For my part, I candidly own I felt more inclined to sympathise with the wife than with her husband; but the music-hall is bound to stand up for drinking, for it is by drinking that it lives. If people cared for music and the drama, they would go to the theatre; but that declines, and the music-hall flourishes. Astley’s Theatre is a case in point. That has been an old favourite with the public. At one time, I should imagine, few places paid better—does not Ducrow sleep in one of the most magnificent monuments in Kensal Green, and did he not make his money at Astley’s?—but now there are two flourishing music-halls one on each side of Astley’s, and as I write I see one of the proprietors, as a plea why he should be given more time for the payment of a debt, admits that sometimes they lose at Astley’s as much as forty pounds a week. If Astley’s is to be made to pay, evidently the sooner it is turned into a music-hall the better. Will the London School Boards raise the character of the future public? is a question to be asked but not to be answered in our time. The real fact is that amusements have a deteriorating effect on the character of those who devote themselves to them, and become more frivolous as they become more popular. This is the case, at any rate, as regards music-halls. A gentleman the other day, as we were speaking of one of the most successful of them, said how grieved he was on a visit to it lately to see the generally lowered tone of entertainment. At one time the attempt was made to give the people really good music, and there were selections of operas of first-rate character. Now all that is done away with, and there is nothing but silly comic singing of the poorest kind. In another respect also there has been a deterioration—that is, in the increased sensationalism of the performance. A music-hall audience requires extra stimulus—the appetite becomes palled, and if a leap of fifty feet does not “fetch the public,” as Artemus Ward would say, why then, the leap must be made a hundred; and really sometimes the spectacles held up for the beery audience to admire are of the most painful character. I have said that the doubtful female element is not conspicuous in the music-hall—that is the case as regards those on the outskirts of London, but the nearer you approach the West-End the less is that the case; and there is more than one music-hall I could name which is little better than a place of assignation and rendezvous for immoral women, and where you may see them standing at the refreshment bars soliciting a drink from all who pass. Such music-halls are amongst the most successful of them all, and the proprietor reaps a golden harvest.