at that moving mass
+of sores and rags.  I remember her fair and beautiful, richly apparelled
+and sumptuously fed; but the drink has been her bane, and will be, till
+one of these calm summer mornings she will be carried insensible to the
+nearest hospital, thence to be buried, unwept and unknown, in a pauper's
+grave.  Away from this moral dunghill.  In a few hours the police will
+have retired, the debauchees will have gone home to bed, the
+oyster-houses and gin-palaces will be deserted, the place will have a
+serious and quiet business air, and bishops will ride past it in their
+cushioned carriages to make speeches at meetings for the promotion of the
+Gospel in foreign parts.  As we go up Regent-street we see the lamps
+being extinguished, and the milk carts going round, and the red newspaper
+expresses tearing along to catch the early train, and the green hills of
+Hampstead looking lovelier than ever.  In the sober light of day our
+night in the Haymarket will seem unreal, and when we shall tell our
+experiences, we shall be told possibly that our picture is overdrawn.
+
+
+
+
+THE CANTERBURY HALL.
+
+
+"Give me the songs of the people, and you may make its laws," said old
+Fletcher, of Saltoun, with a knowledge of human nature which statesmen do
+not frequently possess.  Necessity is a stern taskmaster, and the workman
+in the factory, and the clerk in the counting-house, and the shopman
+behind the counter, are generally compelled to stick pretty close to
+work, and to the eye of the observer present very much the same
+appearance.  They come at certain hours, they go at certain hours, and
+perform their daily toil with a certain amount of effectiveness and
+skill.  Very little credit is due to them for this--their livelihood
+depends upon their being diligent and active--and hence I know little of
+the individual by merely witnessing him toiling for his daily bread.  I
+must follow him home; I must be with him in his hours of relaxation; I
+must listen to the songs he sings and the jokes he attempts; I must see
+what is his idea of pleasure, and thus only can I get at the man as he
+is.  Even his church or chapel goings I cannot take as indications of his
+real nature.  He may go because his parents go, because his master goes,
+because his friends go, because he has been trained to go, because
+society expects him to go,--for a hundred reasons all equally vain in the
+eyes of Him who searcheth the heart and trieth the reins of the children
+of men; but no man is a hypocrite where his pleasures are concerned.  I
+can gather more about him from the way in which he spends his leisure
+hours than I can from his active employments of the day.  They are poor
+miserable philosophers indeed, and guilty of an enormous blunder, who, in
+their investigation into the moral and social condition of the people,
+refuse to notice the amusements of the people in their hours of gaiety
+and ease.  I make, then, no apology for introducing you to Canterbury
+Hall.
+
+The Upper Marsh, Westminster-road, is what is called a low neighbourhood.
+It is not far from Astley's Theatre.  Right through it runs the South
+Western Railway, and everywhere about it are planted pawnbrokers' shops,
+with an indescribable amount of dirty second-hand clothes, and monster
+gin-palaces, with unlimited plate-glass and gas.  Go along there what
+hour of the day you will, these gin-palaces are full of ragged children,
+hideous old women, and drunken men.  "The bane and the antidote," you may
+say, "are thus side by side."  True, but you forget that youth in its
+search for pleasure is blind, and sees not the warning till it is too
+late; and of the hundreds rushing on to the Canterbury Hall for a quiet
+glass, none think they will fall so low as the victims of intemperance
+reeling, cursing, fighting, blaspheming, in their path.  But let us pass
+on.  A well-lighted entrance attached to a public-house indicates that we
+have reached our destination.  We proceed up a few stairs, along a
+passage lined with handsome engravings, to a bar, where we pay sixpence
+if we take a seat in the body of the hall, and nine-pence if we do the
+nobby and ascend into the balcony.  We make our way leisurely along the
+floor of the building, which is really a very handsome hall, well
+lighted, and capable of holding fifteen hundred persons; the balcony
+extends round the room in the form of a horseshoe.  At the opposite end
+to which we enter is the platform, on which is placed a grand piano and a
+harmonium, on which the performers play in the intervals when the
+professional singers have left the stage.  The chairman sits just beneath
+them.  It is dull work to him; but there he must sit every night smoking
+cigars and drinking, from seven till twelve o'clock.  I fancy I detect a
+little touch of rouge just on the top of his cheek; he may well need it,
+for even on a fine summer night like this the room is crowded, and almost
+every gentleman present has a pipe or a cigar in his mouth.  Let us look
+round us; evidently the majority present are respectable mechanics, or
+small tradesmen with their wives and daughters and sweethearts there.
+Now and then you see a midshipman, or a few fast clerks and warehousemen,
+who confidentially inform each other that there is "no end of talent
+here," and that Miss --- "is a doosed fine gal;" and here, as elsewhere,
+we see a few of the class of unfortunates, whose staring eyes would fain
+extort an admiration which their persons do not justify.  Every one is
+smoking, and every one has a glass before him; but the class that come
+here are economical, and chiefly confine themselves to pipes and porter.
+The presence of the ladies has also a beneficial effect; I see no
+indication of intoxication, and certainly none of the songs are obscene.
+I may question the worth of such stanzas as the following, sung by Mr R.
+Grover, Miss Pearce, and the whole of the company:--
+
+                                   ALFRED.
+
+       We'll drink to the beauty that's beaming around,
+          Where Nature's own flowers are blooming;
+       Where none but the voices of happiness sound,
+          And our pathway the love-light illumes.
+             We'll drink, too, to the rosy god,
+                The god of love and beauty,
+             For all who are his vot'ries
+                Must tender him their duty.
+    We'll drink while there's love in the cup which we quaff,
+       Since't is love o'er the world reigns supreme.
+
+                                   CHORUS.
+
+    We'll drink to friendship firm and true,
+    While love the cup shall crown.
+
+                                  VIOLETTA.
+
+       Come, bask in the pleasure that falls to our share,
+          For Time on the wing's ever flying,
+       And flowers of love are exotics so rare,
+          Their odour's scarce shed ere 't is flown.
+             Be gay, for youth must soon depart,
+                And even love will vanish,
+             The brightest scenes, alas! will fade,
+                And sweetest pleasures pall.
+    Be gay, then, while youth still untrammell'd by care
+       Shall invite us to joy and to love.
+
+                                   CHORUS.
+
+    Ah! let us join in the toast,
+    In the song and the revelling,
+    Passing the night in mirthful pleasure,
+    While love shall teach us how to treasure
+    This paradise on earth.
+
+I may think I have heard sublimer compositions than the following, sung
+by Mrs Caulfield with great applause:--
+
+    Fare you well, my own Mary Anne,
+       Fare you well for a while:
+    For the ship it is ready, and the wind it is fair,
+       And I am bound for the sea, Mary Anne.
+                      Fare you well, &c.
+
+    Don't you see that turtle dove,
+       A sitting on yonder pile,
+    Lamenting the loss of its own true love?--
+       And so am I for mine, Mary Anne.
+                      Fare you well, &c.
+
+    A lobster in a lobster-pot,
+       A blue-fish wriggling on a hook,
+    May suffer some, but, oh! no not
+       What I do feel for my Mary Anne.
+                      Fare you well, &c.
+
+    The pride of all the produce rare,
+       That in our kitchen-garden grow'd,
+    Was pumpkins, but none could compare
+       In angel-form to my Mary Anne.
+                      Fare you well, &c.
+
+or of the following, sung by Mrs Caulfield with still greater applause:--
+
+    Down in Skytown lived a maid,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+    Churning butter was her trade,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+    She loved a feller whose name was Will,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+    His dad he used to own the mill,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+
+                                   CHORUS.
+
+    Kemo, kimo, where? oh there! my high, my low,
+       Then in came Sally singing,
+    Sometimes, Medley winkum lingtum nip cat.
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+
+    She wanted Will for worse or better,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+    She'd have married, but dad wouldn't let her.
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+    And so she went and got a knife,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+    She broke her heart and lost her life,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+                         Kemo, kimo, &c.
+
+    Then Josh he felt his dander risin',
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+    So he went and swallow'd pisin,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+    The village folks laugh'd in their sleeve,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+    For Jordan's a hard road to travel, I believe,
+       Sing song Polly won't you try me, oh?
+                         Kemo, kimo, &c.
+
+But, compared with many of the places frequented by both sexes,
+Canterbury Hall is a respectable place.  I may think that more rational
+amusement might be found than by sitting smoking and drinking in a large
+room on a hot summer's night.  I may have my doubts whether all go home
+sober--the presence of a policeman in the room indicated that at times
+there was need for his services--but I believe the association of song
+and drinking and amusements pernicious in the extreme; and, knowing that
+man needs relaxation--that he must have his hour of amusement as well as
+of work--I cannot too earnestly press upon the advocates of Temperance
+reform the desirableness of their out-bidding the public-house in the
+attempts to cater for the entertainment of the people.  That they do not
+do so, is clear.  Where once we had a National Hall in Holborn, for the
+action of moral influences, a publican has erected a hall--for singing
+and drinking--capable, I should think, of holding 1200 people, and
+crammed every night.  Then the "Lord Raglan" holds as many.  Nor are
+these alone the only competitors for public patronage; their name is
+Legion.
+
+
+
+
+RATCLIFFE-HIGHWAY.
+
+
+London is several cities rolled into one.  If we walk along
+Regent-street, it is a city of gorgeous shops,--if you turn into the
+West, of parks and palaces,--if you traverse St Giles, of gin and
+dirt;--again, in Belgravia it is rich and grand,--in Pimlico it is poor
+and pretentious,--in Russell-square it is well to do,--in Islington it is
+plain and pious; and, strange as it may seem, the people are equally
+localised in their ideas.  Jobson, the Stock-broker, lives at Clapham,
+and for years he has never set foot in any other streets than those
+leading from the Stock Exchange to that select and favoured spot.  The
+law clerks, who live in Pimlico, seldom stray further than John-street,
+Bedford-row.  The city gents from Islington and Holloway generally
+cluster round the Bank or the Post-office, and for years go in the
+morning and return at night by one unvaried route.  The races are equally
+distinct.  The swells in the Park, the millers in Mark-lane, the graziers
+in the new cattle-market, the Jews in Houndsditch or Holywell-street, the
+prim pale lads in the city, the sailors in Deptford and Wapping, the
+German sugar-bakers in Whitechapel, really form distinct communities, and
+are as worth studying as any race of
+
+    "Red Indians dwelling beyond the sunset,
+    And the baths of all the Western stars."
+
+I should not like a son of mine to be born and bred in Ratcliffe-highway.
+That there would be a charming independence in his character, a spurning
+of that dreary conventionalism which makes cowards of us all, and under
+the deadly weight of which the heart of this great old England seems
+becoming daily more sick and sad, a cosmopolitanism rich and racy in the
+extreme,--all this I admit I should have every reason to expect, but, at
+the same time, I believe the disadvantages would preponderate vastly.
+How is this? you ask.  Does not Ratcliffe-highway form part of our
+highly-favoured land?  I grant it does.  I confess that there the Queen's
+writ is a power, that it boasts the protection of the police, that it
+pays rates and taxes, that it has its churches and chapels, that it is
+not cut off from the rest of the empire, that it is traversed by
+railways, by cabs and busses, and by postmen.  Nevertheless,
+Ratcliffe-highway is not a favourite spot of mine.  I saw lately a letter
+from an Englishman in the _Times_, complaining of the magistrates of
+Hamburg, because when he was coming from church with some ladies, he
+strayed into a street where his sense of decorum was very properly
+shocked.  I know the street as I do every street in Hamburg, and I know
+this, that it ill becomes Englishmen to write of the immorality of
+Hamburg, or any other continental town.  Let him walk down
+Ratcliffe-highway or any other spot where vice loses all its charms by
+appearing in all its grossness.  I fear that it is not true generally to
+the eyes of the class she leads astray, that
+
+    "Vice is a monster of such hideous mien,
+    That to be hated, needs but to be seen,"
+
+but I think it is true, or at any rate it contains a portion of truth, so
+far as regards Ratcliffe-highway, a stroll in which place is sure to
+shock more senses than one.  In beastliness I think it surpasses Cologne
+with its seven and thirty stenches, or even Bristol or a Welsh town.
+
+Ratcliffe-highway lies contiguous to the commerce and the port of London.
+The men and boys engaged in navigating merchant vessels belonging to
+ports of the British Empire were in 1851, 240,298; and of this multitude
+a large portion at some time or other resides in Ratcliffe-highway.  In
+1856, 826 vessels, with a tonnage of 498,594 tons, entered the port of
+London.  Jack, when he's ashore, resides here, and Jack ashore is the
+weakest and simplest of men.  As an illustration of the way in which Jack
+is done--whether in any provincial port or London, for crimps are the
+same all the world over,--let me refer to a case heard at the Tynemouth
+Police Court towards the end of last year.  A man named Glover, the
+landlord of a low public-house in Clive-street, a crimp and sailors'
+lodging-house keeper, was summoned under the 235th and 236th clauses of
+the Merchant Shipping Act of 1854, charged with having taken into his
+possession the moneys and effects of James Hall, a seaman, and with
+having refused to return and pay the same back to Hall when requested to
+do so.  It appears, after being engaged in the Black Sea in the transport
+service during the late war, Hall, who had to receive 30 pounds 15_s._,
+took up his quarters at Glover's, and made him his "purser."  Glover
+charged him 14_s._ a-week for his lodgings, the same as the Sailors'
+Home, but at the end of 16 days he told him that his money was all gone,
+and bought the plaintiff's neckerchief of him for 1_s._, which he also
+spent in drink.  The sailor, finding himself destitute, had applied to
+the authorities, who summoned Glover.  Glover, in his defence, stated
+that Hall had spent his money in drink and treating, keeping a couple of
+bagpipers to play to him all the time he was on the spree.  Glover
+produced the following extraordinary account against Hall:--"Dec.
+9th.--20 pints of rum, 2 pounds 6_s._ 6_d._; 20 quarts of beer, and 15
+ounces of tobacco, 15_s._  10th.--8 glasses of rum, and 2_s._ 6_d._
+borrowed money, 4_s._ 6_d._  11th.--Borrowed money, 2_s._ 6_d._; 5 pints
+of rum, 5 gills of rum, and 15 quarts of ale, 1 pounnd 12_s._ 6_d._; 6
+ounces of tobacco, 2 glasses of gin, and 2 gills of brandy, 6_s._ 6_d._
+12th.--Cash, 2_s._, 15 pints of rum, and 28 gills of rum, 3 pounds; 4
+quarts, half a gallon, and 22 gills of beer, 1 pounds 3_s._ 9_d._; 15
+glasses of rum and 11 glasses of beer, 9_s._ 3_d._; pint of brandy and 16
+glasses of gin, 8_s._; 36 ounces of tobacco and 3.5 glasses of gin,
+12_s._ 4.5_d._  13th.--18 pints of rum, 15 gills of rum, and 26 quarts of
+beer, 3 pounds 4_s._; 26 bottles of lemonade, and 28 gills of beer, 1
+pounds; 14 ounces of tobacco, 6 glasses of gin, 6_s._ 2_d._; 12 glasses
+of gingerade, and cash 5_s._, 8_s._; 1 week's board, 14_s._  Paid for
+clothes, 1 pounds 2_s._ 6_d._; 2 pints of rum, 10 gills of rum, and 4
+glasses of beer, 16_s._; 24 glasses of spirits, 9 quarts of beer, and 7
+ounces of tobacco, 14_s._ 7_d._  15th.--16 half glasses of spirits, 10
+glasses and 2 gills of rum, and 1.5 ounce of tobacco, and beer, 2_s._
+10_d._; fortnight's board, 1 pounds 8_s._; cash, 2 pounds 18_s._;
+spirits, tobacco, and rum, 4_s._ 1.5_d._; cash, 5_s._  17th.--Cash,
+7_s._; 20 glasses of spirits, and 8 quarts of ale, 9_s._ 4_d._
+18th.--Ale, spirits, and tobacco, 16_s._ 4_d._  19th.--35 glasses of
+spirits, and 20 glasses of ale, and 2 glasses of brandy, 1 pounds 4_s._
+10_d._  20th.--Ale, tobacco, and cash, 7_s._  24th, 25th, and 26th.--Ale
+and spirits, 7_s._ 11_d._, and other items, making up the amount in hand.
+The defendant had refused to deliver up Hall's clothes on the plea that
+the man was in his debt.  Now in Ratcliffe-highway such men as Glover
+abound.  It is unnecessary then to describe the character of the
+tradesmen in Ratcliffe-highway, or the character of their wares.  At one
+shop there are the enormous boots, which only navvies and sailors have
+strength to wear; at another there are oilskin caps, and coats and
+trousers, or rough woollen shirts, piled up in gigantic masses.  One shop
+rejoices in compasses and charts, and another in the huge silver watches
+which Jack invariably affects.  The descendants of Abraham swarm here.
+They sell little fish fried in oil; they deal in second-hand clothes;
+they keep lodging-houses; I believe they stick at nothing to turn a
+penny, and don't break their hearts if the penny turns out a dishonest
+one.  Everything has a nautical adaptation.  The songs sung are nautical.
+The last time I was there an old woman was singing to a crowd of the
+"Saucy Sailor Boy" who, coming disguised in poverty to his lady love, is
+by her ignominiously rejected, to whom rejecting he tells of his real
+riches, and by whom the rejection is eagerly recalled, but in vain, for
+the Saucy Sailor Boy declares:--
+
+    "Do you think I am foolish, love?
+       Do you think I am mad,
+    For to wed a poor country girl,
+       When there's fortune to be had?
+
+    "So I'll cross the briny ocean,
+       Where the meadows are so green,
+    And since you have refused my offer, love,
+       Some other girl shall wear the ring."
+
+Up and down Ratcliffe-highway do the sailors of every country under
+heaven stroll--Greeks and Scythians, bond and free.  Uncle Tom's numerous
+progeny are there--Lascars, Chinese, bold Britons, swarthy Italians,
+sharp Yankees, fair-haired Saxons, and adventurous Danes--men who worship
+a hundred gods, and men who worship none.  They have ploughed the stormy
+main, they have known the perils of a treacherous sea and of a lee shore;
+but there are worse perils, and those perils await them in
+Ratcliffe-highway.  It is night, and the glare of gas gives the street a
+cheerful appearance.  We pass the Sailor's Home, a noble institution
+which deserves our cordial support and praise, and find at almost every
+step pitfalls for poor Jack.  Every few yards we come to a beer-shop or a
+public-house, the doors of which stand temptingly open, and from the
+upper room of which may be heard the sound of the mirth-inspiring violin,
+and the tramp of toes neither "light nor fantastic."  There were
+public-houses here--I know not if the custom prevails now--to which was
+attached a crew of infamous women; these bring Jack into the house to
+treat them, but while Jack drinks gin the landlord gives them from
+another tap water, and then against their sober villany poor Jack has no
+chance.  I fear many respectable people in this neighbourhood have thus
+made fortunes.  Jack is prone to grog and dancing, and here they meet him
+at every turn.  Women, wild-eyed, boisterous, with cheeks red with rouge
+and flabby with intemperance, decked out with dresses and ribbons of the
+gayest hue, are met with by hundreds--all alike equally coarse, and
+insolent, and unlovely in manners and appearance, but all equally
+resolved on victimising poor Jack.  They dance with him in the
+beer-shop--they drink with him in the bar--they walk with him in the
+streets--they go with him to such places as Wilton's Music Hall, where
+each Jack Tar may be seen sitting with his pipe and his pot, witnessing
+dramatic performances not very artistic, but really, on the score of
+morality, not so objectionable as what I have seen applauded by an
+Adelphi audience, or patronised by the upper classes at her Majesty's
+Theatre.  And thus the evening passes away; the publicans grow rich, the
+keepers of infamous houses fatten on their dishonest gains--obese Jews
+and Jewesses become more so.  The grog gets into Jack's head--the unruly
+tongue of woman is loosened--there are quarrels, and blows, and blood
+drawn, and heads broken, and cries of police, and victims in abundance
+for the station-house, or the hospital, or the union-house, or the
+lunatic asylum, save when some forlorn one (and not seldom either is this
+the case), reft of hope or maddened by drink and shame, plunges in the
+muddy waters of some neighbouring dock, to find the oblivion she found
+not in the dancing and drinking houses of Ratcliffe-highway.
+
+
+
+
+JUDGE AND JURY CLUBS.
+
+
+This is a comic age in which we live.  We are overdone with funny
+writers.  The ghastliest attempts at liveliness surround us on every
+side.  I would not bring back the grave deportment and stately etiquette
+of days gone by, nor could I if I would.  But are we not running to
+another extreme?  Is there not a lack of reverence and dignity?  If we
+train up our youth to comic Blackstones, and teach them to extract fun
+out of the grandest history done in modern Europe--the history of the
+Anglo-Saxon race--of the race that has founded civil and religious
+liberty, and still nurses it in the face of a frowning continent, what
+can we expect?  Men are what we make them.  "Just as the twig is bent the
+tree's inclined."  A feeble and contemptible father is succeeded by a
+feeble and contemptible son.  Have no grand creed of your own to make
+your daily path lustrous with the light of heaven.  Crack your weak jest
+and pun at all men have reverenced.  Learn from _Punch_ to titter, no
+matter the theme.  And can you wonder that your son believes not in man's
+honour or woman's love--in God or the devil, but solely in the Holborn
+Casino and Cremorne?  For instance, is not law one of the most wonderful
+achievements of civilisation?  I do not go so far as "the judicious
+Hooker."  I do not say with him that her seat is the throne of God, her
+voice the harmony of the universe, but is it not wonderful to think of
+the complex arrangements of which the judge seated in his robes on the
+bench, administering law, is the outward sign.  In the first place, man
+must have learnt to give up a primary instinct of his nature--that of
+self-revenge.  Then the central power in the darkest parts of the land
+must have become dominant.  What ages must have past before law dared
+meddle with privilege, or before its administrators could realize the
+fact of the sanctity of the individual man, whether he starved in a
+garret or feasted in a palace.  And when the judges went on circuit, with
+the gorgeous cavalcade of the olden time, what terror was struck into the
+hearts of the rustics, and how patent became to them the strength and
+dignity of law.  Now why burlesque this?  The idea is good and true, yet
+the burlesque is permitted and exists, aye, even to this day.
