From Chapter 8: Angelo gives some lively pictures of scenes of this kind in the London of about 1780. The Turk's Head, in Gerrard Street, was the meeting-place for "a knot of worthies, principally 'Sons of St. Luke,' or the children of Thespis, and mostly votaries of Bacchus," as the old fencing-master, who loved a little "fine writing," describes them; and here they sat, he says, "taking their punch and
smoking, the prevailing custom of the time." About the same time (
circa 1790) an evening resort for purposes mostly vicious was the famous Dog and Duck, in St. George's Fields. "The long room," says Angelo, "if I may depend on my memory, was on the ground floor, and all the benches were filled with motley groups, eating, drinking, and
smoking." Angelo also mentions the "Picnic Society," a celebrated resort of fashion at the beginning of the nineteenth century, where the odour
of tobacco never penetrated. It afforded, he says in his fine way, "a sort of antipodeal contrast to these
smoking tavern clubs of the old city of Trinobantes." The same writer speaks of a certain Monsieur Liviez whom he met in Paris in 1772, who had been one of the first dancers at the Italian Opera House, and
maître de ballet at Drury Lane Theatre. This gentleman was addicted to self-indulgence, loved good eating, and good and ample drinking, and moreover kept "late hours,
à l'Anglaise, smoked his pipe, and drank oceans of punch."
