London poverty and London vice flourished unchecked till long after Queen Victoria had commenced her reign. When I first knew London the streets after dark were fearful, and a terrible snare to all, especially the young and idle and well-to-do. The public-houses were kept open till a late hour. There were coffee-houses that were never closed; music-halls, where the songs, such as described in Thackeray’s “Cave of Harmony,” were of a most degrading character; Judge and Jury Clubs, where the low wit and obscenity of the actors were fearful; saloons for the pickpocket, the swell mobsman, and the man about town, and women who shone in evening dress, and were alike fair and frail. It is only within the last twenty years that the Middlesex magistrates refused Mr. Bignell a licence for the Argyle Rooms; that was not until Mr. Bignell had found it worth while to invest £80,000 in the place. Year after year noble lords and Middlesex magistrates had visited the place and licensed it. Indeed, it had become one of the institutions of the metropolis, one of the places where Bob Logic and Corinthian Tom—such men still existed, though they went by other names—were safe to be found of an evening. The theatre was too staid and respectable for them, though dashing Cyprians, as they were termed, were sure to be found at the refreshment saloon. When the Argyle was shut up, it was said a great public scandal was removed. Perhaps so; but the real scandal was that such a place was ever needed in the capital of a land which handsomely paid clergymen and deans and bishops and archbishops to exterminate the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, which found their full development in such places as the Argyle Rooms. It was a scandal and a shame that men who had been born in English homes, and nursed by English mothers, and confirmed by English bishops, and had been trained in English public schools and Universities, and worshipped in English churches and cathedrals, should have helped to make the Argyle Rooms a successful public institution. Mr. Bignell created no public vices; he merely pandered to what was in existence. It was the men of wealth and fashion who made the place what it was. It was not an improving spectacle in an age that sacrificed everything to worldly show, and had come to regard the brougham as the one thing needful—the outward sign of respectability and grace—to see equipages of this kind, filled with fashionably dressed women, most of them Born in a garret, in a kitchen bred—