In Covent Garden, the Tavistock, the Hummums, and the Bedford—each of them hotels—served the same class of dinner. At these comfortable resorts the meal was generally followed by a bottle of port, thus insuring the achievement of that indigestion which the stodgy comestibles may have failed to set up. The ordinary English restaurant was supplemented by the chop-house. In the City, where quick lunching is a desideratum, these establishments flourished exceedingly. In the West End the most noted of them was Stone’s, in Panton Street, at that period a thoroughfare with a bad name, but at the present time purged of its earlier reputation. It has a theatre, some elegant restaurants, and exhibits few signs of its squalid past. Panton Street has forsworn sack, and lives cleanly. But this chapter is not designed as a mere catalogue of the catering houses, but as the rough sketch of an evolution illustrated by examples, and illuminated here and there, I hope, by anecdotes, relevant and irrelevant. I have sufficiently shown that the Englishman of the early seventies, dining from home, liked to have served to him the same sort of meal which was provided for him on Sundays in the bosom of his family. The Café Royal catered mainly for foreigners. It and the Café Verrey were—so far as Londoners were concerned—but two voices crying in the wilderness. While as for the minor French restaurants in Soho, only artists, poets, and other degenerate Englishmen, affected those cheery little outposts of a great army which was presently to take possession of the town. To-day the conquest of London by the foreigner is complete. The French cuisine has been adopted in all the principal hotels and restaurants, and the old fish-joint-sweets-and-Stilton menu has been relegated to the howling wilderness.