+
+It is years since I was at a Judge and Jury Club, but I believe their
+character is in no degree changed.  The one I speak of met in an hotel
+not far from Covent-garden, and was presided over by a man famous in his
+day for his power of _double entendre_.  About nine o'clock in the
+evening, if you went up-stairs you would find a large room with benches
+capable of accommodating, I should think, a hundred, or a hundred and
+fifty persons.  This room was generally well filled, and by their
+appearance the audience was one you would call respectable.  The entrance
+fee entitled you to refreshment, and that refreshment, in the shape of
+intoxicating liquor, was by that time before each visitant.  After
+waiting a few minutes, a rustle at the entrance would cause you to turn
+your eyes in that direction, when, heralded by a crier with a gown and a
+staff of office, exclaiming, "Make way for my Lord Chief Baron," that
+illustrious individual would be seen wending his way to his appointed
+seat.  The man I write of was then about thirty-five, but he appeared
+much older, and in his robes of office and with his judicial wig had
+almost a venerable appearance.  Having seated himself and bowed to the
+bar--one of them they called the double of Brougham had been a dissenting
+minister (he is dead now--he died "game," they told me)--the Lord Chief
+Baron called for "a cigar and glass of brandy and water, and, having
+observed that the waiter was in the room and that he hoped gentlemen
+would give their orders, the proceedings of the evening commenced.  A
+jury was selected; the prosecutor opened his case, which, to suit the
+depraved taste of his patrons, was invariably one of seduction or crim.
+con.  Witnesses were examined and cross-examined, the females being men
+dressed up in women's clothes, and everything was done that could be to
+pander to the lowest propensities of depraved humanity.  I do not believe
+the audience could have stood this if it had not been for the drink.  As
+it was, I believe many a youth fresh from home felt a little ashamed of
+himself that he should be in such company listening to such unmitigated
+ribaldry, but these reflections were soon drowned in the flowing bowl,
+and the lad, if he blushed at first, soon learned to laugh.  I write of
+the time when the railway mania had filled London with overpaid
+engineers, and attorneys, and parliamentary witnesses, only too anxious
+to see life, as they called it, and by whom this beastly entertainment
+was frequented night after night.  I dare not even attempt to give a
+faint outline of the proceedings.  After the defence, came the summing
+up, which men about town told you was a model of wit, but in which the
+wit bore but a small proportion to the obscenity.  The jury were
+complimented on their intelligent and lascivious appearance, all the
+filthy particulars which had been noticed were referred to Dog Latin, and
+poetical quotations were plentifully thrown in; and by twelve, amidst the
+plaudits of the audience, the affair, so far as the Judge and Jury Club
+was concerned, was over.  Then there was supper for such as wished it,
+and an entertainment to follow, either in the shape of a concert or of an
+exhibition of _Poses Plastiques_.  To these subsequent entertainments
+ladies were generally admitted--and perhaps the less I say about them or
+their proceedings the better.  If I refer to them at all, it is but as an
+illustration of the drinking customs of society.  These Judge and Jury
+Clubs after all are but an excuse for drinking.  They are held at
+public-houses--there is drinking going on all the time the trial
+lasts,--nor could sober men listen unless they had the drink.  I believe
+an attempt has been made to introduce this kind of thing to the
+provinces, but it has not answered.  In all our provincial towns there
+exists a public opinion which guarantees decency to a certain extent.  In
+the metropolis this public opinion does not exist.  No one knows that I
+frequent Judge and Jury Clubs, and I lose no social status if I do; and
+some of the men who patronise them have no social status to lose.  In one
+of the lowest beershops in the New Cut the other day I saw it announced
+that on Sunday night a Judge and Jury Club was held.  It is too true that
+we are, as Tennyson says,
+
+    "Fish that love the mud,
+    Rising to no fancy flies."
+
+But man does not naturally revel in obscenity; the modesty of nature will
+stick to him for years.  But the Judge and Jury Clubs make you familiar
+with the manners of the stews; and I solemnly believe that in Sodom and
+Gomorrah nothing more filthy could have been talked about, and that this
+side Pandemonium there is nothing more debasing or debased.  If you wish
+to see your son thoroughly depraved, send him to a Judge and Jury Club.
+In a little while he will come back to you with every noble principle
+blotted out, with a mind stored with pollution, and with a fitting
+phraseology, ready to run a mad career of debauchery and vice.  Some
+fifteen years back the writer was at college, and one of his
+fellow-students was a fine young fellow, the heir to a decent fortune,
+and said to be connected with a noble family.  The last time I was at the
+Judge and Jury he was employed as one of the mock counsel; but he became
+too intemperate even for that, and enlisted, and miserably died.  They
+have tragic ends, many of these frequenters of Judge and Jury Clubs, and
+it is sad to think that, when the merriment is the loudest, and the drink
+is most stimulating, and the fellowship most jovial, there is burlesque
+even then.
+
+
+
+
+THE CAVE OF HARMONY.
+
+
+Reader, do you know the Cave of Harmony?  If you do not, so much the
+better.  If you are one of its _habitues_, I fear no words of mine can
+make you forsake it.  It is said the Cave is altered since we were
+there--so much the better; Thackeray, I think, had something to do with
+that reform--and that now nothing objectionable is sung.  Still, I doubt
+whether drinking and harmony after 12 P.M. can do much good.  You and I,
+it may be, are old men,
+
+    "Ruin'd trunks on wither'd forks,
+    Empty scarecrows you and I."
+
+We have run through youth with money in our pockets and time on our
+hands, and have seen all that life can offer, and know, what so many do
+not, that pleasure's cup but sparkles near the brim.  What we have done
+and been has been wine working on the fiery impulses of young blood, but
+now, sir, with our hair turning grey and our eyes growing dim, shall we
+not lift up a warning voice, and ask youth to pause ere it take the final
+plunge which for years, it may be for ever, shall estrange it from
+innocence, and peace, and God.
+
+It is midnight in the great city in which we write.  For a while sorrow
+and care are veiled from the eyes of men, and to the poorest and most
+toilworn come pleasant dreams.  The shops have long been closed, the roar
+of the streets has died away, the theatres have discharged their jaded
+crowds, and as we walk along, meeting now and then a poor drunkard
+reeling home--or a policeman silently patrolling the streets--or one of
+the unfortunates, by turns man's victim and curse--or some of the
+votaries of dissipation who are awake when other men are asleep--we
+realize all the grandeur and poetry and magnificence of London by night,
+and wonder not that Savage and Johnson should have found such a
+fascination in the scene, and that other sons of genius have read such
+sermons in its eloquent stones.  Let us stroll towards Covent Garden--in
+another hour it will be ringing with the oaths and execrations of
+seemingly all the market gardeners in Middlesex--and enter that doorway
+indicated by the glare of gas; come with me down these stairs, and into
+that room, the door of which the waiter holds obligingly open.  Let us
+stand here while we recover from the effect of the fumes of grog and the
+smoke of tobacco.  You find yourself in a room holding perhaps 1200
+gentlemen; look around, this is a respectable place, this Cave of
+Harmony, there are no poor people here.  We have heavy swells,
+moustached, and with white kids--officers in the army--scions of noble
+houses--country gentlemen, and merchants, and lawyers in town on
+business--literary men, medical students, and old fogies, with every
+moral sensibility dead, who have sat here for years listening to the same
+songs and the same outpourings; they could tell you something, these old
+fogies--what changes they have seen, as one generation after another of
+students and rakes and men about town have thought it fast to sup every
+night within these walls; of course the majority in the room are clerks,
+and commercial gents, and fellows in Government situations, learning here
+the extravagance which in time will compel them to commit frauds and
+forgery, and eventually perhaps land them in a felon's jail.  For the
+Cave of Harmony is not a cheap place to sup at.  The chop and baked
+potatoes are excellent but dear, and four or five shillings is a sum soon
+spent if you do as every one here does,--take your pint of stout, and
+three or four glasses of grog; and the chances are you will meet a
+friend, who will persuade you to make a night of it and stroll West with
+him, where you will see Vice flaunting more finely and with greater
+bravery than in any other capital in Europe.  But let us drop these
+considerations.  We are at one end of a long room, at the other is a
+raised platform, on which is a piano, and in front of which some
+half-dozen gentlemen are seated--these are the performers.  Their faces
+you know well enough, for they are in much repute for dinners at the
+London Tavern or the Freemasons, and the last time I dined with the
+Indigent Blind--with a High Church dignitary in the chair--we had the
+whole half-dozen to assist; they are good singers, I willingly confess,
+and sing many of them touching songs of youth, and hope, and true love,
+and home--but they don't sing the better for singing during the small
+hours and in a drinking saloon.  That little Hebrew, who has been at it,
+he tells me, for upwards of forty years, is not an improvisatore like
+Theodore Hook, but he does it well enough for an audience good-natured
+and a little the worse for drink.  The imitations of a barnyard, with its
+cows, and geese, and turkeys, and other live stock, by that poor, seedy,
+needy, smiling German, are amusing to hear once, but every one here has
+heard them over and over again.  What they need is something richer, and
+more spicy, as they term it.  You see they are getting tired of
+sentimental songs, and war songs, and madrigals, and glees.  They don't
+want to hear--
+
+    "I know a maiden fair to see,"
+
+or,
+
+    "Down in a flowery vale,
+    All on a summer morning,"
+
+or,
+
+    "In going to my lonely bed
+    As one that would have slept."
+
+They are careless when Podder sings "Kathleen Mavourneen," and are
+indifferent to the manner in which Brown renders
+
+    "Beautiful Venice, city of song."
+
+In old times, before the obscenity of the place was done away with,
+towards early morning it seemed a perfect Babel.  A favourite's name was
+sounded--it was repeated with every variety of emphasis in every corner
+of the room; the tables were struck with drunken fists till the tumult
+became a perfect storm; the master of the place raps the table with an
+auctioneer's hammer--"Silence, gentlemen, if you please, Mr --- will sing
+a comic song;" and immediately a man in a beggar's costume, and with the
+face of an idiot, jumps upon the stage.  His appearance was a signal for
+a whirlwind of applause.  He sang, with accompanying action, some dozen
+verses of doggerel, remarkable for obscenity and imbecility.  You looked
+around, but not a blush did you see in that crowded room; not one single
+head was held down in shame; not one high-spirited gentleman rushed
+indignantly from the place.  On the contrary, the singer was greeted with
+the most lavish expression of applause, continued so loudly and so long
+that again the proprietor had to announce, "Mr --- will sing another
+comic song."  But this time the comic singer would not dress for his
+part, and you saw a young, good-looking, well-dressed, gentlemanly fellow
+voluntarily degrading himself for the pleasure of men more degraded
+still.  You tell me the comic singer is a happy fellow, that he gets six
+guineas a-week, that he lives in a nice little cottage in the
+Hampstead-road.  I know better than you; the man I write of, after having
+been the attraction of the Cave of Harmony for years, after having been
+feasted by the nobility and gentry, after having led a career of pleasure
+on the most extravagant scale, will go down yet young as a beggar to one
+of our sea-port towns, and, after craving in vain a refuge from the
+winter's cold and a crust of bread, will die in the workhouse, and be
+buried in a pauper's grave.  How many of the gay young fellows now around
+us will have a similar termination to their career!  I never can pass the
+Cave of Harmony without thinking of the comic singer as last I saw
+him--in the very flush of health and life, stimulated by wine and
+applause, little dreaming of the workhouse in which he was so soon to beg
+for room to die.  But this exhibition is of the past,--the place is
+reformed; and how it is patronized is clear, when I state that on the
+night of the marriage of the Princess Royal, there were consumed in it 21
+dozen kidneys, 478 chops, 280 Welsh rabbits, 1500 glasses of stout, and a
+hogshead of pale ale.
+
+
+
+
+DISCUSSION CLUBS.
+
+
+It is the condition of a public-house that it must do a good business
+some way or other.  Mr Hinton, who has just got his license for Highbury
+Barn, says the dining apartment fell off and he was obliged to institute
+Soirees Dansantes.  Sometimes the publican gets a female dressed up in a
+Bloomer costume; sometimes he has for his barman a giant, or a dwarf, or
+an Albino, or a Kaffir chief--actually as an attraction to decent people
+to go and drink their pot of beer.  I find the following advertisement in
+the _Morning Advertiser_:--
+
+    "The Sheep-eater of Hindostan.--To be seen, the Sheep-eater of
+    Hindostan, representing an exhibition which took place on the 3rd of
+    March, 1796, before Colonel Patrick Douglas and other officers of a
+    battalion of Native Infantry, and a great concourse of the
+    inhabitants of the military station of Futtehghur.  It is engraved
+    from a sketch, taken on the spot by a native artist, and under the
+    inspection of Major-General Hardwicke, F.R.S.  The Sheep-eater was a
+    native of India, about thirty years of age, five feet nine inches
+    high, slender, well formed, and rather muscular.  He was attended by
+    a very old man, whom he called his father or preceptor, termed by the
+    natives Gooroo or Priest, who stated he had formerly followed the
+    same practice.  He was above the ordinary stature of the natives of
+    India, and wore his hair, which was of great length, coiled into the
+    form of a turban; and his beard was twisted like a rope, and nearly
+    reached his feet, being five feet eight inches in length.  The
+    exhibitor began his operation by raising the sheep from the ground
+    with his teeth.  He then threw the animal on its back, and, with his
+    teeth and hands only, separated the limbs, and stript the flesh from
+    the bones.  After mixing dust with the meat, by rubbing it on the
+    ground, in that dirty state he swallowed what he tore off.  The last
+    part of the operation was chewing the leaves of a plant, the local
+    name of which is Madaar (asclepias gigantea), and the milky juice,
+    which is of a very corrosive nature, he swallowed.  Having made a
+    collection of money, and the assemblage of people being much
+    increased, he offered to eat a second sheep, and actually commenced
+    the operation as before.  It may be proper to observe, that the sheep
+    in most parts of India are as small as the Welsh sheep of Great
+    Britain.  No. 1. represents lifting the sheep from the ground with
+    his teeth only.  2. Having thrown the sheep on its back, he extends
+    the limbs, preparatory to No. 3.  3. Ripping the animal open from the
+    flank to the breast.  4. Having removed the intestines, &c, he buries
+    his head in the body, to drink the blood collected.  5. Exhibiting
+    his face, after this sanguinary draught.  6. Having devoured every
+    portion of flesh from the bones, he chews the plant Madaar.  7. After
+    changing his waist-cloth, he returns with his Gooroo, or preceptor,
+    and offers to eat the second sheep, for the satisfaction of the
+    increased number of spectators."
+
+I do not give the name of the spirited proprietor, but in his
+advertisement he declares he intends exhibiting it _over the bar for a
+short time gratuitously_.  This is rich; it is like the doctor's advice
+gratis.
+
+Now in the same manner the publicans provide a weekly discussion meeting
+for that part of the public that loves to hear itself speak.  There is
+one at the Belvidere, Pentonville; another at the Horns, Kennington.
+Fleet-street is much favoured.  There are the Temple Forum, the Cogers'
+Hall, and another large room in Shoe-lane.  These are gratuitous, like
+the picture in the above advertisement--that is, you are expected to sit
+and drink all night.  The most celebrated one is that which meets not far
+from the Temple, presided over by the editor of a Sunday paper, and
+assisted by several reporters connected with the daily journals.  One of
+them not long since contested an Irish borough on Protestant principles,
+but unfortunately, instead of being returned, found himself in gaol for
+election expenses.  Besides these, there are many third and fourth-rate
+literary men--a class, I fear (I speak of the minors), the most braggart,
+lying, and needy under heaven--men who are going to do wonders, but who
+never do--whose success, if such a term may be applied to their career,
+arises simply from their power of brag, and from the possession of an
+enviable amount of self-esteem.  Then there are briefless barristers, but
+too happy to have an opportunity of airing their dictionaries, and
+tradesmen, and clerks, all fancying that there is no need why they should
+hide their talents under a napkin.  Still these places do not flourish,
+and there are more bad speeches made than good ones.  You are cooped up
+in an inconvenient apartment, suffocated by tobacco-smoke, and very
+unpleasantly affected by the beer and gin-and-water which every one feels
+bound to consume.  The waiter is in the room, and you are expected to
+give your orders.  The speaking is a secondary consideration.  The first
+thing you are required to do is to drink.  I have how in my mind's eye a
+young fellow who was a great man at one of these places.  He was a clerk
+with limited means, but he came to these places night after night, and
+drank and spent his money freely.  It is the old tale over again.  He was
+intrusted with his employer's cash.  He applied some of it to liquidate
+his expenses.  He was unable to replace it.  Discovery was made at last;
+he is now in Newgate, and his wife--for he was just married--is breaking
+her young heart with shame and want.  The curse of these public-houses is
+that they lead men into expense and reduce them into poverty, if they do
+not almost necessitate crime.  A discussion is all very well, and the
+habit of being able to get up and say a few words when occasion requires
+pertinent and _apropos_ is invaluable, but to acquire that habit it is
+scarcely worth while to sit all night toping, while Smithers is playing
+old gooseberry with his H's, or O'Flaherty raving of the wrongs of the
+Green Isle.  The questions discussed are generally such as are peculiar
+to the time.  Was Lord Cardigan a hero?  Does Sir Benjamin Hall deserve
+well of the public for his conduct with reference to Sunday bands?  Does
+the Palmerston cabinet deserve the support of the country?  Would Lord
+John Russell's scheme of national education, if carried out, be a public
+benefit?  Let men talk on these subjects if they will, and as long as
+they will, but I think they will think more clearly, and talk better, and
+come sooner to a rational decision, if they do not drink.  I am sure I
+have seen the audience and the orators more inflamed by beer than by
+eloquence, and when turned out into the street after a long sitting,
+many, I imagine, have seen a couple of moons and double the usual
+allowance of lamps and police.  The worst of it is, that after the
+discussion is over, there will be always a few stop to have a bit of
+supper and another glass.  I remember, just as the war broke out, I was
+at one of the places to which I have already referred, the subject was
+the propriety of erecting on the ruins of Turkey a united Greece.  The
+Philhellenists came down in great force, and young Greeks, Sophocles and
+Ionides, and many more screaming at the top of their voices, were there
+as well.  What with the excitement of the subject and what with the
+excitement of the drink, the whole affair settled into a regular orgie,
+and the tumult of that night still rings wildly in my ear.  Dumbiedikes
+would have stared at the gift of tongues exhibited on that occasion.
+
+If you admire pot-house oratory, then attend one of these places.  The
+chair is generally taken about nine, and the proceedings close at twelve.
+A gentleman already agreed on commences the discussion, then the debate
+is left to drag its slow length along, sometimes giving rise to animated
+discussions, and at other times being a terrible failure.  What is
+considered the treat of the evening is generally something of this
+sort--An indifferent speaker, perhaps a stranger, gets up and makes a
+short speech, which brings up one of the old seasoned debaters, great in
+his own eyes and in those of almost every one present.  I assure you he
+is down upon the modest debutant in fine style, making mincemeat of his
+facts, and ridiculing his logic.  The easier his work is, the more does
+he labour at it.  The audience frantically applaud, and the orator, as he
+sits down, evidently thinks Brougham could not have slashed an opponent
+in better style.  The gravity of these speakers is really amusing.  Did
+they speak the language of millions--did principles of eternal import
+dwell upon their tongue--did nations breathlessly wait for their
+decisions--did they shake the arsenal and fulmine over Greece--they could
+not set about their work in a more determined manner.  And Jones, from
+his tremendous castigation of Palmerston, or fierce diatribe against Lord
+John, will sneak off quietly to his back garret in Pentonville, just as
+we can imagine Diocletian abandoning an empire to plant cabbages at
+Salone.  It is clear some of the speakers are naturally good orators; but
+the regular stagers have a seedy appearance, and that peculiar redness of
+the nose or soddenness of the skin which indicates the drinker; and if
+you go much, you will find a paper with five-shilling subscriptions, and
+you will be asked to give your name, for the benefit of some prominent
+debater whose affairs do not seem to have prospered, in spite of their
+master's matchless powers of oratory.  The truth is, the money has been
+spent here in drink that was required elsewhere, and wife and children
+have starved at home while the orator was declaiming against Despotism
+abroad.  I fear the only class benefited by these discussions are the
+landlords, who point to their door and whisper in your ears; Admission
+gratis.  Yes, that is true; but the egress, ah, there's the rub!  It is
+that for which you must pay, and pay handsomely, too, as hundreds of poor
+fellows have found to their cost.
+
+
+
+
+THE CYDER CELLARS.
+
+
+In the days of the gay and graceless Charles, Bow-street was the
+Bond-street of London.  In the taverns of that quarter were the true
+homes and haunts of the British poets.  That they were much better for
+all their drinking and worship of the small hours, I more than doubt.
+Pope tried the pace, but found it killing, and had the wisdom to go and
+live at Twickenham, and cease to play the part of a man about town.
+Describing Addison's life at this period, he says, "He usually studied
+all the morning, then met his party at Button's, and dined there, and
+stayed there five or six hours, and sometimes far into the night.  I was
+of the company for about a year, but found it too much for me.  _I hurt
+my health_, _and so I quitted it_."  But the wits died off, and Tom's,
+Will's, Button's became desolate, and in their place the Cyder Cellars
+grew famous.
