“All the artists of the neighbourhood will dine here,” be declared with conviction. “If we could only get old Madox Brown to come here once, he would never go to the trouble of having dinners cooked at home!” Madox Brown lived in Fitzroy Square, so that the convenience of the arrangement seemed indisputable. And Charlotte Street, as well as some other streets with long first-floor windows, was still a thoroughfare in which artists set up their studios. The Bohemia of “The Newcomes” was still existing north of Oxford Street when I first knew London, and when I have visited Madox Brown in Fitzroy Square it has given me pleasure to think that his might be the very building which was tenanted for a time by Colonel Newcome. But if a tithe of the artists then working in that part of the town were to demand a meal at the restaurant newly discovered by Wills, the majority of them must have had their dinner served to them in the street. An invasion even of the members of the Madox Brown family would have strained the resources of the tiny place to the utmost. At the time when Wills was making daily discoveries among the little French eating-houses of Soho and Bloomsbury, he had few imitators in that field of gastronomies. The Englishman still pooh-poohed the French cuisine. He never hesitated to express his contempt for what he called “kickshaws.” Give him a basin of mock turtle soup, a bit of boiled turbot, a cut off the joint, and two vegetables, with apple pudding and Stilton cheese to end up with, and he wouldn’t thank you for the finest repast conceived by the first chef, and prepared by the most expert assistants in Europe! There are still fine old English gentlemen who hold this heresy; but they all held it then. The consequence is that half the population, over fifty years of age, suffer from indigestion. But while this most barbarous standard of dining obtained, it was faithfully catered for by the fine old English gentleman’s staunch admirer—the fine old English landlord. And to this day there persist a few establishments which make it their business to supply the fine old English dinner for the fine old English gormandizer.