y Gallicized, or Romanized, or Germanized, or
something of that sort; and indeed his state of mind at this point
strikes me myself with a certain awe. I don't venture to follow him,
and I discreetly give up the attempt. But up to this point I can see
what he may have meant, in the midst of his flippancy, and I remember
how to my own imagination at first everything seemed to hang together,
and theatres to be what they were because somehow the streets, and
shops, and hotels, and eating-houses were what they were. I remember
something I said to myself after once witnessing a little drama of real
life at a restaurant. The restaurant in question is in Piccadilly, and
I am trying to think under which of the categories of our Gallicized
observer it would come. The remarkable facade, covered with gilded
mosaics and lamps, is certainly a concession to the idea of beauty;
though whether it is a successful one is another question. Within it
has, besides various other resources, one of those peculiar refectories
which are known in England as grill-rooms, and which possess the
picturesque feature of a colossal gridiron, astride of a corresponding
fire, on which your chops and steaks are toasted before your eyes. A
grill-room is a bad place to dine, but it is a convenient place to
lunch. It always contains a number of tables, which accommodate not
less than half a dozen persons; small tables of the proper dimensions
for a _tete-a-tete_ being, for inscrutable reasons, wholly absent from
English eating-houses.

The grill-room in question is decorated in that style of which the
animus is to be agreeable to Mr. William Morris, though I suspect that
in the present application of his charming principles he would find a
good deal of base alloy. At any rate, the apartment contains a number
of large medallions in blue pottery, pieced together, representing the
heathen gods and goddesses, whose names are inscribed in crooked
letters in an unexpected part of the picture. This is quite the thing
that one would expect to find in one of those cloisters or pleasances,
or "pleached gardens," in which Mr. Morris's Gothic heroines drag their
embroidered petticoats up and down, as slow-pacedly as their poet
sings. Only, in these pretty, dilettantish cloisters there would
probably be no large tickets suspended alongside of the pictorial
pottery, inscribed with the monstrous words, _Tripe! Suppers!_ This is
one of those queer eruptions of plainness and h