anew in the flesh. Cosy but somewhat ponderous in their gaiety must these meetings have been, very different from the wit combats and wild revelry of "the 'Mermaid' men." We can picture the scene on a winter's night, the blazing fire flashing upon the old beams and rafters, and dark wainscoted walls, putting to shame the feeble glimmering of the tallow candle, imparting a ruddier glow to the crimson curtains drawn across the deep-set window, and dropping a carbuncle into each glass of generous wine. Johnson, seated in his own sacred chair, holding forth with oracular pomposity; fat little Boswell on the opposite side, eagerly drinking in every word, making mental notes, and casting now and then a deprecatory half-contemptuous glance upon Goldy, who is fidgetting in his chair, and occasionally interrupting the Doctor by throwing in some of those haphazard flights which made Garrick say of him that he "wrote like an angel and talked like poor Poll." In the background is six-feet-six Langton, sitting with one leg twisted round the other, his hands clasped upon his knee, casting upon the fire-lit wall a strange grotesque image that might be taken for a stork on one leg; near him, perhaps, the handsome cynical face of his friend Beauclerck, who now and then chills the very marrow of toady Boswell by dropping in a sarcasm even upon the Leviathan, who, however, takes it with an indulgence he would not yield to any other man. But unless Burke be there-and we do not hear much of him at the "Mitre "-Johnson dominates the conversation. Now and then a more jovial humour may seize upon the Doctor, as when he was roused out of bed at three o'clock one morning by Beauclerck and Langton, to have "a frisk" with "the young dogs" in a Covent Garden tavern, where he roared out a drinking song over a bowl of bishop; then took a boat to Billingsgate and resolved to persevere in dissipation for the rest of the day. The Doctor usually drank but little, yet he once confessed that when young he could take his three bottles of port and feel none the worse. In Hawkins's "Life" we catch a glimpse of him at the "Devil." There one night in 1751, he gave a supper to celebrate the birth of the first novel of Mrs. Lennox, an authoress of some fame in her day, but now almost forgotten; and it was agreed that the whole night should be spent in festivity. "About the hour of eight Mrs. Lennox and her husband (a tide-waiter in the Customs), a lady of her acquaintance, with the club, and friends, to the number of twenty, assembled. The supper was elegant. Johnson had directed that a magnificent hot apple pie should make a part of it, and this he would have stuck with bay-leaves, because, forsooth, Mrs. Lennox was an authoress, and had written verses; and, further, he had prepared for her a crown of laurel, with which, but not till he had invoked the Muses by some ceremonies of his own invention, he encircled her brows. The night passed, as might be imagined, in pleasant conversation and harmless mirth, intermingled at different periods with the refreshment of coffee and tea. About five A.M. Johnson's face shone with meridian splendour, though his drink had been only lemonade; but the far greater part of the company had deserted the colours of Bacchus, and were with difficulty rallied to partake of a second refreshment of coffee, which was scarcely ended when the day began to dawn. This phenomenon began to put us in mind of our reckoning ; but the waiters were all so overcome with sleep that it was two hours before a bill could be had, and it was not till near eight that the creaking of the street-door gave the signal for our departure." But within the old tavern life was already sown the germ of its destruction; at the "Turk's Head," in Gerrard Street, Soho, Reynolds had started a club, which afterwards became famous as the "Literary Club," and which may be regarded as the progenitor of that race which has robbed the tavern of all its glories. One more glimpse, however. At the corner of Tavistock Court, Covent Garden, there is an old inn called the "Salutation," which is now only supported on crutches, and seems to be rapidly going the way of all bricks and mortar. In an upper room of this house, on certain nights, some time during the closing twenty years of the last century, there assembled a company composed of the Prince Regent, Hare, Fox, Selwyn, Sheridan, who, under assumed names, although their persons were well known to the landlady, used to hold high wassail here, and, when well charged with wine, would sally forth into the regions of St. Giles's in search of adventures. A little later, at another "Salutation," in Newgate Street, we have quite another picture. "When," writes Lamb to Coleridge (1796), "I read in your little volume, your nineteenth effusion, or the twenty-eighth, or twenty-ninth, or what you call the Sigh,' I think I hear you again. I imagine to myself the little smoky room at the 'Salutation and Cat,' where we have sat together through the winter nights, beguiling the cares of life with poesy." A strange place it would be thought nowadays for two youths to discuss poetry in; but the inn parlour was formerly an institution; it was there men sought society and an exchange of ideas, it was a meeting-place, a relief from the cares and troubles of home, from scolding wives and crying children. Well, after all, things have not much changed, the club is but another name for a tavern, on a vaster and greatly improved scale, where you may choose your own company. With the present century we have become more aristocratic and exclusive, and the tavern, when it ceased to be the resort of the gentleman, looked for its best customers among the wellto-do tradesmen ; but these have long since deserted it, and even in VOL. CCXLV. NO. 1788. 