* There is a print of Edwin in this character after a
picture by Alefounder. He was also a favourite 'Croaker' in
the 'Good Natur'd Man.'
But if he was pleased with the acting, he was not equally impressed by the audience. The ceaseless clamour of the upper gallery and the steady hail of missiles were anything but agreeable. 'Often and often whilst I sat here [i.e. in the pit], did a rotten orange, or pieces of the peel of an orange, fly past me, or past some of my neighbours, and once one of them actually hit my hat, without my daring to look round, for fear another might then hit me on my face.' Another passage connected with this part of the entertainment illustrates the old fashion of sending the lackeys to keep their masters' places: 'In the boxes, quite in a corner, sat several servants, who were said to be placed there, to keep the seats for the families they served, till they should arrive; they seemed to sit remarkably close and still, the reason of which, I was told, was their apprehension of being pelted, for, if one of them dares but to look out of the box, he is immediately saluted with a shower of orange peel from the gallery.'
Over the descriptions of St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey we must pass silently, in order to accompany the tourist on his road to Derbyshire, to the 'natural curiosities' of which, after some hesitation, he felt himself most at tracted. Equipped with a road-book, he set out by stage-coach from the White Hart (in the Strand) for Richmond, intending thence to pursue his journey on foot. According to his own account, he must have travelled in just such' another vehicle as that depicted in Hogarth's 'Country Inn-Yard,' and have shared the curiosity, so often felt by admirers of that veracious picture, and afterwards amply gratified in his own case, as to the method by which passengers managed to 'fasten themselves securely on the roof.' Luckily the coach met neither highwayman nor footpad. At Richmond he alighted, and is properly enthusiastic, almost dithyrambic, over 'one of the first situations in the world.' He even got up to see the sun rise from Richmond Hill, with the usual fate of such premature adventurers, a clouded sky. Then he set out on foot by Windsor to Oxford. But he speedily discovered that, in a horse-riding age, a pedestrian was a person of very inferior respectability; and though—modelling himself upon the Vicar of Wakefield—he was careful to invite the landlords to drink with him, he found himself generally treated with pity or contempt, which, when he sat down under a hedge to read Milton, almost changed into a doubt of his sanity. At most of the inns they declined to give him house-room, though, finally, he was allowed to enter 'one of those kitchens which I had so often read of in Fielding's fine novels,' where, just as in those novels, presently arrives a showy post-chaise to set the servile establishment in a bustle, although the occupants called for nothing but two pots of beer. After a vain attempt to obtain a night's lodging at Nuneham, he picks up a travelling companion in the shape of a young parson, who had been preaching at Dorchester and was returning to Oxford. His new ally takes him to the time-honoured Mitre, where he finds a great number of clergymen, all with their gowns and bands on, sitting round a large table, each with his pot of beer before him.' A not very edifying theological discussion ensues, which is too long to quote, and poor Parson Moritz is so well entertained that he has a splitting headache next morning. His further fortunes cannot be detailed here. From Oxford he goes to Stratford-on-Avon, then to Lichfield and Derby, and so to his destination, 'the great cavern near Castleton, in the high Peake of Derbyshire,' which he describes at length. He returns by Nottingham and Leicester, whence, still enthusiastic, but a little weary of his humiliations on foot, he takes coach to Northampton, mounting to the top, in company with a farmer, a young man and 'a black-a-moor.' This eminence proving as perilous as it looked, he creeps into the basket, in spite of the warnings of the black. 'As long as we went up hill, it was easy and pleasant. And, having had little or no sleep the night before, I was almost asleep among the trunks and the packages; but how was the case altered when we came to go down hill; then all the trunks and parcels began, as it were, to dance around me, and everything in the basket seemed to be alive; and I every moment received from them such violent blows, that I thought my last hour was come. I now found that what the black had told me was no exaggeration; but all my complaints were useless. I was obliged to suffer this torture nearly an hour, till we came to another hill again, when, quite shaken to pieces and sadly bruised, I again crept to the top of the coach, and took possession of my former seat.' No wonder he concludes his part of his experiences with a solemn warning to travellers to take inside places in English post coaches. With his return to London his narrative practically ends. But the rapid sketch here given of it affords no sufficient hint of the abundance of naïf detail, of simple enthusiasm and kindly wonderment, which characterize its pages. To complete the impression given, we should be able to suppose the writer resting contentedly from a solitary literary effort, and ending tranquil days as a kind of German Dr. Primrose, telling grandchildren, such as Chodowiecki drew, how he once saw Goldsmith's monument in the great Abbey by the Thames, and heard Pitt speak in the Parliament House at Westminster. But this is to reckon without the all-recording pages of the 'Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie,' and that harsh resolvent, Fact. For the future of Pastor Charles P. Moritz was not at all in this wise. Besides his letters to his 'dearest Gedike,' he wrote many other works, including a 'psychological romance' and 'Travels in Italy;' became a Fine-Art Professor; married late in life, but not happily; left no family; and, last of all, had been dead two years when the translation which has formed the subject of these pages was first introduced to English readers.
