In spite of these acknowledged facts, however, I am happy to say there is not a single “Drunkard” in the London Directory. Nevertheless, in our older registers the tale is not so assuring. There has been a tendency during the last two hundred years to shuffle off certain objectionable names, which our earlier forefathers did not seem to be ashamed of. Who of my readers would like to have been officially registered as “Maurice Druncard,” or “Jakes Drynk-ale,” or worse still, “Geoffrey Dringke-dregges”? Who of my readers would like to sign himself in a marriage record as “Robert le Sot,” or as “Thomas Sour-ale”? Even “John Swete-ale” would scarcely have relished the sobriquet if he had lived in this more punctilious age of ours. Where could the young lady be found who would forego the charms of spinsterhood to be wedded to an “Arnold Scutel-mouth”—(what a capacious mouth it must have been!) “Alice Gude-ale-house” may have been a thoroughly honest and respectable landlady, but I don’t think she would have said “no,” if some smart and worthy younker had offered her the refusal of his name. Every one of these entries I have myself copied from authentic registers. Curious, and yet not curious, is it that not one of them has survived. So far as the Directory shows, we are the soberest and most temperate nation on the face of the earth. Thus do we throw a mantle over our great national vice. Even when we cannot get rid of the fact, we manage to smooth it over with a sesquipedalian gloss. A woman in the middle and higher ranks never gets drunk now-a-days. She is a suffering martyr to dipsomania! How thankful we should be for a Bible that says “Be not drunk.”