With close Fellowships, tied to the Church of England, with little or no science, Art, archæology, philology, Oriental learning, or any of the modern branches of learning, with a strong taste for port, and undergraduates drawn for the most part from the upper classes, the Universities were different indeed from those of the present day.
As for the education of women, it was like unto the serpents of Ireland. Wherefore we need not devote a chapter to this subject at all.
CHAPTER XI.
THE TAVERN.
The substitution of the Restaurant for the Tavern is of recent origin. In the year 1837 there were restaurants, it is true, but they were humble places, and confined to the parts of London frequented by the French; for English of every degree there was the Tavern. Plenty of the old Taverns still survive to show us in what places our fathers took their dinners and drank their punch. The Cheshire Cheese is a survival; the Cock, until recently, was another. Some of them, like the latter, had the tables and benches partitioned off; others, like the former, were partly open and partly divided. The floor was sanded; there was a great fire kept up all through the winter, with a kettle always full of boiling water; the cloth was not always of the cleanest; the forks were steel; in the evening there was always a company of those who supped—for they dined early—on chops, steaks, sausages, oysters, and Welsh rabbit, of those who drank, those who smoked their long pipes, and those who sang. Yes—those who sang. In those days the song went round. If three or four Templars supped at the Coal Hole, or the Cock, or the Rainbow, one of them would presently lift his voice in song, and then be followed by a rival warbler from another box. At the Coal Hole, indeed—where met the once famous Wolf Club, Edmund Kean, President—the landlord, one Rhodes by name, was not only a singer but a writer of songs, chiefly, I apprehend, of the comic kind. I suppose that the comic song given by a private gentleman in character—that is, with a pocket-handkerchief for a white apron, or his coat off, or a battered hat on his head—is almost unknown to the younger generation. They see the kind of thing, but done much better, at the music-halls.
EDMUND KEAN AS RICHARD THE THIRD
Really, nothing marks the change of manners more than the fact that fifty years ago men used to meet together every evening and sing songs over their pipes and grog. Not young men only, but middle-aged men, and old men, would all together join in the chorus, and that joyfully, banging the tables with their fists, and laughing from ear to ear—the roysterers are always represented as laughing with an absence of restraint impossible for us quite to understand. The choruses, too, were of the good old ‘Whack-fol-de-rol-de-rido’ character, which gives scope to so much play of sentiment and lightness of touch.
OLD ENTRANCE TO THE COCK, FLEET STREET