estionable 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.

It would do some of the noisy poor, who waste their time in low
pot-houses talking of their rights--when all that a man has a right to is
what he can get--good to look over such a place as Colney Hatch. There
are pauper lunatics lodged in a palace, waited on by skilful male and
female attendants, living in light and airy galleries, as clean as
wax-work, with four meals a day, and with every want supplied. I am sure
every Englishman must confess that our asylums and hospitals are the
glory of our land. None can deny the active and practical character of
the philanthropy of our days. You may depend upon it, nine-tenths of the
men and women here were never so well fed, lodged, and cared for before.
Their day commences at six, and termina