In the City Road there were tea-gardens, and at Highbury Barn was a dancing establishment, more famous than those of the Eagle or White Conduit Fields, and all at times made the scene of political demonstrations and party triumphs. In this way also were much celebrated the London Tavern and Freemasons’ Hall. There was no attention paid to sanitation, and Lord Palmerston had not horrified all Scotland by telling the clergy who waited on him that it was not days of humiliation that the nation wanted, but a more intimate acquaintance with the virtues of soap and water. The clergy as a rule looked upon an outbreak of disease, not as an illustration of the evils of want and water and defective drainage, but as a sign of the Divine disgust for and against a nation that had admitted Dissenters in Parliament, and emancipated the Roman Catholics. Perhaps the greatest abomination of all was the fearful custom which existed of burying the dead in the midst of the living. The custom died hard—churches and chapels made a lot of money in this way, careless of the fact that the sickly odours of the vault and the graveyard filled up the building where, on Sunday, men and women and children came to worship and pray. Yet London got more country air than it does now. The Thames was not a sewer, and it was all open fields from Camden Town to Hampstead Heath, and at the back of the Holloway Road, and such-like places. There was country everywhere. As a whole, the London of to-day is a far statelier city than the London of my earlier years. Everything was mean and dirty. I miss the twopenny postman, to whom I had always to entrust a lot of letters—when I came up from my village home—as thus the writers save a good sum of money on every letter. There were few omnibuses, and they were dear. Old hackney coaches abounded, and the cabs were few and far between, and very dirty as well, all of which have immensely improved of late. The cab in which I rode when I was set down by the coach at the White Horse, Fetter Lane, then a much-frequented hotel of the highest respectability, was an awful affair, hooded and on two high wheels, while the driver was perched on a seat just outside. I was astonished—as well I might be—when I got to that journey’s end in safety.