systematic immorality: no, not by Wilkes; no, not by Aphra Behn: no, not by Crebillon the younger: no, not by Voltaire in the scandalous “Pucelle.” And have I brought you all the way over Waterloo Bridge in the evening only to sermonise you! I deserve to be mulcted in three times the halfpenny toll; and I must make amends by saying nothing whatsoever about the shot towers, or the Lion Brewery, the London and South-Western Terminus, and Hawkstone Hall. Here we are, at the corner of the New Cut. It is Nine o’Clock precisely (I must have flown rather than walked from the pawnbroker’s in that lane on the Middlesex side), and while the half-price is pouring into the Victoria Theatre, the whole-price (there is no half-price to the gallery, mind, the charge for the evening’s entertainment being only threepence) is pouring out with equal and continuous persistence, and are deluging the New Cut. Whither, you may ask, are they bound? They are in quest of their Beer. The English have been a beer-loving people for very many ages. It gives them their masculine, sturdy, truculent character. Beer and beef, it has been before remarked, make boys. Beer and beef won the battle of Waterloo. Beer and beef have built railways all over the world. Our troops in the Crimea languished, even on beef (it was but hard corned junk, to be sure) till the authorities sent them beer. There is a _lex non scripta_ among the labouring English, much more potent than many Acts of Parliament, and called the “Strong Beer Act.” They have songs about beer with lusty “nipperkin, pipperkin, and the brown beer” choruses; and in village parlours you may hear stentorian baritones, of agricultural extraction, shouting out that “Feayther likes his beer, he does;” that “Sarah’s passionately fond of her beer, she is;” and denouncing awful vengeance upon those enemies of the people who would “rob a poor man of his beer.” Our fingers were brought to the very hair-trigger of a revolution by the attempted interference of an otherwise well-meaning nobleman, with the people’s beer; and did not William Hogarth strike the right nail on the head when he drew those two terrible pictures of Beer Street and Gin Lane? The authorities of the Victoria Theatre have preserved, I am glad to say, a wholesome reverence for the provisions of the Strong Beer Act, and it is, I believe, a clause in the Magna Charta of the management, that the performances on Saturday evenings shall invariably terminate within a few minutes of midnight, in order to afford the audience due and sufficient time to pour out their final libations at the shrine of Beer, before the law compels the licensed victuallers to close.