The modern “Angel,” built somewhere about 1870, before public-houses became Elizabethan, Jacobean, or Queen Annean, is frankly a public-house in appearance, like the rebuilt “Elephant and Castle” and others, and carries in its aspect no reminiscence of coaching times. It has been left for the proprietors in recent years to grow somewhat ashamed of that fact, for, painted on tiles, there now appears on the wall of its entrance lobby one of those quasi-historical pictures, that have of late begun to decorate the entrance walls of our otherwise unredeemed gin palaces. By means of these tile-pictures those patrons who are not too far gone in intoxication may learn something of local or national history and topography. In the case of the “Angel,” the subject selected is that of the starting of the Holyhead Mail from the old house, whose frontage, pictured from old prints, bears the inscription, “For Gentlemen and Families,” and at whose windows the gentlemen and families are accordingly observed to be sitting, enjoying the scene. It is not conceivable that any one should now hope to find pleasure in doing the like at these modern windows that nowadays light billiard-rooms, and look down upon a busy scene of omnibuses and tramcars; but perhaps even what we rightly consider to be a sordid confluence of traffic may come to have a retrospective romance of its own in, say, the twenty-first century. Exactly what the “Angel” was like in 1812 may be seen from the accompanying illustration by Pollard, of the illuminations on the night of the King’s birthday in that year. The Holyhead Mail is prominent in front of two others drawn up before the house. [Illustration: THE “ANGEL,” ISLINGTON. MAIL COACHES AND ILLUMINATIONS ON NIGHT OF THE KING’S BIRTHDAY, 1812. _From a Print after J. Pollard._ ]