Sunday evenings there, if mothers see their sons robbed of all that would make them decent men owing to their visits there, what’s the odds? cries the dram-seller, who, like another Cain, asks if he be his brother’s keeper. The regular attendants see this not. “It’s a beautiful place,” says Mrs Smith to Mrs Robinson, “a’nt it, my dear?” as they sit eating questionable sausage rolls, and indulging in bottled beer. They see the pictures in the balcony, and think the gas jets quite miraculous, and admire the weak fountains and ambitious grottoes—and they laugh even at the comic singer, a feat I cannot achieve anyhow. Evidently the Eagle Tavern audience is of the same genus as an Adelphi audience, a people easily moved to laughter, and much given to taking their meals with them,—a people not prone to look before or after,—who would be drowned rather than get up and walk into the Ark, and who see no chance of their own house being burnt down in the fact that their neighbour’s house is in flames. I don’t believe naturally men or women are these dull clods, but custom makes them such, and they see no danger, nor perhaps is there where they are concerned. THE LUNATIC ASYLUM. A few miles from the terminus of one of our metropolitan railways is an immense plot of buildings, looking more like a town than a single house. It is a stately pile, beautifully situated, and I doubt not many a care-worn Cockney, as he has been hurried past it by the rail, has often wished that he had a little niche in it where he could come of a night after the day’s toil was over, and smell the sweet flowers and the fresh grass; yet the place is a lunatic asylum, and whilst I write there are in it fourteen hundred men and women bereft of reason, unaccountable for their actions, and shut up away from their fellows. Very often the number is much greater, and yet this does not contain all the pauper lunatics of the metropolitan county. There is another equally large on another line of railway, and there are Wandsworth, Bedlam, and others in London itself.