Alas for men! that they should be so blind, And laud as gods the scourges of their kind! Call each man glorious who has led a host, And him most glorious who has murdered most! Alas! that men should lavish upon these The most obsequious homage of their knees-- That those who labour in the arts of peace, Making the nations prosper and increase, Should fill a nameless and unhonoured grave, Their worth forgotten by the crowd they save-- But that the Leaders who despoil the earth, Fill it with tears, and quench its children's mirth, Should with their statues block the public way, And stand adored as demi-gods for aye. But thanks to the efforts of Mr. G. F. Watts, R.A., and Mr. Walter Crane, London is at last in a fair way to pay homage also to these unsung and unhonoured heroes of lowly life. During the Jubilee of 1887 Mr. Watts urged that cloisters or galleries should be erected throughout the country and frescoes painted therein, to record the shining deeds of the Democracy's great men and great women. Such a Campo Santo is now being prepared in the new Postmen's Park in Aldersgate Street, and one of the first frescoes to be painted there by Mr. Crane will commemorate the valiant act of one Alice Ayres, a young nurse-girl who rescued her three young charges from a burning house, she herself perishing in the flames. When I go to Paris, my favourite pilgrimage is to the Mur des Fédérés in the Père-la-Chaise Cemetery, where the last of the Communists were mowed down by the mitrailleuse. My sincerest worship of the dead in London will be tendered in the Campo Santo of the Postmen's Park, and I hope one day to pay my homage there to the memorial of Trooper Lockyer. THE MERMAID TAVERN There hath been great sale and utterance of wine, Besides beere, and ale, and ipocras fine, In every country, region, and nation, But chiefly in Billingsgate, at the Salutation; And the Bore's Head, near London Stone, The Swan at Dowgate, a taverne well known; The Mitre in Cheape; and then the Bull Head, And many like places that make noses red; Th' Bore's Head in Old Fish Street, Three Crowns in the Vintry, And now, of late, St. Martin's in the Sentree; The Windmill in Lothbury; The Ship at th' Exchange, King's Head in New Fish Street, where oysters do range; The Mermaid in Cornhill, Red Lion in the Strand, Three Tuns, Newgate Market; Old Fish Street, at the Swan. (_Newes From Bartholomew Fayre_; an undated, anonymous black-letter poem.) "Much time," says Andrews in his history of the sixteenth century, "was spent by the citizens of London at their numerous taverns." The tavern was the lounging-place, not only of the idle and dissolute, but of the industrious also. It was the Club, the Forum, sometimes too the Theatre.