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