he 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