(A Mr. Richmond writes to _The Times_ in support of the Anti-Smoke campaign of Sir William B. Richmond, K.C.B., R.A. _Mr. Punch_ says, heartily, "Let 'em _all_ come, and more power to their elbows!")] [Sidenote: _The End of the Westminster Aquarium_] I do not find that _Punch_ in his record of "disappearances" notes the disuse of hatchments, but he duly chronicles at the close of 1895 the termination of the last of the old turnpike trusts on November 1. "Vanishing London" generally moved him to elegy. Over the Lowther Arcade, which was closed in 1898 by the sale of the Crown lease, he did not waste many tears, and the end of the Westminster Aquarium in January, 1903, did not excite any passionate regret. Still, _Punch_ had seen many strange shows and celebrities within its walls--Blondin, Zazel and Zaeo, Slavin and Sullivan, Pongo the Ape, Sandow the strong man, John Roberts the master of the cue; and a certain mitigated melancholy broods over _Punch_ as we watch him Muse over a pipe of the days that are dead, Dream that once more I am able to scan Closely the bird with the duplicate head, Live once again with the Petrified Man. It was another matter altogether when _Punch_ heard that Clifford's Inn was to be pulled down in April of the same year. In his indignation he suggests that the Temple Gardens, Middle Temple Hall and Temple Church should forthwith be sacrificed to the craze for improvements, and continues in the same strain of exaggerated irony:-- If you turn the Charterhouse into a railway station, the Tower into warehouses and Westminster Hall into an Inebriates' Home, something will have been done towards making London a happier and a better place. Another sign of the times which frequently exercised _Punch's_ mind and stimulated his satire was the multiplication of huge new hotels. In 1902, when it was announced that St. James's Hall was about to be pulled down to make room for another of these monsters, _Punch_ pictured Macaulay's New Zealander coming to visit London and finding it entirely composed of hotels and residential flats. The luxury _à l'Américaine_ of these mammoth establishments excited _Punch's_ strictures in 1907; simultaneously he inveighs against the poky and insanitary arrangements of the modern flat. In earlier years _Punch_ had been prodigal of suggestions for the "improvement" of London; in this period he is more critical than constructive, though I note that in 1904 he reverts to his old suggestion of a great open-air _café_. This, he now proposed, should occupy the ground floor of the Ritz, with a _terrasse_ overlooking Piccadilly and the Green Park. But _Punch_ did not scorn the cheap restaurants, and in one of his "Lays of a Londoner" pays homage to the charms of Soho--a tribute culminating in this admirable stanza:--