rious
persons, more or less celebrated, not forgetting the name of Dickens,
attracted, properly enough, huge crowds, who were willing to pay high
prices to hear a popular author interpret his works. A species of
lion-taming, which, if not exactly exciting, is harmless and withal
edifying. The last two varieties of entertainment usually took place in
the "Egyptian Hall," in Piccadilly, "St. James' Hall," or "The Gallery of
Illustration" in Regent Street.

Of miscellaneous amusements, appealing rather more to the middle class
than the actual society element,--if one really knows what species of
human being actually makes up that vague body,--were such attractions as
were offered by "Madame Tussaud's Waxwork Exhibition," which suggests at
once to the lover of Dickens Mrs. Jarley's similar establishment, and such
industrial exhibitions as took place from time to time, the most important
of the period of which this book treats being, of course, the first great
International Exhibition, held in Hyde Park in 1851.

Further down the social scale the amusements were a variation only of
degree, not of kind.

The lower classes had their coffee-shops and, supposedly, in some degree
the gin-palaces, which however, mostly existed in the picturesque
vocabulary of the "smug" reformer.

The tavern, the chop-house, and the dining-room were variants only of the
"assembly-rooms," the "clubs," and the grand establishments of the upper
circles, and in a way performed the same function,--provided entertainment
for mankind.

As for amusements pure and simple, there was the "music-hall," which,
quoting a mid-Victorian writer, was a place where held forth a "_species
of musical performance, a singular compound of poor foreign music, but
indifferently executed, and interspersed with comic songs of a most
extravagant kind, to which is added or interpolated what the performers
please to term 'nigger' dances, athletic and rope-dancing feats, the whole
accompanied by much drinking and smoking_." Which will pass as a good
enough description to apply to certain establishments of this class
to-day, but which, in reality, loses considerable of its force by reason
of its slurring resentment of what was in a way an invasion of a foreign
custom which might be expected, sooner or later, to crowd out the
conventional and sad amusements which in the main held forth, and which in
a measure has since taken place. The only bearing that the matter has to
the