I have taken some pains in compiling these lists, partly from topographical curiosity, partly from the conviction that their enumeration almost rises to the dignity of pointing a moral. The main contrast is between the tavern and public-house of former days and the gin-palace, with whose aspect—externally, if not (in any sense of the word) internally—we are only too familiar. A description that I have found in a London guide-book of 1846 of the tea and tavern gardens of that date has already an old-world air: ‘The amusements are innocent, the indulgence temperate; and a suitable mixture of female society renders it [our guide means _them_] both gay and pleasing.’ The public-house was then, as now, no inconspicuous feature of the Metropolis; yet in the earlier half of the nineteenth century it had, if not exactly gaiety and innocence, some characteristics which tended in that direction—its little gardens in summer, its tavern concerts in winter-time. In the fifties, or earlier, many of these garden spaces—often, it is true, of Lilliputian dimensions—were marked out as building-ground, which was either sold to alien contractors or utilized by the proprietor of the tavern when he thought fit to erect thereon a roomier and more imposing edifice. At the same period, or some years later, the increase of music-halls, of local theatres, and places of entertainment, rendered the tavern concert, with its unambitious glee-parties and comic singing, a superfluity. The disappearance of the tavern concert may not be a matter of keen regret, but the abolition of the garden has altered—and for the worse—the whole character of the public-house. In the garden a man might sit with a friend or chance acquaintance as long as his pleasure and a treacherous climate permitted. In the gin-palace he practically cannot sit at all, but is huddled, sometimes with his wife and children, into a kind of pen, from which custom and a sort of shy politeness bid him depart at the earliest moment to make room for new-comers. The London public-house has thus become a mere counter for the hurried consumption of drink; it has lost any convenience or merit it may once have had as an improvised club and a cheerful resort. The proprietors of the larger houses seem, indeed, to have had a suspicion of this, for they sometimes offer, for the behoof of their wealthier customers, a comfortable lounge or smoking-saloon. But this does not benefit the humbler classes, and it has often seemed to me that a good way of discouraging intemperance in a great city is not to attempt the heroic, unpopular, and impossible task of abolishing the traffic in drink, but to compel the owners of licensed houses to dispense their stock-in-trade under more rational and recreative conditions—_to give us_ ‘_clubs_’ _for_ ‘_pubs_,’ or, at any rate, cafés and café-restaurants.