+
+You know Maiden-lane, where an old hair-dresser had a son born to him,
+who, under the name of Turner, won his way to the first rank amongst
+English painters,--where Voltaire, "so witty, profligate, and thin,"
+lodged at the house of a French peruke-maker, and corresponded with
+Swift, and Pope, and the other literary men of the times,--where Fielding
+laid the foundation of an eternal fame,--where Andrew Marvell refused
+courtly bribes, and in sublime poverty proudly picked his mutton-bone:
+there, some long time since, stood a mansion, the residence, in a green
+old age, of that Nell Gwynne of whom, with a strange perversity, the
+world speaks as kindly as if she were a Grace Darling, or a Florence
+Nightingale, or a Margaret Fuller, or an Elizabeth Fry.  A portion of the
+old house still remains, with its ancient wainscotting.  Well, on the
+site of this mansion was, and is, the Cyder Cellars, the oldest house of
+its class in London, actually referred to in a rare pamphlet now extant
+in the British Museum, entitled "Adventures Under-ground in the Year
+1750."  In those days to drink deep was deemed a virtue, and the literary
+class, after the exhausting labours of the day, loved nothing better than
+to sit soaking all night in the Cyder Cellars, where all restraints were
+thrown on one aide,--where the song was sung and the wine was quaffed,
+and men were fools enough to think they were getting happy when they were
+only getting drunk.  I can understand why the wits went to the Cyder
+Cellars then.  Few of them lived in a style in which they would like to
+receive their friends.  In a place like the Cyder Cellars they could meet
+after the theatres were closed, and the occupations of the day over, and
+sup and talk and drink with more freedom than in any private house; and
+no doubt many were the ingenuous youths who went to the Cyder Cellars to
+see the learned Mr. Bayle, or the great Grecian Porson, or the eminent
+tragedian Mr. Edmund Kean, and thought it a fine thing to view those
+distinguished men maudlin, or obscene, or blasphemous, over their cups.
+But the wits do not go to the Cyder Cellars now.  Even the men about town
+do not go there much.  I remember when that dismal song, "Sam Hall," was
+sung--a song in which a wretch is supposed to utter all the wretchedness
+in his soul, all his sickness of life, all his abhorrence of mankind, as
+he was on his way to Tyburn drop.  Horrible as the song was--revolting as
+it was to all but _blaze_ men, the room was crammed to suffocation,--it
+was impossible often to get a seat, and you might have heard a pin drop.
+Where are the crowds that listened to that song?  My own companion--where
+is he?  A finer young man, with richer promise, I knew not.  He had a
+generous disposition, a taste for study, and was blessed with the
+constitution of a horse; he had received a liberal education; his morals
+had been carefully attended to; his parents were people of large
+property, and this son I always deemed his mother's favourite son; and
+now in his very prime, when he might have been a blessing to society,
+when in his successful professional career his parents might have reaped
+a reward, when the heart of some loving, tender, trusting woman might
+have joyed in his love, when fair young children, calling him father,
+might have clustered round his knees, he is dying, I am told, before
+their very eyes, slowly, and with agony, from the terrible effects of
+drink.  And does it not really seem as if there were a curse attaching to
+those connected with the trade?  A week or two since, had you been
+passing down Bridges-street into the Strand late on a Saturday night, or
+early on a Sunday morning, on a door-step, in spite of the pouring rain,
+you might have seen a woman, in her rags and loneliness, trying to gather
+a few hours of sleep.  She was too weak to pursue her unhallowed calling,
+and had she been so disposed on that cold, wet night, it would have been
+of little avail had she walked the streets.  The policeman as he goes his
+monotonous rounds tells her to move on.  She wakes up, gets upon her
+legs, hobbles along, and then, when he is past, again, weary and wayworn,
+seeks the friendly door-step.  The policeman returns; "What, here still?"
+he exclaims.  Ah yes! she has not power to move away.  She is weak, ill,
+dying.  The friendly police carry her to the neighbouring hospital.  "She
+cannot be received here," says Routine, and she is taken to the
+workhouse.  Again she is taken to the hospital, admitted at last--for is
+she not a woman, and a young one, too?--not more than twenty-five, it
+appears,--and on her face, stained with intemperance and sin, there is
+the dread stamp of death--in this case, perhaps, a welcome messenger; for
+who would live, fallen, friendless, forsaken, with a diseased body and a
+broken heart?  "The spirit of a man can sustain his infirmity; but a
+wounded spirit who can bear?"  Peace be with her! in another hour or two
+she will have done with this wretched life of hers, and have gone where
+"the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest."  More than
+usual official cruelty is visible in this case, for all that is given her
+between her admission and her death is a simple cup of tea; and the
+coroner's verdict very properly censures the hospital authorities.  Well,
+what connexion, you ask, is there with this girl's sad fate and the
+jollity of the Cyder Cellars?  Only this, that her father made the Cyder
+Cellars so popular a place of resort.  If I go there again I shall think
+of Louisa Regan, who began life as the daughter of a successful publican,
+who had been a governess in a nobleman's family, at the early age of
+twenty-five rescued from the streets by policemen, and dependent on
+charity for a bed on which to die.  In the foaming cup, in the glitter of
+the gas, while the comic singer was most comical, or the sentimental
+singer most sentimental, I could not be oblivious of her fate.  Is there
+not poison in the bowl?  Is there not madness in the merriment?  To the
+night so bright does there not come a dolorous morrow?  You may sing and
+laugh the hours away in the Cyder Cellars for a while, but you must pay
+your reckoning, and then, I imagine, you will doubt whether the amusement
+was worth the price.  Youth generally pays too dear for its whistle.
+Youth is finding this out; at any rate the days of the Cyder Cellars are
+numbered, and now, with its Judge and Jury and _Poses Plastiques_, it
+collects comparatively few.
+
+Let me ask, need the amusements of our leisure hours be thus based on
+false principles?  Cambridge, in one of the pleasantest papers in the
+"World," says, "Among the numbers who have changed a sober plan of living
+for one of riot and excess, the greatest part have been converted by the
+arguments in a drinking song."  Life is real, life is earnest.  It is a
+battle-ground which requires heart and muscle, and where only the brave
+can conquer; but if I drop for half-an-hour into a music hall, I learn
+that pleasure is the great aim of life, and that gin can make me jolly
+and a genius.
+
+
+
+
+LEICESTER-SQUARE.
+
+
+One of the peculiar institutions of the country is the square.  Charles
+Knight says:--"The Piazza, Place, Platz, of Italy, France, or Germany,
+have little in common with it.  Its elements are simple enough--an open
+space of a square figure, houses on each of the four sides, and an
+enclosed centre with turf, a few trees, and, it may be, flowers; and
+there is a square."  There are fashionable squares, all alive with the
+sound of carriage-wheels and the chaste accents of a thousand flunkeys;
+there are city squares, dull, dark places, with old red-brick houses, and
+a stunted, smoke-dried shrub or two in the middle.  Then there are
+respectable squares, which never were fashionable, nor ever aimed to be
+such; and then there are squares which were once fashionable, but now are
+sadly gone out of repute.  One of the chief of these is Leicester-square.
+Do our readers remember how Queen Caroline found time to be the mother of
+seven promising children, of whom the eldest, Frederick, Prince of Wales,
+was a continual source of sorrow and vexation to both his parents?  "He
+resembled," writes Horace Walpole, with his usual sneer, "the Black
+Prince only in dying before his father."  Well, there was a house built
+before the Commonwealth, called Leicester-house.  Hither came this young,
+dissipated, short-lived Prince, and fixed his court.  When he passed
+away, and the wits wrote--
+
+    "Here lies Fred,
+    Who was alive,
+       And is dead,"
+
+still the place had the prestige of fashion.  It gradually assumed the
+shape of a square, and became the dwelling-place of men truly great.  Sir
+Isaac Newton resided near the square, in a house yet standing, and known
+to fast men as Bertolini's, _alias_ the Newton Hotel.  Where now we see
+the Sabloniere Hotel, Hogarth once dwelt, and at a later time Sir Joshua
+Reynolds lived on the opposite side of the square.  In its neighbourhood
+Sir Charles Bell made his discoveries respecting the nervous system, and
+here the renowned John Hunter lived.  In later times Wordsworth made it
+the scene of his Moon-gazers; and if he could term it "Leicester's busy
+square," still more is that epithet appropriate to it at the present
+time.  It is true that the Great Globe is not a success; that the
+Panopticon failed; that the Western Literary Institution did not
+flourish; that the place is not literary or scientific, nor even
+business-like, for by daylight the shops look seedy, and the wares
+exhibited are somewhat of the cheapest.  But at night a change comes over
+the spirit of its dream.  Here, from cheap lodging-houses hard by, from
+cold garrets or dark and dusty two-pair backs, crawl out to walk its
+flagstones, or taint its air with the smoke of cheap cigars, men of all
+nations and tongues--French, Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Poles--the
+scoundrels and patriots of Europe.  There is business here now; the air
+is laden with the sickly odour of a thousand dinners.  Hotels and _cafes_
+and _restaurants_ are lit up and gay.  Mr Smith opens the Alhambra on
+Sundays and week-days for Music for the Million; and women, rouged and
+dressed as much as possible like the nude figures, degrade our
+conceptions of Venus, and Sappho, and the Syrens, and others of our
+classic acquaintances, by the exhibition of them in questionable
+groupings tolerated as _poses plastiques_.  Wine-shades attract us; we
+hear the clink of billiards.  This house we know to be a betting
+house--that to be a hell.  A man runs up against us.  He turns round and
+apologizes.  I catch a glimpse of his face.  I see at once that he is a
+billiard-room shark.  Look at his pale face, his cold eye, his hard
+mouth; and don't play with him, however civil.  Above all, don't imagine
+from his exterior that he is a gentleman.  A gentleman does not wear
+slop-shop clothes nor mosaic gold.
+
+You wish to sit down.  Well, as it is past the midnight hour, we will go
+into this _Cafe Chansante_.  At any rate the foreigners have more taste
+than ourselves.  The pretty young girls, French or German, at the bar
+give the place a pleasant appearance, and the mirrors on all sides
+reflect the gay forms and faces here assembled.  But we pass into the
+concert room, where some Spanish minstrels in national costumes are
+singing national airs.  As you are not musical and cannot understand
+these distinguished foreigners, let us see who are here, the Swiss
+Kellner, with his wonted civility, having first brought us a cup of
+coffee and a cigar.  I don't know why it is so, but it always struck me
+that of all asses the English ass is the greatest.  How conspicuous, for
+instance, are those three young fellows sitting at the small marble table
+in front of us.  Most likely they are medical students.  Of course they
+are drinking and smoking, and have female companions, respecting whose
+character there can be no doubt.  How happy are they in their conceit--in
+their insolent laugh at the foreigners round them--in their vulgar shouts
+of derisive applause.  Talk to them, and you will be astonished to find
+how morally dead they are, how narrow is their range of thought, how
+obsolete are all their ideas, how suppressed are all their sympathies:
+not even the beer they drink can be heavier.  Yet these lads are to teach
+the next age its medical science--and in the last death-struggle, when we
+would save the life we love, with broken hearts and streaming eyes we
+shall appeal to them in vain.  In England the general practitioner will
+always be under-bred so long as the night-house and the casino absorb the
+hours science imperiously claims.  But pass on to this next table.  Look
+at this girl all radiant with beauty and smiles--beautiful even in spite
+of her long-lost virtue and life of sin.  For,
+
+    "You may break, you may ruin, the vase if you will,
+    But the scent of the roses will hang round it still."
+
+The man seated by her side is in love with her.  It may be for her love
+he has given up mother, sister, betrothed, home, his fair name, his
+prospects in life, his hopes of heaven; and she no more heeds his
+passionate vows than does the rock the murmur of the waves at its feet;
+and already her wanton eye glances round the room for other victims to
+sacrifice to her vanity and pride.  Oh, the deceit and craft and hardness
+of women such as she!  And yet on account of such in distant
+village-homes there is sadness, and the mother and sister deny themselves
+many a luxury, and grayhaired fathers mourn over their lost and
+loved--their Benjamins--born and nurtured to come to such an end.
+Perhaps at the next table the picture is reversed; that woman is
+beautiful, and her face has a smile, and there is a flush upon her cheek,
+and the wine has driven from her heart for a while bitter memories; but
+she is not happy, though loud be her laugh; and if she dared to sit and
+think of the hour when she fell, and of the mire and dirt along which she
+has crawled, of what she is now in her rustling silks, and what she was
+in her peasant dress then--eyes full of grief, and dim with tears, would
+look into her own; and out of that gilded room, and away from all the
+song and laughter and wine, would she not rush home to die?  Yet if she
+now sells herself to pay to-morrow's baker's bill, is she to be trod on
+by the high-born beauty that goes up to God's altar with one for whom she
+has no love, for an establishment that will make her bridesmaids yellow
+with well-bred jealousy?  But we are all gay here.  Is not the room light
+and cheerful?  Is not the whole aspect all mirth-inspiring?  Does not
+dull care flee the flowing bowl?  Jolly fellows are sitting and telling
+each other tales which you would be sorry your sister should hear, and
+which no mother would believe would be ever heard by son of hers without
+a manly protest.  Women are laughing and drinking as if theirs were not
+lives of shame.  Sated men about town languidly smoke, and the eye of the
+gloomy refugee sparkles, and his heart beats quicker, as he hears the
+song of his father-land.  The hours hasten on--the company depart--the
+wanton beauty, flushed with conquest, rides off in the Hansom, or it may
+be in her private brougham, to her luxurious rooms; while her sister,
+shivering in the cold night, begs us for two-pence with which to purchase
+a bed of straw.  Poor forlorn one! in another year thou wilt lie down in
+another bed, only to wake up when the last trump shall sound!
+
+
+
+
+DR JOHNSON'S TAVERN.
+
+
+Leigh Hunt, Barry Cornwall, and the _Times_ are all eloquent in the
+praise of alcohol.  It lifts us above this dull earth, it fires our
+genius, it gives to us the large utterances of the gods.  Barry Cornwall
+tells us--
+
+    "Bad are the times
+    And bad the rhymes
+    That scorn old wine."
+
+Leigh Hunt translates "Bacchus in Tuscany," and sanctions such lines as
+the following--
+
+    "I would sooner take to poison
+    Than a single cup set eyes on
+    Of that bitter and guilty stuff ye
+    Talk of by the name of coffee;"
+
+and the _Times_ everywhere inculcates the idea that, without wine, poetry
+and eloquence and wit were dumb and dead.  Was Sidney Smith witty, was
+Shelley a poet, or was he who in old times drew away the Hebrew multitude
+from the crowded streets of Jerusalem out into the desert, whose food was
+locusts and wild honey, whose raiment was a leathern girdle--was he not
+eloquent, as he warned the terror-stricken mob that hung upon his lips of
+the wrath to come?  Facts are not in favour of the wine-drinkers.  Of
+Waller Dr Johnson writes, "In a time when fancy and gaiety were the most
+powerful recommendations to regard, it is not likely that Waller was
+forgotten.  He passed his time in the company that was highest both in
+rank and wit, from which even his obstinate sobriety did not exclude him.
+Though he drank water, he was enabled by his fertility of mind to
+heighten the mirth of Bacchanalian assemblies; and Mr Saville said that
+'no man in England should keep him company without drinking, but Ned
+Waller.'"  "In Parliament," says Burnet, "he was the delight of the
+House, and, though old, said the liveliest things of any of them."  The
+truth is, men have often reserved the outpourings of their mind for the
+social glass, and have fallen into the natural mistake of believing that
+it was the glass, and not the opportunity and the action of mind upon
+mind, that elicited a certain amount of joyous fun.  I must quote an
+anecdote from Sir Walter Scott's Life to illustrate my meaning.  He tells
+us one of his school-fellows was always at the top of the class.  Young
+Scott found that when asked a question the lad alluded to was in the
+habit of fumbling one peculiar button.  Scott cut off that button.  The
+next time the poor fellow was asked a question, as usual he put his hand
+to fumble the friendly button--alas! it was gone, and with it his power,
+and he speedily lost his place.  The writers I have quoted, to be
+consistent, should argue it was the button that made that lad sharp and
+clever.
+
+But if you still doubt, let us test the thing practically.  In
+Bolt-court, Fleet-street, there is a tavern bearing the honoured name of
+Dr Johnson.  Dr Johnson lived in this court, and hence, I suppose, the
+sign; but the Doctor was a total abstainer.  He found he could not be a
+moderate drinker, so he verily gave up the drink altogether.  He told
+that precious ass, Boswell, to drink water, because if he did that he
+would be sure not to get drunk, whereas if he drank wine he was not so
+sure; and Boswell, to whom the idea seems never to have occurred, prints
+the remark as an astonishing instance of his hero's sagacity.  But I pass
+on to modern times.  In this Dr Johnson's Tavern is situated "The City
+Concert Room."  I suppose the City does not care much about concerts, as
+I have generally found it very thinly attended.  It is a handsome room,
+and perhaps there are about fifty or sixty gentlemen, chiefly young ones,
+present.  You do not see swells here as at Evans's.  They are all very
+plain-looking people, from the neighbouring shops, or from the warehouses
+in Cheapside.  Just by me are three pale heavy-looking young men, whose
+intellects seem to me dead, except so far as a low cunning indicates a
+sharpness where money is concerned.  One of them is stupidly beery.
+Their great object is to get him to drink more, notwithstanding his
+repeated assurances, uttered, however, in a very husky tone, that he must
+go back to "Islin'ton" to-night.  A lady at one end of the room, with a
+very handsome blue satin dress and a very powerful voice, is screaming
+out something about "Lovely Spring," but this little party is evidently
+indifferent to the charms of the song.  Just beyond me is a gent with a
+short pipe and a very stiff collar.  I watch him for an hour, and whether
+he is enjoying himself intensely, or whether he is enduring an
+indescribable amount of inward agony, I cannot tell.  A little farther
+off is another gent with a very red scarf, equally stoical in appearance.
+Behind me are two verdant youths, of limited means I imagine; but they
+have the pleasure of speaking to the comic singer, and take tickets for
+that interesting gentleman's benefit.  But the comic singer comes
+forward, and sings with appropriate action of the doings of a little
+insect very partial to comfortable quarters.  That song I have known
+fifteen years.  I have heard Sharp sing it, Ross sing it, Cowell sing it.
+Night after night in some drinking room in some part of London or other
+is a beery audience told--
+
+    "Creeping where no life doth be,
+    A rare old plant is the lively flea."
+
+And after a pursuit very vividly pantomimed, the little stranger is
+suffered to be caught, and to tell the catcher that it is his father's
+ghost, doomed for a season to walk the earth and nip him most infernally,
+and so on.  Now I am sure that every one in the room has heard this
+dozens of times before, yet old men are laughing as if it was an absolute
+novelty.  Talk about alcohol brightening men's intellects!  When I come
+to such places as this, it always seems to me to have a precisely
+contrary effect.  Men could not sit and hear all these stale witticisms
+unless they drank.  Sober, I am sure they could not do it, not even if
+they were paid for it; and yet all seem enraptured.  I remark, however,
+one exception.  Two waiters help to a seat by my side a very dirty little
+man with red eyes, and generally shabby appearance.  The waiters set down
+by him a glass of grog, offer him a cigar, and then playfully shaking
+their fingers at him, as if to intimate he had better be quiet, leave him
+to his fate.  After a few minutes of deep thought, he looks to me and
+beckons.  I take no notice.  He repeats the signal.  I lean forward.
+
+"Very o-old, sir."
+
+"What do you mean?" we ask.
+
+"The comic singer very o-old, sir."
+
+We intimate as much.
+
+"But get him on a fresh piece, sir, and see how he can go-o."  Here our
+friend began rolling one arm rapidly round the other, to give us an idea
+of the comic singer's powers.
+
+"Pity he don't give something new," repeats our friend.  Another
+assenting nod on our part and the conversation ceases.  But we suppose it
+is with comic singers as with others.  "A man who has settled his
+opinions does not love to have the tranquillity of his convictions
+disturbed," wrote Dr Johnson, and a comic singer does not like to have
+the bother of learning fresh songs.  But the comic singer was applauded
+and encored, and then he treated us to a monologue, in which he describes
+how he, the drunken husband, stays out all night, and makes it up with
+his "old ooman" when he gets home; and in the course of his remarks of
+course he declares teetotalism is humbug, that there was truth in wine,
+but he'd be blessed if there was any in water; that the man who would
+drink the latter would be a muddy cistern--forgetting all the while the
+_tu quoque_ the water-drinkers would very fairly urge, on the authority
+even of Mr Henry Drummond; and then I came away, thinking that if
+drinking made men witty and light-hearted, I had been very unfortunate on
+the night of my visit.  Once upon a time, as the writer was in the Cave
+of Harmony, the polite manager asked him his opinion of a new comic
+singer.  Having given it, the red-faced little man turned to us with a
+sigh, and said, "Ah, sir, you have no idea what a dearth there is of
+comic talent now-a-days."  And truly he was right.  There is little fun
+and comedy and wit anywhere.  I know not where they are; I know where
+they are not.  You will not find them in the taverns where men sit all
+the evening listening to music for which they do not care, and drinking
+all the while.  How should there be, since wine is now admitted to be the
+product of the laboratory, not of the grape?
