The great stand-by of the halls, however, is the laughter-making and vocal department. Here shine the great stars whose names are familiar on English lips as household words. Here is purveyed the culture, the song, and the humour of the English masses. It is from the music-hall stage that the vast majority of Englishmen take their tone and their sentiment. That renowned comedian, Fred Fetchem, strolls on to the boards of the Frivolity some night, and, assuming a fiendish grin, exclaims idiotically; "There's 'air!" Next morning and for many weeks thereafter all England says; "There's 'air!" on any and every occasion. "What ho she bumps!" "Now, we sha'n't be long," "Not half," "Did he?" and similar catchwords, all popular and all meaningless, capture the English imagination in their turn, and for a season, at any rate, Englishmen can say nothing else. It is the same with the music-hall song. Always there are current in England three or four "songs of the hour," which every Englishman worth the name sings, whistles, or hums; and always these songs, from whatever point of view regarded, are of the most blithering and bathotic nature. At the present moment the prime and universal favourite is that pathetic ditty, _Everybody's Loved by Some One_. For the benefit of the English, I quote the first stanza and the chorus of this work: A lady stood within a busy city, Her darling little daughter by her side; She'd stopped to buy a bunch of pretty violets From a ragged little orphan she espied. The words she spoke were kinder than the boy had heard for years; And in reply to what she asked, he murmur'd through his tears, Everybody's loved by some one, everybody knows that's true, Some have father and mother dear; sister and brother, too. All the time that I remember, since I was a mite so small, I seem to be the only one that nobody loves at all. With this enchanting song the English welkin resounds by day and night. The great, broad-shouldered, genial Englishman, full of four-ale and bad whisky, howls it in chorus at his favourite "public," work-girls sing it in factories, mothers rock their children to sleep with it, and every English urchin whistles or shouts it at you with unflagging zest. Of course, there are others; for example, there is _I'm a P'liceman_, which goes like this: In the inky hour of midnight, when the clock is striking three, As I stroll along my beet-root, many curious things I see: Ragged urchins stagger past me to their mansions in the west; Millionaires, through cold and hunger, on our doorsteps sink to rest; Dirty dustmen in their broughams, off to supper at the "Cri."; Then "Bill Sykes," the burglar, passes, with an eye-glass in his eye. Such are the sights I witness when I am on my beat, Filling my heart with sawdust, filling my boots with feet; Covering half the pavement up with my "plates of meat," Though mother sent to say that I'm a p'liceman--