" ALL THAT'S BRIGHT MUST FADE."
OLD SLAUGHTERS is no more! and in it one of the links which bound us to the past has broken. HOGARTH had sipped his port in Old Slaughters. Dr. PITCAIRNE presided there over a club of medical men—the most unmanageable of professional fraternities. Mrs. MARY ANNE CLARK (is it not written in the records of the House of Commons ?) had spent a night in Old Slaughters. But the fiat has gone forth, and a street is to pass over the site of Old Slaughters. The title is extinct. There was a New (or, as it was sometimes called by the writers of last century, a Young) Slaughters ; but the springal has already changed the family name, and (without the licence of her Majesty's College of Heralds) assumed " the name and arms " of the Hotel Fricour. There are yet some old campaigners surviving who can remember Old Slaughters in the palmy days of " William" ; and the news that it is no more may sadden " the mess" for a moment in the far Ionian Isles or Canada. The Past is receding from us as rapidly RS the Comet. The Cyder Cellar has moved up stairs. There are grown-up men and women among us who never saw the Mews Gate ; who look incredulous when the Northumberland Coffeehouse is mentioned, from the front bedroom-windows of which one might have shaken hands across the Strand with a friend in the ducal mansion opposite. The Albert entry into Hyde Park has been driven through the Cannon Brewery; the conspicuous name of which made the Reverend BLANCO WHITE jot down in his note- book, on his first entry into London, that the idiomatic English phrase was not "casting" but "brewing cannon." (What would his Reverence have said had he chanced to turn down towards Batter- sea Bridge and encountered the Clock Distillery ?) The Cannon Brewery has not merely changed its place ; its proprietor—" bles- sings on his heart, for he brewed good ale! "—has left his artillery behind him, and mounted on the top of his new residence what he calls a lion, but what to the unlearned looks, when seen from be- hind, for all the world like a Shetland pony with the Speaker's wig diffused over his neck. If things go on at this rate, there will soon not be a landmark left whereby to recognize London. It will be " all, all are gone, the old familiar faces."
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