+
+
+
+
+THE SPORTING PUBLIC-HOUSE
+
+
+Was instituted for the combined purpose of encouraging drinking, and what
+its admirers term the noble art of self-defence.  There was a time when
+boxing was in fashion; when but few of our noblemen and gentlemen did not
+take lessons in the pugilistic art.  "I can assert, without fear of
+contradiction," writes Pierce Egan, "that I furnished the present Duke of
+Buccleuch with a pair of boxing-gloves and all the volumes of 'Boxiana'
+during his studies at Eton College."  Prince George of Cambridge learnt
+the rudiments of the art from young Richmond; the late Duke of Portland
+was a pupil of that Jackson whose name is familiar to all readers of
+Byron.  At the first public dinner of the Pugilistic Society, held at the
+Thatched House Tavern, 1814, a baronet, Sir Henry Smith, was in the
+chair; and it is a fact, when the war with France was terminated, and the
+Emperor of Russia and the King of Prussia, accompanied by Blucher and
+Platoff, visited this country, that not anything they had witnessed
+appeared to interest them more than the sparring matches between Jackson,
+Tom Crib, Belcher, Old Dutch Sam, at a _dejeuner_ given by Lord Lowther
+at his mansion.  Indeed, so delighted were those great masters of the art
+of war with the combats between those first-rate boxers, that Messrs
+Blucher and Platoff had a second exhibition by their own express desire
+at the Earl of Elgin's house.  Actually even in the House of Commons Mr
+Wyndham favoured the House with a description, warm and glowing, of a
+recent contest between Richmond and Maddox, of which he had been a
+spectator; and it is not long since Mr Gully, a prize-fighter,
+represented Pontefract.  The late George IV., when Prince of Wales, was
+also a spectator at the fight upon a stage on Brighton Downs between Tom
+Tyne, a distinguished boxer, with a publican of milling notoriety.  The
+latter was killed by a blow on his temple, and died almost upon the
+instant.  The royal debauchee never attended another, but his brother,
+the late William the Fourth, was often a spectator of the matches on
+Moulsey Hurst.  In this respect the age has made progress.  Our noblemen
+no longer patronize the prize-ring.  Our young princes have a purer
+taste.  Yet the institution, with all its brutality and blackguardism,
+still exists, and in the _Advertiser_, side by side with an article
+bewailing the spread of German neology in our dissenting colleges, or
+speaking evil of such earnest workers in the wide field of philanthropy
+as Maurice or Kingsley, you will read of one of the beastly prize-fights
+which still disgrace the land.  But the _Advertiser_ is the publicans'
+paper, and it is a fact easily understood, that the prize-fighter, when
+his day is over, generally keeps a public-house, which is generally
+called a sporting-house.  A warm admirer of them writes, "Fun, civility,
+mirth, good-humour, and sporting events are the general theme of
+conversation to be met with over a cheerful glass at the above houses."
+Ben Caunt's, in St Martin's-lane, is perhaps the principal one, but there
+are some five or six besides in various parts of the metropolis.  Let us
+enter one.  In spite of the assurance of civility and good humour, I
+don't think you will stay long, but will feel on a small scale what
+Daniel must have felt in the lions' den.
+
+We enter, we will say, Bang Up's hostelry, about ten on a Thursday
+evening; there is Bang Up at the bar, with his ton of flesh and broken
+nose.  Many people think it worth while to go and spend one or two
+shillings at Bang Up's bar, merely that they may have the pleasure of
+seeing him, and consider him cheap at the money.  I don't admire their
+taste.  I once spent an evening with the Norfolk Giant, and I did not
+find him very witty or well informed.  But let us walk up-stairs, having
+first paid sixpence to a doorkeeper, by appearance a negro, for which we
+are to receive a certain amount of refreshment, if beer and grog come
+rightly under that denomination; at length we find ourselves in a very
+ordinary room, with very extraordinary people in it.  First, there are
+the portraits--_imprimis_ Bang Up, looking grosser and more animal than
+ever.  Secondly, Mrs Bang Up, the exact counterpart of her bosom's lord;
+then a tribe of Bang Ups junior, of all sizes and sexes, attract our
+astonished eyes.  Then--for the room is a complete Walhalla--we have
+portraits of sporting heroes innumerable, with villanous foreheads, all
+"vacant of our glorious gains," heavy eyes, thick bull necks, and very
+short croppy hair.  Here Gully vanquishes Bob Gregson, "the Lancashire
+champion," one of the finest and most formidable men of the day.  There
+Jack Randall and Ned Turner display "a fine science and capital
+fighting," almost unparalleled, and so on; for the list is long, and it
+is one we do not care to repeat.  We seat ourselves at the further end of
+the room, with a few gentlemen drinking gin and smoking cigars.  Twenty
+or thirty mean-looking men are seated along the side; they are mostly
+dirty, and have broken noses; they are not very conversational, but seem
+chiefly to be deeply engaged in smoking.  At length the waiter brings out
+some boxing gloves; one man takes off his coat and waistcoat, possibly
+his shirt, and puts them on; another does the same--they stand up to each
+other, the gents at the table encourage them, and the seedy men with
+broken noses look on very knowingly; they spar for some time, till the
+one feels that he cannot touch the other, and throws down the gloves; a
+small collection is then made for the noble art of self-defence, which, I
+presume, is divided amongst the performers; other actors come upon the
+stage, and the friendly contests are maintained till Bang Up closes his
+public-house for the night.  As I came out, it was a great consolation to
+me to think that there are not many such places in London.  The style of
+men thus created are, I fear, neither useful nor ornamental.  They have a
+nasty ticket-of-leave look, and I would fain dispense with their company
+in quiet back streets during the small hours.  One other thought may
+console you; the sporting public-house, once popular, now attracts but a
+few, and that few a weak and vicious class.  Is not this matter of
+encouragement?
+
+
+
+
+THE PUBLIC-HOUSE WITH A BILLIARD-ROOM
+
+
+Is a great attraction in some places.  We knew a whole town upset by the
+fact that the landlord of the "Swan" had fitted up a billiard-room.  I
+and Wiggins and Foley and Jobson spent at one time, I regret to say, a
+good deal of time there.  I am warning the reader against the follies of
+my youth; but Foley failed, and Jobson and Wiggins, after having had
+their debts paid three or four times by their friends, I believe are now
+following that eminently healthy occupation called gold-digging,
+somewhere in Australia.  Then I think of that little town in South Wales,
+and of the "Angel," under whose too hospitable roof we used to meet.  One
+of us was an M.P's son; he is now, I believe, dragging down a father's
+grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.  Another of us bore a name dear to
+every Englishman; he, I believe, is pensioned off by his family, and
+lives as he can on the handsome allowance of a guinea a-week.  But these
+London billiard-rooms are fifty times more pernicious.  There are some
+five or six hundred connected with public-houses.  There are in all our
+large thoroughfares separate rooms licensed for this game, but at these
+drinking often goes on.  And thus the two excitements acting on the man,
+he is impelled downwards with an increasing power.  I have seen in these
+rooms officers and secretaries of public companies in a night losing, I
+am sure, a quarter's salary; I have seen young fellows completely ruined.
+There was not, when I first knew him, a more promising, gentlemanly young
+fellow than Smethwicke, and now, they tell me, he is in Marylebone
+Workhouse.
+
+We are told that men are grown-up children.  This saying forcibly
+occurred to me the last time I was in a billiard-room.  After I had
+recovered from the feeling of suffocation which an atmosphere infected by
+gas and smoke had produced, I observed a number of men with long sticks
+trying to knock a number of various-coloured balls into any of the six
+pockets of the billiard-table.  At each unsuccessful attempt a chorus of
+observations were made by the players, not remarkable for their novelty,
+for the vocabulary of the billiard-room is very limited, such as "Not
+within a mile"--"I didn't play for you, Bob"--"It smelt the hole," &c.
+&c.  At each successful attempt the chorus was still more animated, but
+not more original, as "Good stroke,"--"Bad flewke"--"On the red," &c. &c.
+The game that was being played was called "pool."  A number of people put
+each 2_s._ or 3_s._, as they may choose to arrange it, and they have each
+a ball of a different colour--red, blue, pink, yellow, white, brown,
+black.  Each player has what is called three lives, and each time he is
+put in by a player--for they play in turn--he pays sixpence or a
+shilling, according to arrangement, and loses a life, whilst the
+successful player is allowed to play again upon the ball which happens to
+be nearest.  The money in the pool is ultimately divided between the two
+players who have kept their three lives the longest.  It will be seen
+that, if everything is straightforward, the best player has the best
+chance of dividing the pool or taking the lives.  But, unhappily, this
+game, so child-like in appearance, is not always innocent.  It may happen
+two players, gifted by nature with conveniently elastic consciences, and
+a very confused notion of right and wrong, may arrange when they play
+upon each other to purposely avoid putting the ball in.  Of course, each
+time this omission is made it is equal to the owner of the ball having an
+extra life, and of course makes the division of the pool almost a
+certainty.  Perhaps at the end of the evening the two gentlemen, "who
+merely play for their amusement," may be seen under a lamppost dividing
+the spoil.  The other games are pyramids and billiards, which it is
+unnecessary to describe.  I will simply remark that the best player
+should win the game; but this is not always the case.  Alas! for human
+nature!  Sharps lose to win; muffs win to lose (the term "muff" is
+applied to an indifferent player).  After this not very flattering
+description the reader would doubtless like to know who frequent these
+places.  A very large majority are gentlemen--men who are perfectly
+incapable of doing anything but what is strictly honest; the minority are
+billiard sharks.  The gentlemen play because it is a source of
+excitement; the sharks, because it is a source of profit.  There are also
+some who play only for amusement with gentlemen like themselves, and
+never risk beyond a shilling or so; and others, mere lookers-on, who,
+fatigued by their daily labours, prefer a _dolce far niente_ to the
+trouble of theatres, &c., and who read the paper, drink their brandy and
+water, and smoke their cigar, without either playing or making a bet.
+
+It is not easier to distinguish a gentleman in a billiard-room than
+elsewhere, but without wishing to be personal, it is desirable the
+stranger should keep at a distance those individuals who are so very
+familiar and friendly with every one, and who keep a piece of chalk in
+their waistcoat pocket.  These people cannot be insulted; they carefully
+avoid squabbles, which may bring about disagreeable insinuations; they
+prefer pursuing the even tenor of their way, "picking up" as many people
+as they can.  See yonder old man who totters across the room; his trade
+is swindling, his goods are lies, his recreation is obscenity and
+blasphemy; his palsied hand can scarcely grasp a cue, and yet there are
+few who can excel him; by concealing his game carefully he has won, and
+can win hundreds, from his victims, who, thinking nothing of his skill,
+are astonished, as he pretends to be himself, at his _luck_.  The young
+wife tossing restlessly in her bed, and wondering what can keep her lord
+so long at _business_, little knows, when he returns home flushed and
+excited, that he has been fleeced of money he can ill afford to lose;
+whilst the sharer of the domestic joys of the billiard shark basks in the
+sunshine of his momentary good humour, as he displays with a sardonic
+smile the gold which perhaps never belonged to the dupe who lost it.  But
+the night is closing on us; we have seen enough for once.  Come away.
+
+
+
+
+THE RESPECTABLE PUBLIC-HOUSE
+
+
+Is situated in one of the leading thoroughfares, and is decorated in an
+exceedingly handsome manner.  The furniture is all new and beautifully
+polished, the seats are generally exquisitely soft and covered with
+crimson velvet, the walls are ornamented with pictures and pier-glasses,
+and the ceiling is adorned in a manner costly and rare.  Such places as
+Simpson's or Campbell's in Beak-street, or Nell Gwynn's, almost rival the
+clubs, and, indeed, are much smarter than anything they can show at the
+Milton.  Time was when men were partial to the sanded floor, the plain
+furniture, the homely style of such places as Dolly's, the London
+Coffee-house, or the Cock, to which Tennyson has lent the glory of his
+name.  Now the love of show is cultivated to an alarming extent.  "Let us
+be genteel or die," said Mrs Nickleby, and her spirit surrounds us
+everywhere.  Hence the splendour of the drinking-rooms of the metropolis,
+and the studied deportment of the waiters, and the subdued awe with which
+Young Norvals fresh from the Grampian Hills and their fathers' flocks
+tread the costly carpets or sprawl their long legs beneath glittering
+mahogany.
+
+Let us suppose it is about nine or ten in the evening, and we step into
+one of the numerous establishments which are to the respectable classes
+what the gin-palace and the beer-house is supposed to be to the class who
+are not.  The reader must pardon my use of the word respectable.  It is a
+word which, from my heart, I abhor, and, as it is commonly employed,
+merely denotes that a man has an account at a bank.  There are but two
+ways in which human actions can be contemplated--the worldly and the
+philosophical or Christian.  I use the term respectable merely in its
+worldly acceptation, but I skip this digression and pass on.  Undoubtedly
+at the first blush it is a cheerful scene that first meets our eye.  In
+this box are two or three old friends discussing a bottle of claret, who
+have not met perhaps since bright and boisterous boyhood, and who may
+never meet again.  Of what manly struggle, of what sorrow that can never
+die, of what calm pleasures and chastened hopes, have they to tell!  No
+wonder that you see the tear glistening in the eye, though there is
+laughter on the lip.  Pass on; here are some bagsmen red with port, and
+redolent of slang.  In the next box are three or four young fellows
+drinking whisky and smoking cigars, and of course their talk is of wine
+and women; but there is hope, nevertheless, for woman is still to them a
+something divine, and the evil days have not come when they see in her
+nothing but common clay.  Look at this retired old gentleman of the old
+school sitting by himself alone; yet is he not alone, for as he sips his
+port memories thicken in his brain, of ancient cronies now sleeping in
+churchyards far away, of a sainted wife no longer a denizen of this dark
+world of sin, of daughters with laughing children round their knees, all
+rosy and chubby and flaxen-haired, of sons with Anglo-Saxon energy and
+faith planting the old race on a new soil.  Cross to this other side and
+look at these reckless, dissipated fellows, whom the waiter has just
+respectfully requested not to make so much noise, as it disturbs the
+other gentlemen in the room.  Possibly they are Joint Stock Bank
+directors or railway officials, and after a few years it will be found
+that for their revelry to-night a deluded public will have to pay.  Here
+are a host of city merchants discussing politics, and it is wonderful how
+common-place is their conversation under the influence of alcohol.
+
+"Palmerston is a great man, by ---, he is a great man, sir," says one.
+"Yes, and no mistake," is the reply.  "There is no humbug about
+Palmerston," says another.  And so they ring the changes, originating
+nothing, gaining nothing, only getting redder in the face and more
+indistinct in their pronunciation.  At length they button over their
+great coats, pay their bills, and generally very good-naturedly, but very
+unsteadily, steer towards the door.  It may be that a noisy discussion
+takes place.  One man a little more gone than the rest disturbs the
+harmony of the evening by his flat contradictions, uttered somewhat too
+rudely, and backed by a blow from the fist on the table, which breaks a
+couple of glasses.  But next morning he apologizes; "It was only my wine
+contradicting your wine," he says, without any sense of shame.  But this
+rarely happens.  The respectable classes have more command of their
+temper, and do not get so idiotically drunk as the frequenters of low
+public-houses, and so the _habitues_ are in no hurry to move and leave
+the light and luxurious room for the muddy streets and the winter night.
+But they must do so, and young men with their passions unnaturally
+stimulated, and the conscience proportionately deadened, are left to the
+temptations which await men who are out in the small hours; and old
+fogies, believing that if they go to bed mellow, they live as they ought
+to live, and die jolly fellows, find their way to their respective
+dwelling-places in a state as lamentable as it is degrading.  Yet next
+Sunday you will see these men at church, and hear them joining in solemn
+and contrite prayer.  Do they think these purple faces tell no tales?  Do
+they think it is only the wife knows how they drink--in respectable
+company--in respectable hotels?  Do they forget that in the midst of
+their revelry, under the flaming chandeliers, peering over the shoulders
+of courteous waiters, listening to their vinous laughter and ancient
+jokes, Death, with his dart, is there?  Ay, and one night he will ride
+home with his victim in the Hansom, and will see him placed, all smelling
+with drink and under its influence, in the bed, side by side with his
+wife, and next morning she will as usual give her husband the seidlitz
+powder or soda water, and leave him to sleep for a short while longer,
+and when she comes back will find that his is the sleep which knows no
+waking.  And then the inquest will be held--and a medical man will
+perplex a plain case with useless show of knowledge, and a jury will
+return a verdict of "Death from natural causes."  You and I know
+better--you and I know that if the man had not gone into the respectable
+public-house he might have lived another ten years--that it was because
+he went there night after night, and sat soaking there night after night,
+that the blood-vessels became gorged and clotted, and that the wonderful
+machine stood still.  "Poisoned by alcohol" is the true verdict--by
+alcohol sold and consumed in the respectable public-house.  How long will
+society sanction such places?  How long will they retard the progress of
+the nation by wasting energies, and time, and cash, and opportunities
+that might have been devoted to nobler ends?  How long with their
+splendour--with their gilding and glass--with their air of respectability
+and comfort, will they attract the unwary, ruin the weak, and slay the
+strong man in his strength and pride?
+
+
+
+
+NIGHT-HOUSES.
+
+
+Plutarch begins one of those biographies which in all times have been the
+charm of childhood and age, by remarking that, "If things are implicated
+in a dependence upon definite numbers, it is a necessity that the same
+things must often happen, being effected by the same means."  Thus is it,
+life in all its broad aspects is everywhere the same.  All over the globe
+there is a wonderful uniformity in human habits.  Men who work hard--as a
+rule--rise early, and go to bed early.  Night is the time for rest.  So
+far at least there is harmony between God's law and man's.  The men and
+women who transgress are for the most part waifs and strays.  Such are
+the denizens of our streets by night--such are they who crowd, not alone
+the night public-houses, but night coffee-houses of our metropolis.
+
+Here in London these houses are of all kinds.  For instance, let us enter
+one in the Haymarket.  The rooms are as smart as gilding and ornamented
+paper and plate-glass can make them.  The waiters are got up regardless
+of expense.  The coffee is good, but dear.  The men and women are of the
+kind usually met with in this locality during the small hours.  The
+greater part are fools enough to think it worth while to buy a little
+worldly wisdom at a price--it may be at the loss of their bodies and
+souls--none but madmen would think of paying.  In such places as these
+you are as sure to be injured as if you sat all night carousing in a
+public-house.  These women with forced smiles on their painted cheeks are
+the veritable Harpies.  Theirs is the true sardonic laugh.  Do you
+remember one way in which that ancient phrase is accounted for?
+Sardinia, it was said, was noted for a bitter herb which contracted the
+features of those who tasted it.  Pausanias says it is a plant like
+parsley, which grows near springs, and causes people who eat it to laugh
+till they die; and these women, have they not eaten a bitter plant, and
+do they not laugh and die?  Beware of the women.  Beware of the men.  See
+how their cunning eyes glisten if you change a sovereign.  If they can
+get you into a neighbouring public-house and rob you, they will be rather
+pleased than otherwise.  Look at that tall dark fellow watching us.  It
+was only the other day he met a man here, as he might you or I, and
+decoyed him into a public-house close by, where his confederates were
+waiting, and robbed him of forty pounds when they thought their victim
+was sufficiently "fuddled" with champagne.  He and such as he are not
+particular who they rob.  They do not spare the women, I assure you.
+
+Let us now turn towards Covent-garden.  The debauchery of Covent-garden
+is not what it was.  Obscenity is banished from the Cave of Harmony, and
+better hours are kept; but there are night coffee-houses about here,
+dirty, shabby places, patronised by dirty, shabby people.  How weary and
+wayworn are the women!  They have been walking the streets for
+hours--they have been dancing in neighbouring saloons--they have paraded
+their meretricious charms, and here they sit, hungry, tired, sleepy, and
+'t is three o'clock in the morning.  No home have they to go to but some
+wretched room for which they pay a sum equal to the entire rent of the
+house.  There is little gaiety here; the poor comic nigger, with his
+banjo and his double entendre playing with all his might, in the hope
+that some gent will stand a cup of coffee and a muffin, can scarce raise
+a laugh.  Timidly one asks, "Will you treat me to a cup of coffee, sir?"
+Yes, forlorn one.  If your sin is great, so is your punishment; once you
+might have been a dainty little wife, and now what are you?  I say it
+sorrowfully, the scum of the streets, garbage for drunken lust.
+
+Let us go a little further on, not into that house, there are only
+thieves and pickpockets there, and we might be bullied, which is not
+pleasant.  Ah, here's the house we are looking for; it has done a good
+trade this many a year, for is there not a cab-stand opposite, and cabby
+knows the value of a cup of coffee on a cold winter's night.  Never mind
+the smell; as business is carried on uninterruptedly during the
+twenty-four hours, and as the company belongs to that part of the
+population not guilty of an inordinate attachment to soap and water, and
+to whom cheap baths are a myth, it cannot be matter of surprise if there
+be about the place "an ancient and fish-like smell."  But here comes the
+landlord.  "Good morning, gents;" in an under voice, "you had better mind
+your pocket; there are some strange characters here.  A cup of coffee?
+Yes, sir.  Now then, sir, you had better wake up, it is time for you to
+be off.  You've had a good hour's sleep."  "Why not let him sleep?"
+"Why, you see, sir, such fellows would stay here all night and fill up
+the house, and not spend a penny; and business is business."  A curious
+medley is here of sleepy, half-tipsy, sickly unfortunates.  Yet even here
+the line is drawn; the door opens, and we dimly discern a mass of rags;
+so does our landlord, as he rushes to exclude the would-be customer.
+"What, you are trying it on again, are you? you know you can't come here.
+Why, you see, sir, if we let such fellows in, the place would swarm
+with--," (the reader must supply the blank).  But we take the hint, and
+not unreluctantly depart.
+
+The night public-house has, I confess,--and I am glad to do so,--lost
+somewhat of its popularity in latter years.  At one time it was common
+everywhere; now it is in only a few streets that it exists and pollutes
+the atmosphere.  In the Strand, in the Haymarket, in Oxford-street,
+night-houses were numerous; but the one to which I more immediately refer
+was situated in the neighbourhood of Tottenham-court-road.  Since then,
+Mr Spurgeon has been preaching in that locality, but I dare say the
+night-house exists nevertheless.
+
+Let us suppose it is about two in the morning, and with the exception of
+one or two amiable garotters, a few sleepy police, and some three or four
+women, the regular population of the neighbourhood may be safely
+considered to have been long in bed.  The gas-lamps shine almost
+exclusively on yourself.  You look up at the windows and you see no
+lights save where, perhaps, poverty may be stitching for bread, or where
+Death may have come an unbidden guest and borne away the fairest and the
+best beloved.  At this hour the young bride in all her beauty may be
+struck down in mortal agony, or the wee pet lamb, whose little silver
+laugh had so often dispelled the dark cloud that gathered round the home,
+or the grey-haired man, having just reached the goal, and achieved an
+independence, may find himself left in this bleak, dark, wide world
+alone.
+
+    Leaves have their time to fall,
+       And flowers to wither at the north wind's breath,
+    And stars to set; but all--
+       Thou hast all seasons for thine own, O Death.
