"In the early days of the music-halls, before the nameless Captain had begun to cultivate his too famous whiskers, or the insatiable thirst of the convivial Charley had become a fact so painfully notorious,--when the prudent Joseph was yet unknown, and the Strand not yet renowned as the dweling-place of Nancy,--there was sung a song called "Mrs. Johnson," in which the singer, in a tipsy solemnity, bewailed the fact that the tastes and manners of his amiable wife were but too identical with his own. "And so does Mrs. Johnson,"--that was the ever recurring refrain. "I drink, I smoke, I swear, I stop out to unholy hours of the night," sings this Mr. Johnson of the music-halls, "and so, unhappily, does Mrs. Johnson. I am altogether a fast and disreputable individual, and I consider it very delightful to be fast and disreputable; but--and here, I confess, the shoe pinches--so does Mrs. Johnson. This midnight rioting, this hunting up of dancing-gardens and quaffing of perennial champagne, is my very ideal of man's existence; but I recoil aghast with horror before the idea of the same predilections in Mrs. Johnson." It is only a vulgar music-hall ditty; but I think there is a moral hanging to it, which our modern Juvenals would do well to consider." "It is the story of Adam and Eve over again--"the woman tempted me, and I did eat." The historian of the future, studying the social aspects of this century from a file of _Saturday Reviews_, would have fair ground for believing it was because of modest women that outraged Englishmen fled to the denizens of St. John's-wood; that it was the slang and fastness of our girls that drove our men to the race-course and the betting-ring; the women tempted them. What cowards and hypocrites men must be, when they can turn upon and assail the helpless woman who has meekly and dutifully copied the model they have set up before her eyes, and at whose shrine she has seen them prostrate and worshipping!"