l _viva
voce_,--'Two beefs, one potato, three ales, two wines, six and two
pence.'"

A unique institution existed during the first quarter of the last
century. Some of Dickens' characters, if not Dickens himself, must have
known something of the sort. Charles Knight tells of more than one
establishment in the vicinity of the "Royal Exchange," where a sort of
public _gridiron_ was kept always at hand, for broiling a chop or steak
which had been bought by the customer himself at a neighbouring butcher's.
For this service, the small sum of a penny was charged, the profit to the
house probably arising from the sale of potable refreshments.

The houses which were famous for "fine old cheese," "baked potatoes,"
"mutton or pork pies," "sheep's trotters," or "pig's faces," were mostly
found, or, at least, were at their best, in the "City," though they formed
an humble and non-fastidious method of purveying to the demands of hunger,
in that the establishments catered, more particularly, to the economically
inclined, or even the poorer element of city workers.

The rise from these City eating-houses to the more ambitiously expensive
caterers of the "West End" was gradual. Prices and the appointments
increased as one journeyed westward through Fleet Street, the Strand, to
Piccadilly and Regent Street.

Another institution peculiar to London, in its plan and scope at least,
was the "coffee-house" of 1840, evolved from those of an earlier
generation, but performing, in a way, similar functions.

At this time a "House of Commons Committee of Inquiry into the Operation
of Import Duties"--as was its stupendous title--elicited some remarkable
facts concerning the fast increasing number of "coffee-houses," which had
grown from ten or twelve to eighteen hundred in twenty-five years. One
Pamphilon, who appears to have been the most successful, catering to five
hundred or more persons per day, gave evidence to the effect that his
house was frequented mostly by "lawyers, clerks, and commercial men, some
of them managing clerks, many solicitors, and highly respectable
gentlemen, who take coffee in the middle of the day in preference to a
more stimulating drink ... at the present moment, besides a great number
of newspapers every day, I am compelled to take in an increasing number of
high-class periodicals.... _I find there is an increasing demand for a
better class of reading._"

And thus we see, at that day, even as before and since, a