+
+And now let us forget all this, and knock at this door, above which
+streams a mellow light, and from which we hear sounds of boisterous
+gaiety.  Is it not open yet?  Then give another rap.  Ah, it is all right
+now.  "Take care of your pockets," says Cerberus, in a low voice,--"there
+are some rum blokes here."  We will, my friend.
+
+Yes, they must be rum blokes who come here into this filthy, stinking
+shop, and amongst this filthy, ragged, swearing crew of reprobates.  If
+you wish to see a set of fellows whose mere looks would hang them, I
+think they are about us now.  Even the landlord seems uncomfortable in
+their presence, and wisely allows as little as possible of temptation in
+his house or on his person.  He knows, I believe, they would as soon rob
+him as any one else, and his small ferrety eyes are evidently wide awake.
+Indeed, none of the party look as if they had much honest sleep, and in
+the daylight, I imagine, would present a somewhat seedy appearance.  We
+generally think cabmen not scrupulously honest, but perhaps these cabmen,
+with ancient great coats and well muffled up, are the honestest fellows
+here.  Then of course there is an Irish "widder," with melancholy face
+and a string of ballads, such as "Mary Blane," "The Red, White, and
+Blue," "Cheer, boys, cheer," all of which she is willing to dispose of on
+the most reasonable terms.  A decayed swell, probably a railway director
+in the great year of bubbles, with extraordinary sponges--an article I
+should have thought quite as unsaleable as soap to the _habitues_,--and a
+jockey-like looking person with knives with most wonderful and
+unaccountable blades, or with some fancy work-boxes or other articles
+equally ingenious and useless.  Women are here, of course, in the last
+stage of their profligate career, driven out of decent houses, unfit to
+associate with the well-dressed and the young--wrinkled, repulsive, red.
+As you see them drink, quarrelling, screaming, and cursing, as they
+always do till turned out to go God knows where, can you imagine that the
+difference between them and your own mother is merely that of
+circumstance, and education, and habit?--perhaps merely the difference
+produced by drink.  I can tell you that little hag was once a rich man's
+leman, and robed herself in silk and satin, and quaffed her costly wine;
+and now hark how piteously she begs a drop of gin, ere she staggers to
+her wretched garret and straw to dream of a youth and gaiety now no
+longer hers.  Here she has warmth, light, and society, and the
+night-house exists for such as she; and if, as is quite as likely as not,
+she is in league with some of the men around us, here she brings her
+victim, and then, stupified by drink, she has only to decoy him down some
+dark passage, and he becomes an easy prey to the sneaking thief who comes
+skulking up behind.  But let us listen--
+
+"Me and my pal we was a-going along the Hedgware-road, and we sor"--
+
+"Hold your tongue," is the courteous reply.
+
+"What do you mean by making all this row?" cries the landlord, with a
+horrid oath.
+
+"Now, then, old buffer, another quartern of gin."
+
+"And a screw of tobacco, master, if you please."
+
+"Well, old gal, what'll you drink?"
+
+"Well, I don't mind, what'll you stand?"
+
+"Suppose we has arf and arf."
+
+"Ay, to be sure."
+
+And so the hours pass, and the place gets hotter, and stinks more and
+more every hour, for the men and women have not a very pleasant
+effluvium, and the hubbub becomes more intense.  You tell me you would
+rather not stay here long.  Well, I am quite of your opinion, for a
+couple of gentlemen with pale faces have been eyeing us most attentively
+ever since we have been here, and I confess their appearance is not
+prepossessing.  Their short hair seems to indicate an acquaintance with
+one of the public establishments of the metropolis, with whose inmates it
+is not well to be too familiar.  They are dressed in fustian, with thick
+boots well studded with nails, a kick from which on the head when a man
+is down would soon settle his business; and with their close-fitting
+caps, Belcher handkerchiefs, and heavy animal faces, are certainly not
+very pleasant-looking young men.  I should be sorry to intimate my
+suspicions to them, as they may be noblemen in disguise, and might feel
+hurt at my want of charity.  In the mean while, as the door is being
+opened and the coast is clear, I avail myself of the opportunity, and
+leaving the night-house, am soon dreaming in my feverish slumber that I
+have just been garotted and left for dead at the door of my domestic
+establishment, to the intense agony of my wife and children,--of course,
+by the two amiable young people aforesaid,--and I feel for some days
+after as if I had suffered terribly from a species of night-mare.  So
+hideous is the life, so degraded the company, so revolting are the
+scenes, at these night-houses, I know not why the law permits them to be
+open.  I am sure they can answer no good or moral end.  Mr Norton, a few
+days since, said, in deciding a case at the Lambeth police-office, he
+hoped a law would soon be passed to close night-houses.  On this head the
+police magistrates are unanimous.
+
+
+
+
+HIGHBURY BARN.
+
+
+A writer in _Chambers's Journal_ some time since called attention to the
+peculiar attractions of Highbury Barn.  What are these attractions?  I
+confess that the place has connected it with the eating and drinking
+associations of years; that here generations of cockneys have dined; that
+here, Sunday after Sunday, they have come to drink bottled stout and
+smoke; that it is extensively patronized by shopmen and milliners; that
+the society is not of the most refined order; and that the love made in
+it is not of the noblest and purest character.  I cannot understand how
+_Chambers_ could have been got to puff up such a place to the public.  I
+am sure the decent public will not thank _Chambers_ for the puff.
+
+Highbury Barn is an admirable illustration of the way in which Acts of
+Parliament are evaded.  In 1852 Mr Hinton applied for and obtained a
+license for music, and he stated in his petition on that occasion, that
+his object was to have the license as an adjunct to dinner-parties, a
+great number of which were held there; and at that time he had no idea
+whatever of having dancing in the place.  In 1854, however, a different
+state of things arose, and, from a combination of causes, the parties and
+festivals at Highbury Barn fell off, and competition was so great, that
+Mr Hinton, having a large establishment, in which a great deal of capital
+was invested, was compelled to do something to meet the public taste, as
+he says, or, as I might say, to create it.  Accordingly, on Whit Monday
+of that year, he opened his establishment for musical entertainments with
+the band of the Grenadier Guards.  This was considered by the magistrates
+as an infraction of his agreement with them, and his license was refused.
+But Mr Hinton was not beaten; he had his large capital invested, and
+somehow or other the public must be got into his house.  An ingenious
+plan was devised, by which Mr Hinton was enabled to carry on his music
+and dancing without a license, and yet be secure from the penalties
+incurred by the breakers of law.  There is an assembly called Almack's,
+frequented by the _elite_ of the land, held in Willis's Rooms.  Those
+rooms are not licensed according to Act of Parliament, yet all the
+leaders of _bon ton_ there congregate, and they would be liable to be
+taken up as rogues and vagabonds under the Act.  But the dancing is
+carried on there by an association, under the auspices of which tickets
+are sold.  Well, Mr Hinton adopted a similar plan.  The Highbury Club was
+formed, and the club kindly provided the youthful votaries of pleasure
+with the desired amusement.  If we are to believe Mr Hinton, the result
+has not been very advantageous, as his receipts on the sale of alcoholic
+liquors fell off 600 pounds--a statement rather difficult to reconcile
+with his former one, that he found his customers had left him, and that
+he must do something to call them back.  Be that as it may, Mr Hinton has
+now his license, though three clergymen connected with the district
+concurred in stating that parties on leaving the Barn were disorderly and
+riotous, and disturbed the quiet of the locality, and that the licensing
+of that establishment would have a very demoralizing effect.
+
+And now let us go to Highbury Barn.  As we walk alone Highbury-place, we
+pass by many a father of a family grumbling at the idea of having his
+quiet invaded by parties coming home from the Barn; and yet there was a
+time, probably, when he heard the chimes at midnight; and the chances
+are, so wretchedly are our lads educated, that while the father is at
+home reading his religious magazine, the son is being initiated into fast
+life at the Barn.  But on we go through a dark passage, admirably adapted
+for a garotte walk, till we come to the place of rendezvous.  We pay
+sixpence and walk in.  The first thing that strikes us is the Master of
+the Ceremonies.  We are amazed,--in the distant West never have we met a
+more distinguished swell.  His attitude is faultless; his raven hair is
+parted in the middle; his dark eye is turned in a languishing manner
+upward to the orchestra.  In the intervals between the dances he walks up
+and down the room in an abstract and poetic manner, and Melancholy marks
+him for her own.  You believe in the doctrine of metamorphoses as you
+look at him.  He is a star fallen upon evil days.  Beneath that faultless
+black dress-coat there lies the soul of a Beau Brummel or a Nash.  Well,
+then, may there be a tinge of sadness on his cheek, and a cloud upon his
+brow.  But let us leave him awhile and look about us.  What a noble room!
+we shall not see a finer one in London.  At one end is a gallery; at the
+other a raised platform with very comfortable seats and tables.  All
+round the room are illustrations of oriental scenery, and over the bar is
+the orchestra.  But the place is not so crowded as we might expect, and
+the visitors are quieter than in the casinos of the West; the men and
+women are most of them much younger,--the men, many of them, have an
+exceedingly juvenile appearance, and think it fine to dance with young
+ladies of uncertain occupations, and to drink brandy-and-water and smoke
+cigars; but they have yet to cut their wisdom-teeth.  As Thackeray says,
+
+    "Pretty page with the dimpled chin,
+       That never has known the barber's shear,
+    All your wish is woman to win;
+    This is the way that boys begin,--
+       Wait till you come to forty year."
+
+Come here in the summer-time, and the attendance is then numerous; and of
+a Sunday evening, on the lawn before the Barn, or in the bowers and
+alcoves by its side, what vows have been uttered only to be broken; and
+what snares have been set for youth, and beauty, and innocence; and how
+many have come here with gay hearts who have left with them bruised
+beyond the power of man to heal!  Even in this room itself, what changes
+have been wrought by the magic hand of time!  Where are the Finsbury
+radicals--all beery and Chartist, who here dined; the demagogues who
+duped them, the hopes they cherished, the promises they made?  One after
+another have the bubbles burst, have the leaders palpably become shams,
+have the people woke up to disappointment and despair; and yet the nation
+has yet to learn that it is only by individual righteousness its
+salvation can be wrought.  The dancing, instead of speech-making, is a
+sign of the times.  Accompanied as it is by less drinking, let us hope it
+is a favourable sign.  Let us judge in the spirit of charity and hope.
+But let us not be too sanguine,--it was during the terrors of the French
+Directory, when the
+
+    "Streets ran so red with the blood of the dead,
+    That they blush'd like the waves of hell,"
+
+that Paris became a city of dancers, and that the art reached a climax
+unknown before or since.
+
+
+
+
+BOXING NIGHT.
+
+
+I am rather out of conceit with Christmas boxes.  I have been wished the
+compliments of the season by no less than six individuals this very
+morning, and for those good wishes I, poor man though I be, with family
+of my own to work for, have had to pay half-a-crown each.  I grow
+suspicious of every smiling face I meet.  I walk with my hands in my
+pocket, and my eyes cast down.  I wonder how it fares with my
+strong-minded wife at home.  I know she will have had a rare battle to
+fight.  She will have had the Postman--and the Dustman--and the
+Waits--and the Sweep--and the Turncock--and the Lamplighter--and the
+Grocer's lad--and the Butcher's boy; and if she compounds with them at
+the rate of a shilling a-piece, she may bless her stars.  I feel that I
+cannot stand much of this kind of work, and that for a merry Christmas
+and a happy New Year I shall have to pay rather handsomely.  Stop at
+home--tie up your knockers--say you are sick or dead, or a shareholder in
+the Royal British Bank, still you cannot escape the tender mercies of a
+London Boxing day.  Mind, I have not one word to say of the various good
+wishes and gifts offered by friends and relatives to each other as
+pledges of esteem and goodwill.  I would be the last to find fault with
+the customs originating in the warm heart of love, and honoured by the
+sanction of the whole civilized world.  By all means let us reverence
+them ten-fold.  But I have a right to complain that I am compelled to pay
+for mercenary goodwill, and that on me, or such as me, a tax is levied
+which does no good in most cases, and frequently does an immense amount
+of harm.  When I read, as I am sure to do, in the police reports of the
+next day, that, "yesterday, being the day after Boxing day, the time of
+the magistrates was chiefly occupied with cases of drunkenness," am I not
+right in wishing that I had kept the money in my own pocket?  Some of my
+friends would do that, but then for the next twelve months they are
+hampered and inconvenienced in a thousand ways.  As a wise man, I choose
+the least of two evils, but I am an unwilling victim nevertheless.  But a
+truce to my meditations; let us look at London on a Boxing night.  By
+daylight you would scarce know London.  A new race seems to have invaded
+the streets, filled the omnibuses, swarmed in the bazaars and the Arcade,
+choked up the eating-houses and the beer-shops.  Smith with his Balmoral
+boots, Brown with his all-round collar, Jones with his Noah's Ark coat,
+Robinson with the straight tile, which young England deems the cheese,
+delight us no more with their snobby appearance and gentish airs; to-day
+this is the poor man's holiday.  You can tell him by the awkwardness with
+which he wears his Sunday clothes, by the startling colour of his ties,
+by the audacious appearance of his waistcoat.  If he would only dress as
+a gentleman dresses, he would look as well, but he must be fine.  Well,
+it matters little so long as he be happy, whether he is so or not; and
+let him pass with his wife and children, all full of wonder and delight
+as they stare in at the shop windows and think everything--how happy are
+they in the delusion!--that all that glitter is gold.  Let us wish them a
+merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
+
+And now the dull, dark day, by the magic power of gas, has been
+transformed into gay and brilliant night.  The thousands who have spent
+the day sight-seeing are not satiated, and are flocking round the
+entrances of the various theatres.  Let us stand on the stage of the
+Victoria, and see them to the number of fifteen hundred mounted upon the
+gallery benches.  Through the small door near the ceiling they come down
+like a Niagara, and you expect to see them hurled by hundreds into the
+pit.  What a Babel of sounds!  It is in vain one cries "Horder!"  "'Ats
+off!"  "Down in front!"  "Silence!"  Boys in the gallery are throwing
+orange peel all over the pit; Smith halloos to Brown, and Brown to Smith;
+a sailor in a private box recognises some comrades beneath, and
+immediately a conversation ensues; rivals meet and quarrel; women treat
+each other to the contents of their baskets--full of undigestible
+articles, you may be sure, with a bottle of gin in the corner.  The
+play--it is that refreshing drama, the "Battersea Brigand"--proceeds in
+dumb-show; but the pantomime, the subject of which is, "Wine, War, and
+Love, and Queen Virtue in the Vistas of Light or Glitter,"--with what a
+breathless calm, that is ushered in.  It is an old silly affair.
+Harlequin, clown, and pantaloon, are they not all very dreary in their
+mirth?  Yet the audience is in a roar of laughter, and little babes clap
+their tiny hands, and tears of laughter chase each other down the
+withered cheeks of age.  This night in every theatre of London is a
+similar scene witnessed.  The British public is supposed to be unusually
+weak at Christmas, and tricks that were childish and stale when George
+the Third was king, and jokes venerable even in Joe Miller's time, are
+still supposed to afford the most uproarious amusement to a people
+boasting its Christianity, its civilisation, and enlightenment.  Of all
+conventionalisms those of the stage are the most rigid, antiquated, and
+absurd.
+
+But the thousands outside who did not get in--what are they about?  Look
+at that respectable mechanic; you saw him in the morning as happy as a
+prince, and almost as fine; he stands leaning against the lamp-post,
+apparently an idiot.  His hat is broken--his coat is torn--his face is
+bloody--his pockets are empty; not a friend is near, and he is far away
+from home.  It is clear too what he has been about.  Come on a few steps
+further--three policemen are carrying a woman to Bow-street.  A hooting
+crowd follow; she heeds them not, nor cares she that she has lost her
+bonnet--that her hair streams loosely in the wind--that her gown (it is
+her Sunday one) is all torn to tatters--or that her person is rudely
+exposed.  The further we go, and the later it grows, the more of these
+sad pictures shall we see.  Of course we do not look for such in
+Regent-street, or Belgravia, or Oxford-street, or the Strand.  Probably
+in them we shall meet respectable people staggering along under the
+influence of drink--but they are not noisy or obstreperous--they do not
+curse and swear--they do not require the aid of the police.  We must go
+into the low neighbourhoods--into St Giles', or Drury-lane, or
+Ratcliffe-highway, or the New-cut, or Whitechapel--if we would see the
+miseries of London on Boxing night.  We must take our stand by some
+gin-palace.  We must stay there till the crowds it has absorbed and
+poisoned are turned loose and maddened into the streets.  Then what
+horrible scenes are realized.  Here an Irish faction meet, and men,
+women, and children engage in a general _melee_, and cries of murder rend
+the air, and piercing shrieks vex the dull ear of night.  There two mates
+are stripped and fighting, who but this morning were bosom friends, and
+who to-morrow would not harm a hair of each other's heads.  Here a
+mechanic with a bloody head is being borne to the neighbouring hospital,
+to lie there a few months at the public expense, while his family are
+maintained by the parish.  Again, we meet two wives nursing young babes
+scared into unnatural silence, clenching their fists in each other's
+faces, and with difficulty restrained from acts of more savage violence
+by their drunken husbands.  Their day's holiday has come to this.  In the
+metropolis in 1853, the number of public-houses was 5729--the number of
+beer-shops 3613.  These figures give a total of 9342.  If on this night
+we suppose on an average one fight in the course of the evening takes
+place in each of these drinking shops, we can get some idea of what goes
+on in London on a Boxing night.  In passing at midnight down Drury-lane,
+I see three fights in a five minutes' walk.  Enlightened native of
+Timbuctoo, will you not pity our London heathens and send a few
+missionaries here!
+
+
+
+
+THE MOGUL,
+
+
+Not the Great Mogul in Thibet, but the Mogul in Drury-lane, is an
+increasingly popular place of public amusement.  I was there a few years
+since, and it was not more than half full.  The other night I could
+hardly get standing room, though I paid sixpence and went with the
+operative swells into the gallery.  In these days the test of everything
+is success.  We speak well of the tradesman who does the largest
+business--of the writer whose books sell the most--of the actor or
+preacher that draws the largest crowd.  We do not stop to criticise the
+manner in which that business is done, the influence of the writer, the
+doctrine taught by the preacher, or the character of the acting.  On the
+ordinary principle, then, the Mogul is a creditable establishment, for it
+is a successful one.  Indeed, in the present state of society, it is
+hardly possible to conceive how a place that combines entertainment and
+drinking together can well be otherwise.  In the course of last summer
+Vauxhall was open a few nights; I was credibly informed that on each
+night it was supposed not more than half the company paid for admission,
+the other half having been admitted by means of orders.  It is calculated
+the sale of drink and refreshment to the crowd thus collected will yield
+a profit sufficient to cover all expenses.  Thus it is such places as the
+Mogul pay.  The entrance fee and the sale of intoxicating drinks must
+amount to a sum out of which a proprietor can extract a handsome profit.
+
+Thus at the Mogul you have a double attraction.  Are you a gin-drinker,
+you can go and get your quartern or half-quartern over the bar--or you
+can lounge into the concert-room and quietly sit soaking the whole
+evening; for, as the performance does not close till midnight, the time
+admits of a man getting "fou" between the commencement and the close of
+the entertainment.  Drury-lane is what may be called a low neighbourhood,
+devoted principally to butchers' and bakers' shops, pawnbrokers'
+establishments, and gin-palaces.  Pass these latter any hour of the day
+you will, and you will find them crowded by laundresses, and charwomen,
+and haggard old crones from the sister isle, and young wives whose
+husbands, it may be, are hard at work.  There they stand in the streets,
+with babies in their arms and dirty children in rags by their side,
+gossiping with women as ill-conditioned as themselves; and as gossiping
+makes them thirsty, and as drinking makes people drunk, it is not
+difficult to imagine the state in which many of these women are.  In the
+middle of the day it is very obvious that many of them have had more than
+enough.  How they can afford it always puzzles me--I cannot, I know, and
+I believe my weekly earnings equal theirs.  The pawnbrokers may help
+them--but their material guarantees cannot be perpetually forthcoming.
+These gin-drinkers live cheap, I grant.  They herd in the horrid slums of
+Drury-lane--and people say sometimes, Can you wonder that such poor
+wretches drink? but they forget that it is the drink that makes them such
+poor wretches.  The money these women spend in drink would pay for decent
+apartments and clothes that would be clean and comfortable, not ragged
+and filthy, and stinking with every abomination.  It is not poverty that
+creates drunkenness, but drunkenness that creates poverty, and the
+poverty thus created--the dreariest kind of all poverty--abounds in
+Drury-lane.  Well, then, exclaims one of the new school, who believes
+mankind are to be regenerated by fiddling, does not such a place as the
+Mogul have a beneficial influence?  I will answer this by describing the
+kind of amusement afforded at the Mogul.  You are pent up in a room where
+the air is ten times worse than in any theatre--any crowded chapel--or
+worse than in the late Reading Room of the British Museum or the House of
+Commons.  You see a little of the worst acting in London--broad farce,
+chiefly by artists, if I may term them such, who are more remarkable for
+their weakness than their strength.  "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I
+pronounce it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as
+many of our players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines.  Nor
+do not saw the air too much with your hands," says Hamlet; but actors of
+the class you meet in the Mogul never seem to have heard of the Prince of
+Denmark.  There are some people who doubt whether good acting has a
+beneficial effect, but there are none who doubt that the effect of bad
+acting is altogether bad.  But the dramatical part of the entertainment
+constitutes but a small part of the evening's amusement.  There is a lady
+who sings sentimental songs, and a gentleman who sings comic ones, and
+another gent, with dismal voice and weary mien, who declares--
+
+    "The _gurls_ of dear Old England
+    Are the _gurls_ of _gurls_ for me-e-eh."