XX. OLD VAUXHALL GARDENS.
'In gay Vauxhall now saunter beaux and belles,
And happier cits resort to Sadler's Wells.'
THUS sings one of Sylvanus Urban's poets, describing the pleasures of Spring in the London of George the Second. In the epithet 'happier'—an epithet probably suggested by the not very profound observation that the middle classes as a rule took their pleasure less sadly than mere persons of quality—there is 'the least little touch of spleen.' But the social distinction implied between the fashionable gardens on the Surrey side of the water and the more popular place of entertainment from which the tired dyer and his melting wife are trudging wearily in Hogarth's 'Evening' is practically preserved in the advertisements to be found, between May and August, in the newspapers of the time. Sadler's Wells is specific in its attractions,—its burletta or its rope-dancer: Vauxhall, on the contrary, with a disdainful reticence,—a superbia quosita mentis befitting the 'genuine and only Jarley,'—shortly sets forth that its 'Evening Entertainments' will begin on such a date; that the price of admission is one shilling; and that the doors will open at five. After this notification it continued, at rare intervals, to repeat that the gardens were at the service of the public; but made no more definite sign. Obviously the thing to do was to go. With the help of a few old pamphlets and descriptions, it is proposed to invite the reader to make that expedition, and to revive, if it may be, some memory of a place, the traces of which are strewn broadcast over the literature of the last century. It is true that Vauxhall Gardens survived to a date much later than this. But it was Vauxhall 'with a difference,' and the Vauxhall here intended is Vauxhall in its prime, between 1750 and 1790,—the Vauxhall of Horace Walpole and the 'Connoisseur,'—of Beau Tibbs and the pawnbroker's widow,—of Fielding's 'Amelia' and Fanny Burney's 'Evelina.'
In 1750, the customary approach to this earthly paradise was still along that silent highway of the Thames over which, nearly forty years before, Sir Roger de Coverley and Mr. Spectator had been rowed by the wooden-legged waterman who had fought at La Hogue. There was, indeed, a bridge built or being built at Westminster; but more than half a century was to elapse before there was another at Vauxhall. This little preliminary boating-party, especially to the accompaniment of French horns, must have been one of the delights of the journey, although, if we are to believe a Gallic poet who addressed a copy of verses upon 'Le Vauxhall de Londres' to M. de Fontenelle, 'le trajet du fleuve fatal' was not without its terrors to would-be visitors. Goldsmith's Mrs. Tibbs, at all events, had 'a natural aversion to the water,' and when Mr. Matthew Bramble went, he went by coach for fear of cold, while the younger and bolder spirits of his party took ship from Ranelagh in 'a wherry, so light and slender' that, says poetical Miss Lydia Melford, they looked like 'fairies sailing in a nutshell.' They were four in the boat, she nevertheless adds, beside the oarsman; and if this paper were to be illustrated by fancy pictures the artist's attention might be particularly invited to that very fantastic fairy, Mrs. Tabitha Bramble, who, we are told, 'with her rumpt gown and petticoat, her scanty curls, her lappet-head, deep triple ruffles and high stays,' was (in Lady Griskin's opinion) 'twenty good years behind the fashion.' What the waterman charged, the fair Lydia does not tell us; but he probably asked more than usual for so exceptional a cargo. Meanwhile, the old rates shown in the 'Court and City Registers' of the time are moderate enough. From Whitehall Stairs, the favourite starting-place, the cost of a pair of oars was sixpence; from the Temple eightpence. For sculls you paid no more than half.