total darkness. Groping for some little time, with half the romance of the 'Arabian Nights' in my head, and an immense amount of theatrical dust in my hands, I saw a glimmer in the distance, and making towards it, found it to be a gas-jet projecting from the wall. On the ground I saw a piece of brown paper, and lighting this I guided myself still further, until I came to some ladder-steps. I mounted these, and pushed open a door which admitted me to the back of the stage. The whole house was before me, brilliantly lighted, and full of people, but screened from my view by a high wooden barrier which was built across the stage. Climbing up this barrier, by the aid of a few rough projections and considerable skill in this kind of work, I was soon able to look over the top, and I found that I was an uninvited guest on the platform at one of the great Anti-Corn Law League Meetings. The speaker, I think, was the late W. J. Fox, a short man with a Beethoven head, and a practised orator. In a semicircle behind him were Richard Cobden,

John Bright, Colonel Perronet Thompson, Milner Gibson, and many others whose faces had been made familiar to me by popular portraits. This was my first appearance on any stage, but not my last, and I think I have said enough to prove that I, at least, have not wandered far from a given centre.

MUSIC AND DANCING LICENSES.

F any intelligent foreigner' found it difficult to understand why

London-a town of nearly four millions of inhabitants-is now left without one solitary Casino-he should attend the annual Licensing Sessions of the Middlesex Magistrates at Clerkenwell, and see the very mixed, very numerous, and somewhat unruly body of gentlemen who are appointed to govern half the amusements of the greatest city in the world. Here is a body, over four hundred strong, representing in its working majority every form of fussy respectability, narrow-minded bigotry, hopeless ignorance,

wrought-iron prejudice, sour sectarianism, puritanical zeal, and well-meaning obstinacy. Nearly ninety of these Solons from Clapton and Lycurguses from Stoke Newington attended at the Sessions House one Friday, in October, and in their struggle to obtain seats hardly left room for the reporters and the legal gentlemen, to say nothing of witnesses and applicants. The cause, which brought together so many of these chosen ones, was what is called the 'Reserved List of Opposed Licenses,' in which such places as the Argyll Rooms and Evans's Supper Rooms stood prominent. The foreigner we supposed to be present would not have formed a very high notion of our logic or decency, when he saw one of the first law officers of the Crown standing up with difficulty in the pen allotted to counsel, and pleading, with all his ability, to those ninety amateur judges, for the renewal of a license for a somewhat notorious property. Nor when a question arose-as arise it did, under one of the standing orders of the so-called Court-as to whether the

names of the magistrates should be taken down as a permanent record of their individual votes, would the behaviour of this select ninety have impressed the foreigner. A bear-garden-the House of Commons on an Irish night-the betting-ring at Epsomanything involving the utmost noise and confusion, would have been suggested to the foreigner, rather than the judicial calm of a Court of Law. At length, above the uproar, their fully-expected decision was heard-'in spite of the value of the property, and the able arguments of the first law officer of the Crown-we, being fifty or sixty of the select body of the Four Hundred Middlesex Irresponsibles, decline to grant any license (except for drink) to the person applying, as long as he lives, or bears the name in which he has made the application.'

This is how the Middlesex Irresponsibles now treat the man whom they sustained for years in a most valuable monopoly-the proprietorship of the one Casino in London. Passing this monopoly (minus the dancing)