Reader, do you know the Cave of Harmony? If you do not, so much the better. If you are one of its _habitués_, I fear no words of mine can make you forsake it. It is said the Cave is altered since we were there—so much the better; Thackeray, I think, had something to do with that reform—and that now nothing objectionable is sung. Still, I doubt whether drinking and harmony after 12 P.M. can do much good. You and I, it may be, are old men, “Ruin’d trunks on wither’d forks, Empty scarecrows you and I.” We have run through youth with money in our pockets and time on our hands, and have seen all that life can offer, and know, what so many do not, that pleasure’s cup but sparkles near the brim. What we have done and been has been wine working on the fiery impulses of young blood, but now, sir, with our hair turning grey and our eyes growing dim, shall we not lift up a warning voice, and ask youth to pause ere it take the final plunge which for years, it may be for ever, shall estrange it from innocence, and peace, and God. It is midnight in the great city in which we write. For a while sorrow and care are veiled from the eyes of men, and to the poorest and most toilworn come pleasant dreams. The shops have long been closed, the roar of the streets has died away, the theatres have discharged their jaded crowds, and as we walk along, meeting now and then a poor drunkard reeling home—or a policeman silently patrolling the streets—or one of the unfortunates, by turns man’s victim and curse—or some of the votaries of dissipation who are awake when other men are asleep—we realize all the grandeur and poetry and magnificence of London by night, and wonder not that Savage and Johnson should have found such a fascination in the scene, and that other sons of genius have read such sermons in its eloquent stones. Let us stroll towards Covent Garden—in another hour it will be ringing with the oaths and execrations of seemingly all the market gardeners in Middlesex—and enter that doorway indicated by the glare of gas; come with me down these stairs, and into that room, the door of which the waiter holds obligingly open. Let us stand here while we recover from the effect of the fumes of grog and the smoke of tobacco. You find yourself in a room holding perhaps 1200 gentlemen; look around, this is a respectable place, this Cave of Harmony, there are no poor people here. We have heavy swells, moustached, and with white kids—officers in the army—scions of noble houses—country gentlemen, and merchants, and lawyers in town on business—literary men, medical students, and old fogies, with every moral sensibility dead, who have sat here for years listening to the same songs and the same outpourings; they could tell you something, these old fogies—what changes they have seen, as one generation after another of students and rakes and men about town have thought it fast to sup every night within these walls; of course the