TAVERNS.

“You may be wise in your study in the morning,” (says brow-beating Johnson, to his gape-mouthed admirer Boswell,) “and gay in company at a tavern in the evening.” What a trait of manners! Fancy a man of fashion, or a man of letters, or any man, in the rank of a gentleman, setting forth after dinner, to be “gay at a tavern in an evening.”

The tavern life has now fallen to the lowest classes of society. In the time of Charles, and James the Second, princes of the blood, and the proudest of the peerage, frequented the tavern. In Louis the Fourteenth’s day, men of fashion resorted to places of the same description in France; and ladies of rank, by way of a frolic, sometimes accompanied them to some fashionable auberge in the suburbs, or the Boulevards. In another half century, there will be nothing between the common chop-house, and a magnificent club—between Crockford’s, and “the cheap and nasty.” The improvements of social and domestic life are filling up the intervals. The improvements in female education are also giving a charm to home, which it wanted in those times, when the women were treated as slaves or sultanas in one class; and were deemed in others creatures only fit