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 p