+
+I am not aware that any of these performers sing songs of an
+objectionable character; and if a sneer is now and then introduced at
+what common decent people believe to be good, and true, and righteous,
+and of beneficial tendency, it is only, perhaps, such as would be
+approved of by the patrons of the Haymarket.  You tell me that this is
+better than sitting all night at a bar drinking; but, I ask, is not this
+entertainment itself an excuse for drinking?  You see the room is full of
+men and women evidently belonging to the working classes; now of all men
+working men can least afford to waste time in such places.  All their
+future emphatically depends upon themselves.  More than most men are they
+called upon to exercise self-denial and to cultivate their powers, if
+they would achieve independence.  But how can the working men who sit
+night after night in such places as the Mogul ever hope to rise? yet any
+night there must be a couple of hundred of such present, for they swarm
+like bees.  They come professedly for the entertainment, but all the
+while it lasts they are doing a good deal in the drinking line.  It is
+not one glass or two that will satisfy them; and the worst of it is, that
+many very clever fellows when once they begin drinking do not know when
+to leave off.  In this respect they are like Dr Johnson, who could either
+feast or fast, but could never be a moderate drinker.  They come to the
+Mogul--perhaps they would never think of sitting all night in a
+public-house--but they come to the Mogul for the entertainment, and they
+finish by drinking as if they had come for the drink alone.  The Mogul is
+indeed an educational establishment, but unfortunately it educes the
+wrong set of faculties.  In Drury-lane, of all lanes in the world, there
+is the least occasion to associate intoxicating drink with happiness.
+Everywhere the idea is a mischievous delusion and a remnant of barbarism,
+but there it is a positive curse.  At the Mogul you will see the
+sweetheart with her lover, the mother with her child,--it may be the
+sucking babe,--till midnight, breathing an air of tobacco smoke, the
+husband and the wife, all you say enjoying themselves in a social way,
+but all, I say, encouraging an appetite which, if it gets the
+mastery,--and in the majority of cases it does,--will destroy them
+without mercy.  Were the Mogul simply a gin-palace, it would have far
+less patronage, it would merely have its share of the general trade; but
+the fact that it provides musical and dramatic entertainments--that it
+gives decent people an excuse for drinking--that it attracts those whom a
+common gin-shop would repel--is that precisely which gives it its power
+for danger.  Such places are decoy shops, the more dangerous as drinking
+in Drury-lane is really disgusting, and enough to make a man a
+teetotaller for life.  The neighbourhood is rich in warnings, but the
+_habitue_ of the Mogul soon learns to heed them not.
+
+
+
+
+CALDWELL'S.
+
+
+A stranger, ignorant of our inner life, and unacquainted with our social
+system, knowing only that we call ourselves a Christian people, and that
+we boast that Christianity places woman in a peculiarly favoured
+position, might dwell among us for awhile, and, seeing how woman is
+flattered and followed, might imagine that our condition was perfect, and
+that here, at least, woman, the weak, was sheltered by man, the strong.
+In the dazzling ball-room--on the glittering promenade--he might meet the
+lovely and the fair, and deem that they were no brilliant exception, but
+as they were sheltered and loved, so were sheltered and loved all of
+their common sex.  Grieved would he be to find out his mistake; yet more
+grieved would he be to know that the graceful drapery that added to the
+beauty that everywhere flashed upon his eye was wrought by tender and
+delicate women, who, pale and wan, slave at the needle from morn till
+eve, and from eve till again the dim grey of morn gleamed in the east--by
+women withered before their prime--by women who, for no crime, but from
+their simple desire to live by the honest and honourable labour of their
+hands, are shut up in heated and unhealthy rooms, debarred from social
+duties and joys, and who know nothing of life but its wants and woes--by
+women who can find in slavery itself nothing more forlorn than their
+melancholy fate--by women to the majority of whom there is no honest way
+of escape from the lingering death that besets them, but the grave.
+
+We would guard our readers against giving way to mawkish sentimentalism;
+_that_ it is not our aim to excite.  There are employers who are all they
+should be; there are milliners' and dressmakers' assistants who find
+their labour what all healthy labour is, a blessing, and not a curse.
+Nor is every dressmaker shut up in these hot-houses of disease beautiful,
+nor the daughter of one who has seen better days.  It is true that some
+of these unfortunate girls are the daughters of "clergymen, medical men,
+and officers;" but it is because they partake of our common
+humanity--because they have human blood and human hearts--because life
+was given them that in it they might bless and be blessed--because, in
+their injuries and wrong, the human family and its Father above are
+injured and wronged--that we claim for them from society sympathy and
+redress.  We say nothing of the moral danger to which, in a metropolis
+like this, they are peculiarly exposed.  When sin offers so golden a
+bait, it shows that those who yet continue at their work deserve respect
+and aid.  If some of them have fallen--if some of them, driven by
+despair, have walked our streets to gain their bread, let us blame the
+system which has made so infamous and wretched a mode of life seem a
+change to be desired.  Let the cure be adopted; let the work now done be
+distributed among a larger number of hands; and in this country, at
+least, there is no lack of persons eager to be employed.  In many of the
+fashionable establishments increased cost of production can be of but
+little moment.  Let employers learn to practise humanity, and let our
+high-born and influential ladies see to it, that it is no thoughtlessness
+of theirs that compels their poorer sisters to toil with a sinking frame
+and a heavy heart.  As a nation, we have worked out one problem in
+civilization; we have shown that the utmost wealth can exist side by side
+with the deepest poverty--the grossest ignorance with the most cultivated
+knowledge--the most elevating piety with the most debasing fetichism--the
+fairest virtue with the most revolting vice.  Be it our nobler work to
+show to the nations of the earth how, while our higher classes live in
+refinement and wealth, there is no class, however humble, but can joy in
+the possession of social happiness and rights.
+
+But what, you ask, has this to do with Caldwell's?  Only this, that of
+the class to which I have referred, I believe more may be found of an
+evening at Caldwell's, than anywhere else in London.  It is not all
+dressmakers who toil thus severely and unnaturally; and few of them are
+there who do not in the course of the year find time to pay Caldwell's a
+visit.  Who has not heard of Caldwell's _Soirees Dansantes_?  Are they
+not advertised in every paper?  Are they not posted in gigantic bills in
+every street?  In quiet country lanes, miles and miles away from town, do
+we not come across the coloured letters by which Mr Caldwell announces
+his entertainment to the world?  Who is Mr John Caldwell?  We will let
+him speak for himself.  He has an establishment in Dean-street, Soho.
+The building cost him nearly four thousand pounds.  On boxing-night he
+had as many as 600 customers, "and on average nights," he tells us, "I
+have about 200."  The charge for admission is eight-pence.  Mr Caldwell
+has a public-house just by, and from that supplies wine, and ale, and
+spirits.  "I have never had a case of drunkenness in my place for years;
+I am very particular--I never let a drunken man remain."  On an average
+about thirty glasses of spirits are drunk in the dancing room in the
+course of an evening, and about forty glasses of beer.  "I believe my
+place is carried on in as respectable a manner as can be.  Some of the
+first noblemen come; there are some very respectable tradesmen round the
+neighbourhood, and a great many young people from the neighbourhood.  The
+rooms are principally supported by the working classes."  The dancing
+saloon opens at eight, and is closed at a quarter to twelve.  Such is the
+evidence given by Mr Caldwell himself before the select committee of the
+House of Commons on public-houses.  As is perfectly natural, it is all
+_coleur de rose_.  The union of the first noblemen and the _elite_ of the
+working classes over spirits-and-water, or in the mazy dance, is a
+beautiful specimen of fraternisation, and the small quantity of beer and
+spirits drunk by 200 persons indicates an amount of sobriety rare in
+places of public amusement.  I think Mr Caldwell has a little understated
+the case.  I fear he forgot to tell the committee that the drinking at
+his place was in the refreshment-room down-stairs, not in the
+dancing-room above; while in the latter the small quantity he asserts is
+consumed, I am inclined to think, much more may be disposed of
+down-stairs.  In the course of his own examination some disagreeable
+truths oozed out.  We give a couple of questions and answers in proof of
+this.--Sir George Grey: "Do you mean to say that the dancing-saloon would
+have no sufficient attraction for the people unless there were connected
+with it the facility of obtaining spirituous liquors?"  "_I think not_;
+_the people want a glass of wine_, _or negus_, _or brandy-and-water_".
+Again, Mr Caldwell has been unable to procure a license on account of the
+opposition of the publicans in the neighbourhood.  The Chairman asks, "Do
+you think the publicans would withdraw their opposition?"  "_Yes_, _they
+begin to find my house an advantage_; _when parties leave my rooms_,
+_they stand together at the corner of the streets_, _and say_, _We will
+have a parting glass_.  _They do not all have it at my rooms_."
+
+Now this answer does not well coincide with Mr Caldwell's former
+evidence.  It is quite as much the drink as the dancing that is the
+attraction, and as to his respectable tradesmen, and the fact of persons
+not being tipsy, and that of some of the first noblemen coming there, all
+these assertions are fairly open to criticism.  It was only the other day
+I heard a London magistrate declare that publicans never could tell when
+a person was tipsy; and as to respectability, your Robsons, and Camerons,
+and Sadleirs are always considered highly respectable.  Ask the first
+person you meet about your neighbours.  What is the answer?  Oh, they are
+a highly respectable family; they are immensely rich.  And as to noblemen
+coming into such places, I imagine that would be precisely the reason why
+the judicious father of a pretty girl would prefer her dancing anywhere
+rather than in Mr Caldwell's establishment in Dean-street.  I have not
+much faith in the benefits of that species of the mixture of all ranks.
+Like the Irishman's reciprocity, it is all on one side.  Tennyson makes
+his hero tell Lady Clara Vere de Vere--
+
+    "At me you smiled, but unbeguiled
+       I saw the snare and I retired,--
+    The daughter of a hundred earls,
+       You are not one to be desired."
+
+But perchance a young maiden, led away by the excitement of the hour,
+could not find it in her heart to address similar language to Lady Clara
+Vere de Vere's brother.  The last victim always believes that she is to
+be the exception to all general rules; she may transgress, but not pay
+the penalty--pluck the forbidden fruit, and for doing so not forfeit
+Eden--plunge wildly into sin, and sorrow, and shame, and yet find peace
+in her heart and the light of heaven lying on her path; but cause and
+effect are eternal, and, youth gone, and pleasure gone, and the power to
+attract gone, and the inward sense of right succeeded by the stings of
+conscience and the gnawing of remorse, what is left but to weep madly and
+in vain for
+
+    "The tender grace of a day that is dead"?
+
+But we are in Caldwell's,--let us go into the gallery and look down.  I
+know not the name of the new dances, but how the women swim round the
+room, as the music now hurriedly hastens, now softly dies away.  The girl
+that dances here so modestly to-night in twelve months will have lost her
+maiden shame, will be dressed in silks and satins, will be dancing at the
+Argyll, and supping at Scott's or Quin's.  That girl they call Rose--and
+a rose she is, for she might shine in a Belgravian drawing-room, and
+walks in beauty as a fairy queen--might have lit up a home with her love,
+and made a brave heart proud; but here she comes, night after night, and
+domestic life is to her tame after music and dancing such as she has
+here.  Beauty you will not find much of, nor that overdress which stamps
+the character of the women at the Casino or the Argyll in unmistakeable
+terms; and the men are the class you usually meet in these places.  They
+may be pickpockets, or they may be peers; you can scared tell the
+difference in these levelling days.  If I had not Mr Caldwell's express
+assertion to the contrary, I should certainly say that that young fellow
+with a pint bottle of champagne in his hand was decidedly drunk,--at any
+rate, he has very much the appearance of a tipsy person; but the waiters
+seem to be of Mr Caldwell's opinion, and are still offering him more
+drink, and the women around seem to think it is rather fun than
+otherwise.  Ah! little do they reflect how such as he, under the
+influences of drink, forget the decencies of life, the claims of duty,
+forget even the common instincts of common humanity; so that the wife,
+whom he has vowed to love, honour, and protect, is abandoned, and the
+home forsaken, for the orgies of the public-house.  Do the women around
+us ever expect to be the wives and mothers of such, or have they, young
+and fair as many of them seem, learnt already that recklessness as to the
+future which robs life of all its glory, and incarcerates the soul in a
+living grave?  I can see, even here, a gaiety more sad than tears.  But I
+need not continue my description; dancing in public rooms in the
+metropolis is much the same everywhere.  Of course the place is all that
+Mr Caldwell says it is.  I believe with him that it is as respectably
+conducted as establishments of the kind can be; but at the same time Mr
+Caldwell confesses it leads to drinking, and that is quite reason enough,
+independently of other obvious considerations, why I come away thankful
+that no wife or sister of mine is amongst the parties nightly to be met
+at Mr Caldwell's _soirees dansantes_.
+
+
+
+
+CREMORNE.
+
+
+"In a set of pictures illustrative of Greek customs, it was quite
+impossible to leave out the _hetaerae_ who gave such a peculiar colouring
+to Grecian levity, and exercised so potent a sway over the life of the
+younger members of the community.  Abundant materials for such a sketch
+exist, for the Greeks made no secret of matters of this kind; the
+difficulty has been not to sacrifice the vividness of the picture of the
+ordinary intercourse with these women to the demands of our modern sense
+of propriety," says Professor Becker, in his truly admirable work on the
+Private Life of the Ancient Greeks.  In the same manner, and for the same
+reason, the modern sense of propriety is supposed to be in the way of any
+very graphic description of Cremorne; yet we have hetaerae almost as
+bewitching as Aspasia or the Corinthian Lais; and if our students, and
+learned clergy, and holy bishops write long articles about the Athenian
+Dionysia only held once a year, why should we not speak of ours which
+last all the summer, and the scene of which is Cremorne?  At the Dionysia
+the most unbridled merriment and drunkenness were the order of the day,
+and were held quite blameless.  For a while the most sober-minded bade
+adieu to the stringency of habit, following the well-known Greek maxim--
+
+    "Ne'er blush with drink to spice the feast's gay hour,
+    And, reeling, own the mighty wine-god's power."
+
+So it is in Cremorne.  If Corinth had her groves sacred to Aphrodite, so
+has Cremorne.  It offends our modern sense of propriety to speak of such
+matters.  English people only see what they wish to see.  If you are
+true--if you look at real life and say what you think of it, you shock
+our modern sense of propriety.  We may talk about drainage and
+ventilation, and the advantages of soap, but there we must stop.  Keep
+the outside clean, but don't look within.  Thus is it our writers make
+such blunders.  For instance, good-meaning Mrs Stowe, after she had
+written Uncle Tom, came here to be lionized, and to write a book about
+us.  She did so, and a very poor book it was.  But I must quote one
+passage from "Sunny Memories."  In writing of a visit she paid to the
+Jardin Mobile in Paris, she writes, "Entrance to this Paradise can be
+had, for gentlemen a dollar, ladies _free_; this tells the whole story.
+Nevertheless, do not infer that there are not respectable ladies there;
+it is a place so remarkable that very few strangers stay long in Paris
+without taking a look at it.  And though young ladies residing in Paris
+never go, and matrons very seldom, yet occasionally it is the case that
+some ladies of respectability look in.  Nevertheless, aside from the
+impropriety inherent in the very nature of the waltzing, there was not a
+word, look, or gesture of immorality or impropriety.  The dresses were
+all decent, and, if there was vice, it was vice masked under the guise of
+polite propriety.  How different, I could not but reflect, is all this
+from the gin-palaces of London!  There, there is indeed a dazzling
+splendour of gas-lights, but there is nothing artistic, nothing refined,
+nothing appealing to the imagination.  There are only hogsheads and
+barrels, and the appliances for serving out strong drink; and there for
+one sole end--the swallowing of the fiery stimulant--come the nightly
+thousands, from the gay and well-dressed to the haggard and tattered, in
+the last stage of debasement.  The end is the same, by how different
+paths!  Here they dance along the path to ruin with flowers and
+music--there they cast themselves bodily, as it were, into the lake of
+fire."  A more unfair comparison, I think, was never drawn; a
+drinking-shop is much the same everywhere, and in Paris as well as in
+London, people, to use Mrs Stowe's own words, cast themselves bodily into
+the lake of fire.  We have our Jardin Mobile, but of course Mrs Stowe
+never went there--as we have known good people confessing to entering
+theatres in Germany or France who on no account would have gone near one
+at home.  If Mrs Stowe had confessed to going to Cremorne, she would have
+been cut, and so she went to the Paris Cremorne instead; but to write a
+true book on England, she should have gone to Cremorne.  Look at
+Cremorne; is it not one, as Disraeli is reported to have said, of the
+institutions of the country? {194}  The gardens are beautiful, are kept
+in fine order, are adorned with really fine trees, and are watered by the
+Thames, here almost a silver stream.  Though near London, on a summer
+evening the air is fresh and balmy, the amusements are varied, the
+company are genteel in appearance, and here, as in Paris, they dance
+along the path to ruin with flowers and music.  If Mrs Stowe gives the
+preference to the Parisians, she may be right, but I am inclined to
+dispute the grounds of that preference.  The gin-palaces are filled with
+our sots, with our utter wrecks, with all that is loathsome and low in
+man or woman.  Your son, fresh from home and its sacred influences, is
+shy of entering a gin-palace at first.  He goes there with a blush upon
+his cheek, and a sense of shame at his heart.  He shrinks from its foul
+companionship, and when he has come out he resolves never to be what he
+has seen under those accursed roofs.  But you take him to Cremorne, or
+you send him to the Lowther Arcade, or the Holborn Casino, and he is
+surrounded by temptation that speaks to him with almost irresistible
+power.  The women are well-dressed and well-behaved.  The drink does not
+repel but merely stimulates the hot passions of youth, and lulls the
+conscience.  For one man that is ruined in a gin-shop there are twenty
+that are ruined at Cremorne.
+
+As to the morality of such places, that is not to be settled dogmatically
+by me or by any one else.  Tennyson talks of men fighting their doubts,
+and gathering strength; in the same manner, men may fight temptation and
+gather strength, and one man may merely spend a pleasant evening where
+another may in the same interval of time ruin himself for life.  The
+tares and the wheat, in this confused world of ours, grow side by side.
+Unnaturally, we bring up our sons only to pluck what we deem the wheat;
+and immediately they are left to themselves, they begin gathering the
+tares, which we have not taught them are such, and have for them at least
+the charm of novelty.  It does not do to say there is no pleasure in the
+world; there is a great deal.  The grass is green, though, it may be, sad
+sinners tread it.  The sun shines as sweetly on carrion as on the
+Koh-i-noor.  The lark high up at heaven's gate sings as loud a song of
+praise, whether villains or lovers listen to its lays.  Places are what
+we make them.  I fear there are many blackguards at Cremorne; the women
+most of them are undoubtedly hetaerae, and yet what a place it is for
+fun!  How jolly are all you meet!  How innocent are all the
+amusements,--the ascent of the balloon--the dancing--the equestrian
+performances--the comic song--the illuminations--the fire-works--the
+promenade on the grass lawn or in the gas-lit paths; the impulses that
+come to us in the warm breath of the summer eve, how grateful are they
+all, and what a change from Cheap-side or from noisy manufactories still
+more confined!  By this light the scene is almost a fairy one.  Can there
+be danger here?  Is there here nothing artistic--nothing refined--nothing
+appealing to the imagination?  Come here, Mrs Stowe, and judge.  You will
+scandalize, I know, that portion of the religious public that never yet
+has looked at man and society honestly in the face, but you will better
+understand the frightful hypocrisies of our domestic life; you will
+better understand how it is that a religion which we pay so much for, and
+to which we render so much outward homage, has so little hold upon the
+heart and life.  There is no harm in Cremorne, if man is born merely to
+enjoy himself--to eat, drink, be merry, and die.  I grant, it is rather
+inconvenient for a young man who has his way to fight in life to indulge
+a taste for pleasure, to launch out into expenses beyond his means, to
+mix with company that is more amusing than moral, and to keep late hours;
+and young fellows who go to Cremorne must run all these risks.  It may do
+you, my good sir, no harm to go there.  You have arrived at an age when
+the gaieties of life have ceased to be dangerous.  You come up by one of
+the Citizen boats to Chelsea after business hours, and stroll into the
+garden and view the balloon, or sit out the ballet, or gaze with a leaden
+eye upon the riders, and the clowns, and the dancing, or the fireworks,
+and return home in decent time to bed; and if you waste a pound or two,
+you can afford it.  But it is otherwise with inflammable youth--a clerk,
+it may be, in a merchant's warehouse on 30_s._ a-week, and it is really
+alarming to think what excitements are thus held out to the passions, at
+all times so difficult to control.  There are the North Woolwich
+Gardens--there is Highbury Barn--all rivalling Cremorne, and all capable
+of containing some thousands of idle pleasure-seekers.  Vauxhall, with
+its drunken orgies, is gone never to return--the place that knows it now
+will know it no more for ever--but such places are what thoughtless
+people call respectable, are frequented by respectable people; and amidst
+mirth and music, foaming up in the sparkling wine, looking out of dark
+blue eyes, reddening the freshest cheeks, and nestling in the richest
+curls, there lurks the great enemy of God and man.  Young man, such an
+enemy you cannot resist; your only refuge is in flight.  Ah, you think
+that face fair as you ask its owner to drink with you; it would have been
+fairer had it never gone to Cremorne.  A father loved her as the apple of
+his eye; she was the sole daughter of his home and heart, and here she
+comes night after night to drink and dance; a few years hence and you
+shall meet her drinking and cursing in the lowest gin-palaces of St
+Giles's, and the gay fast fellows around you now will be digging gold in
+Australia, or it may be walking the streets in rags, or it may be dying
+in London hospitals of lingering disease, or, which is worse than all, it
+may be living on year after year with all that is divine in man utterly
+blotted out and destroyed.  The path that leads to life is strait and
+narrow, and few there be who find it.
+
+
+
+
+THE COSTERMONGERS' FREE-AND-EASY.
+
+
+Every class in London has its particular pleasures.  The gay have their
+theatres--the philanthropic their Exeter Hall--the wealthy their "ancient
+concerts"--the costermongers what they term their sing-song.
