PEOPLE have short memories—particularly in the matter of benefits received. To-day, for instance, it is the usual and the correct thing to credit the London County Council with all that has been accomplished for the beautification of London during recent years. Yet the two greatest improvements carried out in my time were not done by the Council at all. The two municipal achievements to which I allude are the Holborn Viaduct, and that magnificent boulevard, the Thames Embankment. Now, these two enduring monuments of municipal enterprise and foresight we owe to the old—and much-maligned—Board of Works. When I gaze dismayed on the hideous structure at Spring Gardens, which now admits the public through its bowels to St. James’s Park; and when, entering and traversing the Park, I see the grim bastion that has been erected at the end of the duck-pond, with the object, apparently, of dwarfing Buckingham Palace into the likeness of a row of aristocratic almshouses, I wonder whether we were not safer, when all is said and done, in the hands of the reprobated “Board of Shirks,” as it was called by the comic papers of its day. Give a man beautiful surroundings, and he will begin to live up to his environment. With the wonderful improvement effected on the face of London by the operations of the Board, there became heard the still, small voice of a demand for more beautiful living. The two main elements in living, I take it, are eating and drinking. And, rightly or wrongly, I have always synchronized the completion of the Viaduct and the Embankment with the first noticeable advance in catering. Before that point of departure there were in London but two restaurants of the first class at which one could obtain a French dinner. One of these was the Café Royal; the other was Verrey’s. Both were—and still, happily, are—situated in Regent Street. To-day we have restaurants which quite easily surpass in elegance and amplitude of interior the two houses I have named, but the Café Royal still holds its own both in the matter of cellar and of cuisine.