3 с country towns the linendraper and stationer would blush to be found in a public-house parlour, although the butcher and the baker, if their wives be not too genteel to permit such indulgences, still smoke an occasional pipe there. The old tavern life now exists for us only in the pages of our novelists, and with them, from Smollett and Fielding to Dickens, and even to George Eliot, it has been a favourite subject. What a capital bit of painting is that description of the "Maypole" and its company in the opening chapter of "Barnaby Rudge"! Who, after reading it, has not wished he had been seated in that spacious chimney corner, on that gusty March night, listening to the wind howling dismally among the bare branches of the trees, and rumbling in the wide chimneys, and driving the rain against the windows, while the flickering light of the fire made the old room, with its heavy timbers and panelled walls, look as if it was built of polished ebony,-listening to the dogmatisms of sturdy Joe Willet, to Solomon Daisy's ghastly story, and to the subdued utterances of Parkes and Tom Cobb! Such cosiness could surely be found nowhere out of an inn parlour. Yet, perhaps, still more graphic is that scene in the "Rainbow" parlour, in "Silas Marner." Being a night when the gentlemen customers are absent, the parlour is dark and the company are assembled in the kitchen; the more important customers who drink spirits sit nearest the fire, staring at each other as if a bet were depending on the first man who winked ; while the beer-drinkers, chiefly men in fustian jackets and smockfrocks, keep their eye-lids down and rub their hands across their mouths as if their draughts of beer were a funeral duty attended with embarrassing sadness. Who that has ever spent an evening in a country inn, and not been too proud to drink a glass in the common room, has not heard some such conversation as that carried on between Bob Winthrop the butcher, Mr. Macey the tailor, Mr. Tookey the parish clerk, and the rest of those village oracles! But even here the great novelist is describing long-past days, when the squire's sons did not disdain to smoke a churchwarden clay and drink punch, and discuss the "burning questions" of the day, chiefly parish grievances, with the tradesmen of the village. A more roystering, jovial picture of the last of the old tavern days is that given by Washington Irving, in one of the delightful papers of "The Sketch-Book," of the club called the "Roaring Lads of Little Britain," held at the "Half-Moon," kept then by one Wagstaff, in whose family it has been for many generations. The club has a collection of glees, catches, and choice stories, that are traditional to the place, and not to be met with in any other part of the metropolis. There is a mad-cap undertaker, who is inimitable at a merry song; but the life of the club is bully Wagstaff himself, a dapper little fellow, with bandy legs and pot-belly, a red face, with moist, merry eye, and a little shock of gray hair behind. At every club night he is called in to sing his "Confession of Faith," which is the famous old trowl from the old English comedy "Gammer Gurton's Needle," the burden of which is, Back and sides go bare, go bare, Both foot and hand go cold, But belly God send thee good ale enough It has been a standing favourite at the "Half-Moon and Bunch of Grapes" ever since it was written, and Wagstaff affirms that his predecessors had often the honour of singing it before the nobility and gentry at Christmas anniversaries. "It would do one's heart good to hear, on a club night, the shouts of merriment, the snatches of song, and now and then the discordant bursts of half-a-dozen discordant voices, which issue from this jovial mansion. At such times the street is lined with listeners, who enjoy a delight equal to that of gazing into a confectioner's window, or snuffing up the steam of a cook-shop." But all this is only the pleasant and picturesque side of tavern life; the reverse of the medal would not be agreeable, and another hand might paint scenes of sottishness and debauchery that would make the reader very thankful that those old times have passed away. Yet it is not because there are beasts in the world that there should be no more cakes and ale. As an essential part of the times and the men of whom we have, as a nation, most reason to be proud, we must always look back upon the old tavern life with a lingering indulgent fondness, much as we think of some pleasant scapegrace who is, in our secret heart, endeared to us even by his very follies and naughtiness. H. BARTON BAKER. THE TABLE TALK. HE æsthetic world is greatly exercised by a proposal to pull down and rebuild the west front of the duomo of St. Mark's, at Venice. By the time these lines are in the hands of my readers, indeed, it is possible that the commission which is sitting on the subject will have decided to commence the work at once. A memorial has accordingly been addressed to the Minister of Public Works in Italy praying him to interfere to stop this act of Vandalism. Among those who have taken the initiative in this scheme are Lord Houghton, Mr. Morris, Mr. E. J. Poynter, R.A., Mr. E. Burne Jones, Mr. Holman Hunt, Professor Richmond, Mr. W. Bell Scott, Mr. F. W. Stephens, Professor Bryce, and others well known in connection with art. I hope their efforts will be successful. What a curious illustration would not the destruction of this noble monument of Byzantine art afford of the truth of Mr. Ruskin's words in his Manchester Lecture: "You talk of the scythe of Time and the tooth of Time. I tell you, Time is scytheless and toothless. It is we who gnaw like the worm-we who smite like the scythe. . . . All these lost treasures of human intellect have been wholly destroyed by human industry of destruction; the marble would have stood its two thousand years as well in the polished statue as in the Parian cliff, but we men have ground it to powder and mixed it with our own ashes." Not quite true are the views thus eloquently expressed, but they convey enough truth to be worth study. Meanwhile, it is desirable that the public should know the reason why so extraordinary an outrage upon taste has been contemplated: if, indeed, there is not-as I fancy there may be-some misconception on the part of Mr. Morris and his associates. Few visitors to the Continent know that Périgueux, the capital of the famous pie-making district of Périgord, has a cathedral belonging to the same date and the same order of architecture as St. Mark's. This is, however, the case. The church of Saint-Front, elevated into a cathedral in 1669, was built between 976 and 1047. It is a superbly imposing building, and dominates finely the quaint picturesque town of narrow streets which seem as if they had heard but yesterday the trumpets of the Earl of |