+
+I once penetrated into one of these dens.  It was situated in a very low
+neighbourhood, not far from a gigantic brewery, where you could not walk
+a yard scarcely without coming to a public house.  The costermongers are
+a numerous race.  Walk the poor neighbourhoods on a Saturday night, and
+hear the cries,--"Chestnuts all 'ot a penny a score," "Three a penny,
+Yarmouth bloaters," "Penny a lot fine russets, a penny a lot," "Now's
+your time, fine whelks, a penny a lot."  Well, the itinerant vendors of
+these delicacies are costermongers.  Or in the daytime see the long carts
+drawn by donkies loaded with greens and other vegetables, all announced
+to the public in stentorian lungs--these men are costermongers.  Listen
+to those boys calling, "Ho, ho, hi, hi,--what do you think of this here?
+a penny a bunch, a penny a bunch.  Here's your turnips!"  Those boys are
+costermongers' lads.  It is seldom they last long as men.  They soon lose
+their voice, and how they pick up a living then no one can tell.  Their
+talk is peculiar.  Mr Mayhew tells us their slang consists merely in
+pronouncing each word as if spelt backwards.  "I say, Curly, will you do
+a _top_ of _reeb_ (pot of beer)?" one costermonger may say to another.
+"It's _on doog_, Whelkey, _on doog_" (no good, no good), the second may
+reply; "I've had a regular _troseno_ (bad sort) to-day; I've been doing
+_dab_ (bad) with my _tol_ (lot)--han't made a _yennep_ (penny), s' elp
+me--."  "Why, I've cleared a _flatchenorc_ (half a crown) a' ready."
+Master Whelkey will answer perhaps, "But _kool_ the _esilop_ (look at the
+police), _kool him_ (look at him).  Curly: _Nommus_ (be off), I am going
+_to do the tightner_" (have my dinner).  Would you know more of them,
+come with me.
+
+Just look at the people in this public-house.  A more drunken,
+dissipated, wretched lot you never saw.  There are one or two little
+tables in front of the bar and benches, and on these benches are the most
+wretched men and women possible to imagine.  They are drinking gin and
+smoking, and all have the appearance of confirmed sots.  They are
+shoemakers in the neighbourhood, and these women with them are their
+wives.  "Lor' bless you, sir," exclaims the landlord, "they spend all
+they has in drink.  They live on a penny roll and a ha'porth of sprats or
+mussels, and they never buy any clothes, except once in three or four
+years, and then they get some second-hand rubbish."  And here, when they
+are not at work, they sit spending their money.  Are there none to save
+them?--none to come here and pluck these brands from the burning?  I know
+they are short-lived; I see in their pale, haggard, blotched, and bloated
+faces premature death.  The first touch of illness will carry them off as
+rotten leaves fall in November; but ere this be the case, can you not
+reveal to them one glimpse of a truer and diviner life?  But come
+up-stairs into this concert-room, where about a hundred costermongers and
+shoemakers are listening to the charms of song.  Talk about the refining
+influence of music! it is not here you will find such to be the case.
+The men and women and lads sitting round these shabby looking tables have
+come here to drink, for that is their idea of enjoyment; and whilst we
+would not grudge them one particle of mirth, we cannot but regret that
+their standard of enjoyment should be so low.  The landlord is in the
+chair, and a professional man presides at the piano.  As to the songs,
+they are partly professional and partly by volunteers.  I cannot say much
+for their character.  The costermongers have not very strict notions of
+_meum_ and _tuum_; they are not remarkable for keeping all the
+commandments; their reverence for the conventional ideas of decency and
+propriety is not very profound; their notions are not peculiarly polished
+or refined, nor is the language in which they are clothed, nor the mode
+in which they are uttered, such as would be recognised in Belgravia.
+Dickens makes Mrs General in "Little Dorrit" remark, "Society never forms
+opinions, and is never demonstrative."  Well, the costermongers are the
+reverse of all this, and as the pots of heavy and the quarterns of
+juniper are freely quaffed, and the world and its cares are forgotten,
+and the company becomes hourly more noisy and hilarious, you will
+perceive the truth of my remarks.  Anybody sings who likes; sometimes a
+man, sometimes a female, volunteers a performance, and I am sorry to say
+it is not the girls who sing the most delicate songs.  The burdens of
+these songs are what you might expect.  In one you were recommended not
+to go courting in the kitchen when the master was at home, but, instead,
+to choose the "airey."  One song, with a chorus, was devoted to the deeds
+of "those handsome men, the French Grenadiers."  Another recommended beer
+as a remedy for low spirits; and thus the harmony of the evening is
+continued till twelve, when the landlord closes his establishment, to the
+great grief of the few who have any money left, who would only be too
+happy to keep it up all night.  Let me say a word about costermonger
+literature.  I see Mr Manby Smith calculates its pecuniary value at
+twelve thousand a year.  It is wretched in every way,--in composition, in
+printing, in cuts, and paper.  These street ballads--we are all familiar
+with them--are sold by a class of men called patterers, and are written
+so as to bear on the events of the day.  Thus, at the last Lord Mayor's
+day we had a song sung in the streets, of which the following is a
+specimen:--
+
+    "Away they go, the high and low,
+       Such glorious sights was never seen,
+    But still the London Lord Mayor's show
+       Is not as it has former been,
+    When old Dick Whittington was mayor,
+       And our forefathers had to go;
+    They had not got no Peelers there,
+       To guard great London's Lord Mayor's show."
+
+And we are told in another verse that--
+
+    "They will talk of Russia, France, and that,
+       And mention how the money goes;
+    Each man will eat a pect of sprats,
+       That's the fashion at the Lord Mayor's show."
+
+Some of these songs are indecent; almost all of them have a morbid
+sympathy with criminals.  Thus Redpath in the following lines is almost
+made a martyr to his benevolence and Christian life.
+
+    "Alas!  I am convicted, there's no one to blame--
+    I suppose you all know Leopold Redpath is my name;
+    I have one consolation, perhaps I've more,
+    All the days of my life _I ne'er injured the poor_.
+
+    "I procured for the widow and orphan their bread,
+    The naked I clothed, and the hungry I fed;
+    But still I am sentenced, you must understand,
+    Because I had broken the laws of the land.
+
+    "A last fond adieu to my heart-broken wife--
+    Leopold Redpath, your husband, 's transported for life;
+    Providence will protect you, love, do not deplore,
+    _Since your husband never hurted or injured the poor_.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+    "In London and Weybridge _I in splendour did dwell_,
+    _By the rich and the poor was respected right well_;
+    But now I'm going--oh! where shall I say--
+    A convict from England, oh! far, far away.
+
+                                  * * * * *
+
+    "I might have lived happy with my virtuous wife,
+    Kept away from temptation, from tumult and strife,
+    I'd enough to support me in happiness to live,
+    _But I wanted something more poor people for to give_."
+
+The street singers of the metropolis seized upon the Waterloo Bridge
+Tragedy as a fit subject for the exercise of their dismal strains.  The
+following is printed verbatim, from an illustrated broadsheet vended "at
+the charge of one halfpenny:"--
+
+    "Oh such a year for dreadful murders
+       As this before was never seen;
+    In England, Ireland, Britain over,
+       Such horrid crimes has never been.
+    But this which now has been discovered
+       Very far exceeds the whole,
+    The very thought makes men to shudder,
+       How horrible for to unfold.
+
+    "See and read in every paper
+       This dreadful crime, this mystery,
+    Worse, far worse, than James Greenacre's
+       Is the London mystery.
+
+    "His body it was cut to pieces--
+       Oh how dreadful was his fate!
+    Then placed in brine and hid in secret--
+       Horrible for to relate.
+    The head and limbs had been divided--
+       Where parts was taken no one knows;
+    In a carpet bag they packed the body,
+       Over Waterloo bridge they did it throw.
+
+    "It is supposed that a female monster
+       Her victim's body onward dragged,
+    With no companion to assist her,
+       All packed within a carpet bag.
+    Justice determined is to take her,
+       When without doubt she'll punished be,
+    The atrocious female Greenacre
+       Of the Waterloo Bridge Tragedy."
+
+The reader will see from these specimens how alien the costermonger race
+is in sympathy and life from the respectable and the well-to-do.  Their
+songs are not ours, nor their aims nor conventional observances.  What
+wonder is it that they leave their wretched cellars all dirt and
+darkness, and crowd round the public-house; or that at the costermongers'
+house of call--in the midst of an atmosphere of gin and tobacco-smoke,
+and under the influence of songs of very questionable merit--the poor
+lads receive the education which is to stamp their character and to teach
+them to grow up Ishmaelites, with their hands against every one, and
+every one's hand against them.  Society will not educate its poor; wonder
+not then that they educate themselves, and that after a fashion not very
+desirable in the eyes of the friends of morality, of order, and of law.
+
+
+
+
+THE POLICE-COURT
+
+
+Is an attractive lounge to the seedy, the disreputable, the unwashed.
+Evidently it is a grand and refreshing and popular sight to see justice
+doled out in small parcels--to see the righteous flourish, and the wicked
+put to shame.  I fear, however, it is a feeling of a more personal nature
+that is the chief attraction, after all.  Jones goes to see what a mess
+Davis gets into; Smithes to see if Scroggins keeps "mum" like a brick;
+the many, to retail a little scandal at the expense of their
+neighbours,--if at the expense of a friend, of course so much the better.
+A little before ten a crowd is ranged round the police-office, waiting to
+see the prisoners, who have been locked up all night, marched into the
+court, which generally commences its operations at ten.  The court itself
+offers very little accommodation to the most thinking public.  At one end
+of the room is the presiding magistrate; below him is the clerk; on the
+right of the magistrate is the box for complainant and witnesses.
+Opposite him is the dock in which the defendant is placed; behind some
+boards, over which only tall people can see, is the public; and on the
+magistrate's right are the reporters--or, rather, the penny-a-liners--who
+write on "flimsy," and leave "copy" on spec. at all the daily paper
+offices.  Let me say a word about these exceedingly seedy-looking
+individuals connected with the fourth estate.  That they are not better
+dressed is, I take it, their own fault, and arises from that daring
+defiance of conventionalism which is so great a characteristic of the
+lower orders of gentlemen connected with the press.  Let me say, _en
+passant_, the public owe these men much.  It is they who labour with a
+perseverance worthy of a better cause, and that deserves to be
+successful, to describe the cases heard in the police-courts in the most
+racy and tempting terms.  In their peculiar phraseology, every bachelor
+who gets into a scrape is a gay Lothario, and every young woman that
+appeals to justice is lady-like in manners and interesting in appearance.
+The poor wretch that crawls along the street, all rouged and decked out
+in finery not her own, is "a dashing Cyprian."  Every Irishman is
+described as "a native of the Green Isle;" every man in a red coat, "a
+brave son of Mars;" every sailor, "a jolly tar;" and a man with a little
+hair on his chin, or under it, is invariably "bearded like the pard;" and
+if anything causing a smile occurs,--and sometimes on the gravest
+occasions justice will even grin,--the court is--so they always put
+it--convulsed with laughter.  Knights of the pen, a police-case
+loving-to-read public should be grateful to you!  By the side of the
+reporters often sit some three or four of those mischief-makers,
+pettifogging attorneys; men who, in their own opinion, only require a
+clear stage and no favour, and the mere formality of a call to the bar,
+to rival, if not surpass, the fame of a Scarlett, or a Brougham, or a
+Lyndhurst, or an Erskine, or even of a Coke himself; and truly if to
+bully, to suppress what is true, and insinuate what is false--if to gloss
+over the injustice done by a client, and to proclaim aloud that of the
+opposite party--if to speak in an emphatic manner and at a most
+unmerciful length--if to browbeat witnesses, mislead the court, and
+astonish the weak nerves of their hearers, constitute a fitness for legal
+greatness, these gentlemen have only to enter their names at any of the
+Inns of Court, and eat the requisite number of dinners, to win at once
+undying reputation.  At the dock appears the trembling culprit, guarded
+sedulously by the police, who quietly assume his or her guilt, and do all
+they can in endeavouring to make out a case,--occasionally going so far
+in their zeal as to state things not exactly true, the _esprit de corps_
+of course leading them to aid each other whenever they have a chance.
+
+In a low neighbourhood the principal cases heard are those arising from
+intoxication.  On this particular morning we will suppose the court opens
+with what is very common, an assault case between two Irish families who
+were hereditary foes, and who, emigrating, or rather, like Eneas, "driven
+by fate," from the mother country at the same time, locate, unfortunately
+for themselves, in the same neighbourhood,--and who, in accordance with
+the well-known remark of Horace, continue in St Giles's the amicable
+quarrels of Tipperary, to the amusement of a congenial neighbourhood,
+which likes a good fight rather than not, but to the intense terror and
+annoyance of all such of her Majesty's lieges as are well disposed.  As
+generally happens, the case, after a considerable amount of hard swearing
+on both sides, is dismissed, leaving to each party the inestimable
+privilege of paying costs.  This case creates great interest;
+complainants and defendants are well-known performers, and the mob comes
+to see them as people go to see Wright at the Adelphi.  When it
+terminates, the Guelphs and Ghibelines leave the court to discuss the
+oft-told tale in the nearest public-house.  The remaining cases are those
+of sailors and navvies, charged with being drunk and disorderly, of
+robberies committed by prostitutes when their victims were stupified by
+beer, and of ragged urchins with precocious developments, the head and
+front of whose offending was that they "heaved" stones, or that they
+declined to "move on" when particularly requested to do so by the police.
+Poor little outcasts, they are better off in jail than on the streets;
+and they know it, and own to an astonishing number of convictions, and
+gladly look forward to the time when they shall be able to achieve
+greater enormities and manlier offences against law.  These cases are
+soon disposed of; in the majority the magistrate hears the complaint, and
+simply tells the little urchin he "may go down."  But let us not leave
+yet.  That is a publican, and he has a charge against this decent-looking
+woman,--she is not a drunkard;--let us listen.
+
+"Call Phil. Bird," says the superintendent.
+
+As Phil. Bird is in court, there is no need to call him, but he is called
+in stentorian tones nevertheless.  Policemen, like other men, love to
+hear the sound of their own voices.  Phil. immediately steps into the
+witness-box.  That he is a favourite with the beer-drinking public around
+is clear as soon as he kisses the Bible, and promises--a promise lightly
+made, and lightly broken--to speak the truth, the whole truth, and
+nothing but the truth, "So help me God."
+
+"Well, Bird," says the magistrate, "will you state your complaint?"
+
+"Certainly, your honour," is the reply.  "I was in my shop on Saturday,
+when that woman (pointing to the trembling female in the dock) came in
+kicking up a row, and asking for her husband; well, she spoke to her
+husband, and wanted to get him away, but her husband did not choose to
+go; and as she would not leave quietly, I was obliged to go and speak to
+her, upon which she turned round, abusing me, saying I had robbed her of
+her husband, that I had got his money, and kept making a great many
+remarks which I was not going to submit to, especially as she had got
+quite a crowd of people together, and it was interfering with my
+business; so I called in policeman Brown, and gave her in charge."
+
+Policeman Brown corroborates the testimony.  He has yet to win his spurs,
+and is glad of an opportunity of distinguishing himself; besides, he has
+drunk too much of Phil. Bird's fine sparkling ales to refuse to do him a
+little friendly turn when he has a chance.
+
+"Mr Bird's house is a well-conducted house, I believe, Mr
+Superintendent?" says the magistrate, more from habit than with any view
+of eliciting information.
+
+"Good, your worship," is the answer,--"impossible to be better."  The
+superintendent, perhaps, has received a small cask of Devonshire cyder,
+as a mark of private friendship and personal esteem, from the
+complainant, and this might, though I would fain hope not--but flesh is
+grass, and a superintendent of police is but flesh after all--have
+influenced the nature of his reply.  This is the more probable, as one
+bystander whispers to another, that he believes Phil. Bird's is the worst
+house in the street, a remark which seems to excite the cordial
+approbation of the party to whom it is addressed--a remark also which the
+superintendent hears, and which leads him to cry "silence" in his loudest
+voice and sternest manner.  The whisperer is cowed at once.
+
+Phil. Bird looks gratefully at the superintendent; the latter is grateful
+in O'Connell's sense, and has a lively sense of favours to come.
+
+"And the woman, what about her?" asks the magistrate.
+
+"I believe generally she's very well behaved," says policeman Brown, as
+if on the present occasion she had been guilty of an enormous offence.
+
+"Do you know anything against her?"
+
+"Not as I know of, yer worship."
+
+"Well," says the magistrate, addressing the poor washerwoman, nervous and
+"all of a tremble," as she afterwards confidentially informs a friend,
+looking as if she expected immediate sentence of death passed upon her,
+"what do you say to the charge?  Mr Bird says you went and created a
+disturbance in his shop; now you had no business to do that, you know."
+
+"I know I hadn't, sir," said the poor woman; but here she burst into
+tears.
+
+Had she been alone with the magistrate, who is a kind-hearted man, and
+wishes to do what is right, she would soon have found her tongue, and her
+warm appeal, told with natural eloquence, because told out of a full
+heart, would soon have reached his own; but she is frightened--her
+energies are paralysed,--she cannot speak at all.
+
+"Oh, Brown," says the magistrate, as if a bright thought struck him, "was
+the woman sober?"
+
+"Well, I can't swear that she was drunk," said Brown, reluctantly.
+
+This by no means helps to soothe the poor woman's nerves, but it drives
+her to speak in her own behalf.
+
+"Your worship," she exclaims, "I was as sober as you are now"--she might
+have added, but she did not, "and a good deal more sober than policeman
+Brown."  "I did go to Phil. Bird's, but it was to fetch my husband out,
+who had been inveigled in there, and had been led into spending all the
+money he had, and getting drunk."
+
+"Well, my good woman, the publican must be protected.  You should not
+have created a disturbance.  I shan't inflict a fine, but you must pay
+the costs.  You may go down."
+
+And so the time of the magistrate is taken up; not one case out of ten
+comes to anything; but the officiousness of the police is shown; the lazy
+and good-for-nothing part of the public have a gratuitous entertainment
+provided for them, and the criminal class get an initiation into the
+secrets of the law, which robs it of its terrors, as in such matters it
+is especially true familiarity breeds contempt.  Most of the lads and
+girls--especially the latter--placed at the bar, rather seem to like the
+excitement, and go before the bench in their best clothes and with their
+best looks, as they go to the gallery of the Victoria or the Sunday
+tea-garden.
+
+
+
+
+THE EAGLE TAVERN
+
+
+Is situated in an appropriate locality in the City-road, not far from a
+lunatic asylum, and contiguous to a workhouse.  From time immemorial the
+Cockneys have hastened thither to enjoy themselves.  Children are taught
+to say--
+
+    "Up and down the City-road,
+       In and out the Eagle,
+    That's the way the money goes,
+       Pop goes the weasel."
+
+And the apprentice or clerk, fresh from the country, and anxious to see
+life, generally commences with a visit to the Grecian Saloon--Eagle
+Tavern.  As a rule, I do not think what are termed fast men go much to
+theatres.  To sit out a five-act tragedy and then a farce is a bore which
+only quiet old fogies and people of a domestic turn can endure; and even
+where, as in the Grecian Saloon, you have dancing, and singing, and
+drinking added, it is not the fast men, but the family parties, that make
+it pay.  There you see Smith, Brown, Jones, and Robinson, with their
+respective partners and the dear pledges of their well-regulated loves.
+They come early, sit out _Jack Shepherd_ with a resolution worthy of a
+better cause, listen to the singing from the Music Hall, return again to
+witness the closing theatrical performances, and enjoy all the old stage
+tricks as if they had not heard them for the last fifty years.  These
+worthy creatures see a splendour in the Grecian Saloon which I do not.
+Then there are the juvenile swells.  Anxious mothers in the country,
+fearing the contaminations of London and the ruin it has brought on other
+sons, lodge them in remote Islington, or Hoxton, still more remote.  It
+is in vain they do so.  The Haymarket may be far off, but the Grecian
+Saloon is near; and the young hopefuls come in at half-price, for
+sixpence, and smoke their cigars, and do their pale ale, and adopt the
+slang and the vices of their betters with too much ease.  And then there
+are the unfortunates from the City-road, with painted faces, brazen
+looks, and gorgeous silks; mercenary in every thought and feeling, and
+with hearts hard as adamant.  God help the lad that gets entangled with
+such as they!  It requires no prophet to foretell his career.
+Embezzlement--first with a view to replace the sum appropriated to guilty
+pleasures,--then, embezzlement hopelessly continued because once
+begun,--then discovery, and punishment, and shame, and despair.  Youth
+must have its pleasures, I know.  Young blood is not torpid like that of
+age; and song and woman will ever be dear till time furrows the brow and
+silvers the hair.  But why need we seek them where the air is
+contaminated--where the evening's amusement will not bear the morning's
+reflection--where, though pleasure lead the way, scattering sweet
+flowers, vice and shame and premature old age bring up the rear?  Look at
+those lads; they cannot have been long emancipated from school.  The
+erect collar, the straight hat, the long coat, indicate the fact that
+they belong to the Young England party; and here, listening to
+indifferent songs, and witnessing inferior dramatic performances, and
+associating with the refuse of the other sex, they are learning to be
+men.  What a manhood to look forward to!  And if there be no excuse for
+them, there is still less for what I may call the domestic part of the
+audience,--the fat old women with their baskets filled with prog, the
+pursy old tradesmen that drop in to smoke a pipe, and the various tribes
+of gents and bagsmen on their way home from the city.
+
+Let me say a word on our domestic life.  When there is so little
+difference between the majority of men and women, why should the line of
+demarcation be so severely drawn?  We talk very prettily about home,
+sweet home, and poets sing its love and purity and charms; and a popular
+picture is that which the artist draws when he groups together the
+gray-haired grandfather and grandmother, seated by the fire, and father
+and mother by their side, and brave lads and graceful girls around
+listening, by the warm light of the lamp, to some tale of manly struggle
+or Christian chivalry, or lifting up together the glad voice of song.
