I have run the gauntlet of most of these harmless symposia of political talk; and with all, save the Westminster Forum, I can claim acquaintance. I have been one of the Alumni of “Cogers” or “Codger’s” Hall, Bride Lane, where the gentleman who occupied the chair was addressed as “My Noble Grand” by the speaker. I have attended a meeting at the Forum, held at the Green Dragon,[11] Fleet Street, where visitors are invited to join in the discussion; and where, one evening, joining in the discussion as a stranger, the meeting objected to my political views, and a vote passed the chair that I was to be thrown out of the window; from which ignominious exodus I was only rescued by the advent of a friendly Templar, who had dropped in from chambers to the Forum to oil his rusty eloquence in time for the coming Western Circuit. I have dropped in, too, occasionally, at Mr. Wyld’s Reading-Room, in Leicester Square, and have listened to much drouthy eloquence on subjects home and foreign. But nowhere have I seen such tableaux as the governmental journals of Paris have depicted, in the gloomiest of colours, as images of the political discussion meetings of _perfide Albion_. Nowhere have I seen a bowl of blood on the table, the chairman sitting on a barrel of gunpowder—to be subsequently used for the conflagration of the Thames—the orator addressing his hearers from the summit of a pile of ball-cartridges erected on a coffin; or dissentient members launching _abuses_, charged with fulminating mercury, at an unpopular speaker’s head. Dark and dangerous meetings, of dark and dangerous men, do certainly take place in London. Oppressed, despairing, starving, outlawed, outraged exiles, do meet in holes and corners, do plot and conspire, do hurl, in speech, denunciation and sarcasm, at despots. But you must not go to Fleet Street, to Bride Lane, to Leicester Square, nor, least of all, to Pentonville, to find them. The doors of those mysterious meeting-places are “tiled” as securely as Freemasons’ lodges. Now and then a traitor, by lies and hypocrisy, gains admittance, but woe to the traitor if he be discovered in his treason. He dies within the year. [Illustration: TEN O’CLOCK P.M.: A DISCUSSION AT THE “BELVIDERE.”]