display of legs and bosoms, and more generally in the matter of wit? There have always been admirers of good acting. Why should they be ignored, and the stage lowered to the level of the country bumpkin, the imbecile youth of the day, and his female friends? III.—OUR MUSIC-HALLS. I fear the first impression made upon the mind of the careful observer is that, as regards amusements, the mass of the people are deteriorating very rapidly, that we are more frivolous and childish and silly in this way than our fathers. One has no right to expect anything very intellectual in the way of amusements. People seek them, and naturally, as a relief from hard work. A little amusement now and then is a necessity of our common humanity, whether rich or poor, high or low, sinner or saint; and of course, in the matter of amusements, we must allow people a considerable latitude according to temperament and age and education, and the circumstances in which they are placed. In these days no one advocates a Puritanical restraint and an abstinence from the pleasures of the world. We have a perfect right to everything that can lighten the burden of life, and can make the heart rejoice. It was not a pleasant sign of the times, however, when the people found an amusement in bull-baiting, cock-fighting, boxing, going to see a man hanged; nor is it a pleasant sign of the tunes when, night after night, tens of thousands of our fellow-countrymen are forced into shrieks of laughter by exhibitions as idiotic as they are indecent. A refined and educated people will seek amusements of a refining character. If the people, on the contrary, rejoice in the slang and filthy innuendoes, and low dancing and sensational gymnastics of the music-hall, what are we to think? The music-hall is quite an invention of modern days. In times not very remote working men were satisfied with going into a public-house—having there their _quantum suff._ of less adulterated beer than they can get now—and sometimes they got into good society at such places. For instance, we find Dr. Johnson himself a kind of chairman of an ale-house in Essex Street, Strand, where, for a small fee, you might walk up and see the Doctor as large as life and hear him talk. At a later day the bar-parlour, or whatever it might be called, of the public-house, was the place in which men gathered to talk politics, and to study how they could better themselves. When Bamford, the Lancashire Radical, came to town in 1817, the working men were principally to be found discussing politics in all the London public-houses. One such place he visited and describes: “On first opening the door,” he writes, “the place seemed dimmed by a suffocating vapour of tobacco curling from the cups of long pipes, and issuing from the mouths of the smokers in clouds of abominable odour, like nothing in the world more than one of the unclean fogs of the streets, though the latter were certainly less offensive and probably