+But why should your son or mine, immediately he goes out into the world
+and leaves the parental roof, become a stranger to all this?  If the
+Englishman's home be his castle, why should we cast out into the ditch,
+to lie down and die in its mire, all who are not of the family?  Think of
+the thousands and thousands of young men who yearly come up to town,
+strangers to every one, and with no chance of getting into female
+society, except such as they find at such places as the Eagle.  These
+women are not lovelier than you meet with in respectable houses--not
+better educated nor more correct in their principles; yet, as by natural
+instinct one sex seeks the society of the other, we condemn our youth to
+the company of such.  Paterfamilias is afraid the young men will pay
+attention to his daughters.  Perhaps the young lady-daughters fancy it to
+be beneath them to be civil to their father's young men.  Perhaps the
+young men themselves believe that an honourable connexion is beyond their
+means, and deliberately pursue a career of vice.  In all these cases, in
+my humble opinion, very serious blunders are involved.  The life of a
+bachelor under the circumstances I here allude to is quite as costly as
+that of a married man, without the stimulus to exertion which the latter
+has.  Paterfamilias forgets that the young man he fears may be the suitor
+for his daughter's hand, though he is poor to-day, may be comparatively
+rich to-morrow; and the young ladies should remember that it is rather
+too much to expect that a young man just entering upon life will be able
+to launch out in the same style as those who for thirty or forty years
+have been pursuing a successful commercial career.  It is our false pride
+that eats us up,--that makes us sneer at love in a cottage,--that turns
+our women into cross old maids, and our men into gay Lotharios, very
+disreputable and, to a certain extent, deliriously gay.  I admit that we
+have much more outside respectability, but is society the better?  Have
+we more true happiness?  If Wordsworth is correct, "plain living and high
+thinking" go together.  But our aim is high living, and I fear the
+thinking is very, very plain in consequence.  We nurse up in our midst,
+and reverently worship--and denounce as worse than an infidel every one
+who utters the truth respecting it--an aristocracy the richest and most
+luxurious in the world,--an aristocracy which would long ere this have
+become intellectually effete, did it not recruit its ranks from
+successful adventurers in the shape of lawyers; and the commercial
+classes vying with this aristocracy in outward show, the effects are
+manifest all over the land, in the general attempts to live beyond one's
+means, and to get into a circle supposed to be superior to that in which
+originally we moved.  In Germany they manage better; the noble and the
+trading classes never have a rivalry, the gulf is impassable, and hence
+the home life is less pretentious and happier than ours.  In England "the
+toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his
+kibe."  What we want is a return to the plain living and high thinking of
+an age gone by; less show and more reality; the destruction of the wall
+of partition, either of poverty or of false pride, and the widening and
+enhancing the charms of the domestic circle.  If now and then the result
+is a marriage not very intelligible on pecuniary principles, let us
+consider even that as a lesser evil than that resulting from the
+companionship, on the part of our youths, with the women who infest such
+places as the Eagle, and without which it is clear such places could not
+pay.
+
+I will call evidence as to the character of the amusements at the Eagle
+Tavern.  In the parliamentary report on public-houses, I find Mr Balfour
+is examined respecting it.  He says, "The most detrimental place of which
+I know, as far as women are concerned, is the Eagle Tavern in the
+City-road.  There are gardens, and statues round the gardens, and
+everything to attract.  There is a large theatre, and there are
+theatrical representations during the week.  I have seen women there whom
+I have recognised next day as common street-walkers.  The gardens are
+open, with alcoves and boxes on each side, and lads and young persons are
+taken in there and plied with drink.  The house is opened on Sunday
+evening, but on Sunday evening there is no dramatic representation nor
+music.  I have seen gentlemen come out drunk."  On a Sunday night when Mr
+Balfour visited the place, he said, "There were various rooms.  There is
+what is called the Chinese-room, the ball-room, and the concert-room.
+They were all filled with persons drinking, and I saw a great number of
+female servants, and females of a certain description; there is no doubt
+upon that subject at all."  Now, Mr Conquest, the present proprietor,
+must have read all this evidence, yet I do not see that he has taken any
+steps to reform the evil complained of.  It pays, I suppose, and that is
+enough.  Much money has been made by it.  The late proprietor retired a
+wealthy man.  The present proprietor, we presume, trusts to do the same,
+and if the establishment panders to vice, if women date their ruin to
+Sunday evenings there, if mothers see their sons robbed of all that would
+make them decent men owing to their visits there, what's the odds? cries
+the dram-seller, who, like another Cain, asks if he be his brother's
+keeper.
+
+The regular attendants see this not.  "It's a beautiful place," says Mrs
+Smith to Mrs Robinson, "a'nt it, my dear?" as they sit eating
+questionable sausage rolls, and indulging in bottled beer.  They see the
+pictures in the balcony, and think the gas jets quite miraculous, and
+admire the weak fountains and ambitious grottoes--and they laugh even at
+the comic singer, a feat I cannot achieve anyhow.  Evidently the Eagle
+Tavern audience is of the same genus as an Adelphi audience, a people
+easily moved to laughter, and much given to taking their meals with
+them,--a people not prone to look before or after,--who would be drowned
+rather than get up and walk into the Ark, and who see no chance of their
+own house being burnt down in the fact that their neighbour's house is in
+flames.  I don't believe naturally men or women are these dull clods, but
+custom makes them such, and they see no danger, nor perhaps is there
+where they are concerned.
+
+
+
+
+THE LUNATIC ASYLUM.
+
+
+A few miles from the terminus of one of our metropolitan railways is an
+immense plot of buildings, looking more like a town than a single house.
+It is a stately pile, beautifully situated, and I doubt not many a
+care-worn Cockney, as he has been hurried past it by the rail, has often
+wished that he had a little niche in it where he could come of a night
+after the day's toil was over, and smell the sweet flowers and the fresh
+grass; yet the place is a lunatic asylum, and whilst I write there are in
+it fourteen hundred men and women bereft of reason, unaccountable for
+their actions, and shut up away from their fellows.  Very often the
+number is much greater, and yet this does not contain all the pauper
+lunatics of the metropolitan county.  There is another equally large on
+another line of railway, and there are Wandsworth, Bedlam, and others in
+London itself.
+
+It would do some of the noisy poor, who waste their time in low
+pot-houses talking of their rights--when all that a man has a right to is
+what he can get--good to look over such a place as Colney Hatch.  There
+are pauper lunatics lodged in a palace, waited on by skilful male and
+female attendants, living in light and airy galleries, as clean as
+wax-work, with four meals a day, and with every want supplied.  I am sure
+every Englishman must confess that our asylums and hospitals are the
+glory of our land.  None can deny the active and practical character of
+the philanthropy of our days.  You may depend upon it, nine-tenths of the
+men and women here were never so well fed, lodged, and cared for before.
+Their day commences at six, and terminates at eight.  Such of them as can
+be usefully employed are, in cleaning the wards, and in various domestic
+duties; but they have plenty of spare time--the women for sewing or
+knitting, and the men for out-door exercise or reading.  In one ward I
+found some good books on the table, such as Boswell's Johnson, Gibbon's
+Life, popular works on science, and _Punch_ and several magazines.  The
+only woman I saw reading was an old one, with a Bible before her.  The
+women are by far more troublesome than the men.  Directly I went into one
+ward, a middle-aged woman advanced towards me, with one arm uplifted,
+exclaiming, "Here comes my husband, King John."  Another female, still
+plainer and more elderly, seemed inclined to address to me endearments of
+a still tenderer character.  It was clear that they retained the
+instincts of their sex without its clearness.  Yet there were some to
+whom the novelty of a stranger offered no excitement--who sat huddled up
+by the window, with scowling eyes and dishevelled hair, flesh-and-blood
+pictures of despair.  This one had led a gay life--what a termination for
+a votary of pleasure!  That one had become what she was by drinking; this
+one again by the grand passion, which underlies all history, past and
+present--all philosophy, objective or subjective--all religion, true or
+false.  But, hark! it is a quarter to one, and that is the dinner bell.
+We enter the hall, a room capable of holding seven or eight hundred
+persons.  Some enormous Yorkshire puddings, with some excellent beef, are
+borne by several eager assistants (patients) on to the tables in the
+middle of the room; they are immediately cut up, and each portion is
+enough for one person's dinner.  When the tables set apart for the women
+are served, the door opens, and in rush the poor creatures in a manner
+that shows they have not lost their relish for food.  On the men's side
+similar preparations are made, and then in they rush; and when all are
+seated, a blessing is asked, and dinner commences: it does not last long.
+As soon as the patients have cut up their pudding, the knives and forks
+are carefully removed--and in a very few minutes a signal is made; they
+all rise--thanks are returned, and the meal is over--such as have not had
+enough generally managing to collar a bit of pudding as they march out.
+This is very short work, you say, but it is quite long enough.  You will
+hear a woman screaming now and then, short as it is, and an attempt will
+be sure to be made to get over to the men's side before the meal is over.
+You see enough to sadden you, but the worst cases you do not see--they
+are wisely concealed from the curious eye; it is enough to know that they
+are humanely tended.  Why should we care to look on such?  Going down a
+stair-case, I saw through a glass door a poor creature suffering from
+suicidal monomania; night and day she had to be watched, and such had
+been the case for years.  In her sad face there was visible to the most
+superficial observer
+
+             "The settled gloom
+    The fabled Hebrew wanderer bore."
+
+Well might she wish to lay down her life, that her crazed brain had
+rendered insupportable.
+
+It is a sad sight that of an assembly of insane men and women.  At the
+asylum to which I refer they are very humane people, and very successful
+in their treatment of the distressing cases constantly occurring, and
+twice a year--at Christmas and Midsummer--they give an entertainment, at
+which the better-behaved lunatics attend, and seemingly enjoy themselves
+very much.  I was recently at one, and when I arrived, found that a field
+adjoining the asylum had been set apart for the purpose.  There were
+about five hundred lunatics, male and female, present, and besides there
+were several gentlemen and ladies present, spectators like myself.  It
+was a lovely afternoon, and there was music and dancing, and playing
+cricket, and battledore and shuttlecock, and all the various enjoyments
+of out-door life; but in all these matters I found the attendants
+appeared to take the initiative; still the poor creatures seemed to enjoy
+themselves much, and were happy in their way.  Yet the pleasure-seeker
+will not go to such a spectacle again.  I do not say the vulgar idea of
+the maniac was realized; on the contrary, the poor creatures seemed
+decent and very well behaved--but there was a pitiable want of fine
+physical development, there were in abundance crooked forms and stunted
+figures.  You do not like to see what a poor thing is man when his reason
+is dethroned.  Of course the refractory patients we do not see on such
+occasions, but, looking up at a window, I saw one woman's face--as she
+viewed the scene in which she might not participate--so wild in its anger
+and hopeless in its despair, that that face haunts me yet.  It set me
+thinking how a woman could get into that state.  Perhaps her father and
+mother, ignorant of physiological laws, had married, and she had been the
+result; or the ignorance of her friends, or her own ignorance--or the
+competition of modern life--or the wrongdoing of others--had precipitated
+a catastrophe which otherwise might never have occurred, and thus society
+pays indirectly for its ignorance far more than it would have to do for a
+genuine useful education.  Think of what desolated homes these poor
+creatures form a portion.  Remember what a fearful cost it is to the
+respectable hard-working amongst us, who can barely manage to make two
+ends meet, to have to rear such palatial residences for our pauper
+lunatics.  The asylum of which I write in its erection cost the county an
+enormous sum--in its maintenance it does ditto--and I hear it is now in
+an insecure state, firm as it looks, and that the county of Middlesex
+will have to spend upon it some tens of thousands of pounds more.
+
+I once visited this place in the winter-time; a large hall was lighted
+up, and there were some very pretty dissolving views exhibited, and there
+was dancing and music and eating and drinking going on.  The room was
+covered with laurels and flowers and banners, and, of course, there were
+many ladies and gentlemen present, and the place had a cheerful air; and
+all confessed it was a good thing to give the poor creatures a little
+innocent amusement.  But only think of dancing with lunatics--and such
+ugly ones too--and being held by the buttonhole by some wild-eyed ancient
+mariner.  Coleridge might have come here and written:
+
+    "He held him with his glistening eye,
+       The wedding guest stood still,
+    And listen'd like a child--
+       The mariner has his will."
+
+But if the wedding guest stays here long, he would not be in a fit state
+for the wedding--and still less would he be so if he goes over the
+building.  What a contrast the present treatment of lunatics is to that
+which prevailed till lately!  The exposure of the wretched system pursued
+at Bethlem, which took place in 1814, in consequence of the investigation
+of a parliamentary committee, appears to have been productive of great
+good.  The visitors thus describe one of the women's galleries:--"One of
+the side-rooms contained about ten patients, each chained by one arm or
+leg to the wall, the chain allowing them merely to stand up by the bench
+or form fixed to the wall, or sit down again.  The nakedness of each
+patient was covered by a blanket gown only.  The blanket gown is a
+blanket formed something like a dressing gown, with nothing to fasten it
+in parts.  The feet even were naked."  Many women were locked up in
+cells, naked and chained, on straw, with only one blanket for a covering;
+and the windows being unglazed, the light in winter was shut out for the
+sake of warmth.  In the men's rooms, their nakedness and their mode of
+confinement, continues the report from which we have already quoted, gave
+this room the appearance of a dog-kennel.  At this period the committee
+for months together made no inspection of the inmates.  The house surgeon
+was in an insane state himself, and still oftener drunk; and the keepers
+were often in the latter state; yet at this very time the governors spent
+600 pounds in opposing a bill for regulating mad-houses, and I dare say
+they cried out lustily, No centralization!--no interference with vested
+interests! as enlightened Englishmen and parochial dignitaries are wont
+to do in our days.
+
+Could we not do without lunatic asylums, if society gave up its drinking
+customs?  Not exactly; but their number might be very much decreased.
+Two-thirds of our lunatics become so through drink.  "They are very bad
+at first, sir," said one of my informants to me, "but after a little
+while they get quieter, and perhaps they are cured in two or three
+months."  And yet I find all these lunatics are supplied with beer.
+"They has two half-pints a day, sir, and when they work they gets two
+half-pints more, and very good beer it is, sir," continued my informant,
+"as strong as any man need drink."  Now is not this preposterous?  Men
+who drink till they become lunatics should be taught to do without it;
+but they are allowed their beer even in the asylum, and when they go out
+they begin drinking again, and of course relapse.  Thus we keep feeding
+our lunatic asylums, at the very time we profess to cure lunatics.  I
+admit these places are in many respects well managed--that the buildings
+are commodious--that the attention is good--that the governors are
+humane, and the medical officers vigilant; but which is the truer
+humanity, to take care of the man when in a lunatic asylum, or to keep
+him out of it altogether?
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                                 THE END.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                      JOHN CHILDS AND SON, PRINTERS.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+
+
+
+JUST PUBLISHED,
+
+
+                  _Price_ 3_s._ 6_d._, _bound in cloth_,
+                  SECOND EDITION, REVISED AND ENLARGED,
+
+
+
+THE LONDON PULPIT.
+
+
+                                    BY
+
+                           JAMES EWING RITCHIE.
+
+Contents: The Religious Denominations of London--Sketches of the Rev. J.
+M. Bellew--Dale--Liddell--Maurice--Melville--Villiers--Baldwin
+Brown--Binney--Dr Campbell--Lynch--Morris--Martin--Brock--Howard
+Hinton--Sheridan Knowles--Baptist Noel--Spurgeon--Dr Cumming--Dr James
+Hamilton--W. Forster--H. Ierson--Cardinal Wiseman--Miall--Dr Wolf, &c.
+&c.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                          OPINIONS OF THE PRESS.
+
+The subject is an interesting one, and it is treated with very
+considerable ability.  Mr Ritchie has the valuable art of saying many
+things in few words; he is never diffuse, never dull, and succeeds in
+being graphic without becoming flippant.  Occasionally his strength of
+thought and style borders rather too closely on coarseness; but this
+fault of vigorous natures is counterbalanced by compensatory merits--by
+an utter absence of cant, a manly grasp of thought, and a wise and genial
+human-heartedness.  The book is a sincere book; the writer says what he
+means, and means what he says.  In these half-earnest days it is a
+comfort to meet with any one who has "the courage of his opinions,"
+especially on such a subject as the "London Pulpit."--_Daily News_.
+
+"One of the cleverest productions of the present day."--_Morning Herald_.
+
+"Mr Ritchie is just the man to dash off a series of portraits, bold in
+outline, strikingly like the originals in feature and expression, and
+characterized by bright and effectual colouring.  We have here
+photographed a group of the most distinguished pulpit orators of the
+metropolis, of all religious denominations and sects."--_Civil Service
+Gazette_.
+
+"The style of Mr Ritchie is always lively and fluent, and oftentimes
+eloquent.  It comes the nearest to Hazlitt's of any modern writer we
+know.  His views and opinions are always clear, manly, and
+unobjectionable as regards the manner in which they are set forth.  Many,
+no doubt, will not agree with them, but none can be offended at them.  As
+we have already remarked, Mr Ritchie does not write as a sectarian, and
+it is impossible to collect from the treatise to what sect he belongs.
+The tendency of these sketches is to introduce into the pulpit a better
+style of preaching than what we have been accustomed to."--_Critic_.
+
+"Mr Ritchie has written in a graphic, nervous, and most just
+spirit."--_Court Circular_.
+
+"Written in a fluent and easy style."--_Weekly Times_.
+
+"The personal sketches will engage attention; for the author has
+evidently been a close and attentive observer."--_News of the World_.
+
+"Mr Ritchie's pen-and-ink sketches of the popular preachers of London are
+as life-like as they are brilliant and delightful.  The thought of
+producing them was a happy one, and has been carried out in the volume
+before us with much agreeable animation.  The collection of silhouettes
+herein presented to our contemplation will be especially acceptable, we
+conjecture, to our country cousins, as a guide among the more generally
+known of the metropolitan ecclesiastics.  It will be perceived at a
+glance that the writer has familiarized himself with the subject, before
+undertaking its treatment.  Chapter after chapter brings the popular
+preachers of the Capital before our mind's eye in a sort of stately
+clerical procession."--_The Sun_.
+
+"Without going so far as the late Sir Robert Peel, and saying that there
+are three ways of viewing this as well as every other subject, it will be
+allowed that the clerical body may be contemplated either from within one
+of their special folds, and under the influence of peculiar religious
+views, or in a purely lay historical manner, and, so we suppose we ought
+to say, from the 'platform of humanity' at large.  The latter is the idea
+developed in Mr Ritchie's volume, and cleverly and amusingly it is done.
+One great merit is, that his characters are not unnecessarily spun out.
+We have a few rapid dashes of the pencil, and then the mind is relieved
+by a change of scene and person . . . He displays considerable
+discrimination of judgment, and a good deal of humour."--_The Inquirer_.
+
+"There is considerable verisimilitude in these sketches, though they are
+much too brief to be regarded as more than mere outlines.  It is
+possible, however, to throw character even into an outline, and this is
+done with good effect in several of these smart and off-hand
+compositions."--_Tait_.
+
+"It is lively, freshly written, at times powerful, and its facts
+carefully put together.  It bears the stamp of an earnest spirit, eager
+in its search after truth, and strongly set against affectation and
+pretence of every sort."--_Globe_.
+
+"Some of the sketches are very good."--_Literary Gazette_.
+
+"They are penned in a just spirit, and are of a character to afford all
+the information that may be needed on the subjects to which they refer.
+The author's criticisms on preachers and preaching are candid, and for
+the most part truthful.  This book ought therefore to be
+popular."--_Observer_.
+
+"They are written with vigour and freedom, and are marked by a spirit of
+fairness and justice--an admirable trait, if we recollect how much the
+spirit of partisanship governs such strictures as a rule."--_Weekly
+Dispatch_.
+
+"A sketch of the comparative force of the religious denominations in
+London, and notes upon the chief popular preachers, orthodox or
+dissentient, republished from a newspaper--we think the Weekly News and
+Chronicle.  The book, which is written in a sufficiently impartial
+spirit, will interest many people, and offend few."--_Examiner_.
+
+"In this volume we have within a moderate space pen-and-ink sketches of
+most of the popular preachers of the metropolis.  We are bound to say
+that they are drawn with fidelity, and that the admirers of each Sabbath
+orator whose mental lineaments are placed before us will easily recognise
+the prominent features of the original.  Although brief, they evince
+discrimination and talent; a fluent style being one of their chief
+recommendations, not much space is devoted to each.  The writer only
+reviews the most striking characteristics, and his sympathies are
+manifestly with those who display most liberal and manly tendencies in
+their religious expositions."--_Sunday Times_.
+
+"What Mr Francis did some few years since for the parliamentary orators
+of the age, Mr Ritchie has in the volume before us effected for the
+pulpit orators of the day.  In brief but graphic delineations, he gives
+daguerreotypes, as it were, of the living manners of the chief popular
+preachers of various Christian denominations."--_The Church and State
+Gazette_.
+
+"This is a second edition of Mr Ritchie's smart little sketches taken
+from the life of the most noted metropolitan preachers.  The outline is
+bold, rather than minute and diffuse; now and then character is seized
+with remarkable fidelity; whilst the genial spirit which generally
+pervades the volume takes from occasional passages approaching censure
+anything like the sting of bitterness.  There is scarcely a page that
+does not give the reader faith in the sincerity of the
+writer."--_Manchester Examiner and Times_.
+
+"His sketches are characterized by a boldness, freedom, and vigour, which
+are rarely to be met with in works of that class.  He is no
+hero-worshipper, but he shows that he has a keen appreciation of the
+higher forms of pulpit eloquence."  _The People_.
+
+                                * * * * *
+
+                  LONDON: WILLIAM TWEEDIE, 337, STRAND.
+
+
+
+
+Footnotes:
+
+
+{194}  The Chelsea vestry complained of Cremorne, because it injured the
+property in the neighbourhood;--the defence was, that Mr Simpson had
+spent 30,000 pounds or 40,000 pounds upon it; that he had given 1200
+pounds to the Wellington fund, and 300 pounds--the profits of one night's
+entertainment--to the fund for the relief of the victims of the Indian
+mutiny.
+
+
+
+
+***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NIGHT SIDE OF LONDON***
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