The Zoological Gardens had been opened in 1828 and were already a most popular resort; the hippopotamus at one time almost rivalling "General" Tom Thumb as the most run-after celebrity. "Good David Mitchell," who was secretary to the Zoological Society from 1847 to 1859, was a prime favourite with _Punch_, and is never mentioned without a friendly word. But of all officials concerned with the administration of London none stood higher in his esteem than Sir Benjamin Hall, M.P. for Marylebone from 1837 to 1859, when he was created Lord Llandovery, President of the Board of Health in 1854, and Chief Commissioner of Works from 1855 to 1858. "Ben Hall's" services in adding to the amenities of the parks and introducing bands on Sundays were celebrated by _Punch_ in prose and verse. It was he who brought in a Bill for the sorely needed better management of the Metropolis in March, 1855, and _Punch_ more than once applauded him for castigating the follies of the Central Metropolitan Board, whose vagaries in suggesting names for streets roused _Punch's_ special ire in 1856. A nomenclator like the late Sir Laurence Gomme, who combined official authority with a fine historical sense, only emerges once in a century. Among the minor officials of the time beadles were conspicuous. _Punch_ devotes a special article to those of the Burlington and Lowther Arcades, the Quadrant and the British Museum, but these gorgeous uniformed functionaries, splendid in scarlet and gold, are now only memories of the elderly or the aged. Gone, too, are the broadsheets, "dying speeches" and ballads of Catnach, the Seven Dials bookseller; gone also are the "mock auctions" which were held in the Strand up to the war. London had no picture-palaces in the 'forties and 'fifties, but there was an abundance of panoramas, which _Punch_ noted as a reaction against the cult of dwarfs. The fogs cannot have been worse than those which prevailed for nearly a week one winter at the close of the 'nineties, but the smoke nuisance was perhaps more acute because entirely unregulated. _Punch_ defended the intermission of postal deliveries on Sunday, on the ground that it promoted the blessed dullness of that day, and here at least the chronicler has no change to record. On the growth of the great modern art of advertising _Punch_ is a most instructive commentator. As early as December, 1842, he printed an essay on its theory and practice in which the following passage occurs:--