"I won't, you hussey." You may imagine the laugh this reply occasioned. After the tempest was a little calmed, the Pollard said, "Now, how anybody would spoil this story that was to repeat it and say, I won't, you jade!" In short, the whole air of our party was sufficient, as you will easily imagine, to take up the whole attention of the garden; so much so, that from eleven o'clock till half an hour after one we had the whole concourse round our booth; at last they came into the little gardens of each booth on the sides of ours, till Harry Vane took up a bumper and was proceeding to treat them with still greater freedom. It was three o'clock before we got home.'
Whether this 'frisk' in good society included the passage of the Dark Walk, the chronicler has not related. But the Dark Walk, also known as the 'Druid's,' or 'Lovers' Walk,' is almost the only feature of the gardens which now needs to be described. Its position has already been roughly indicated. It was formed by tall overarching trees meeting at the top, in which, in the place's palmiest days, blackbirds, thrushes, and nightingales made their nests. A visit to this selva oscura was the prime ambition of the more inquiring visitor to Vauxhall, either upon the simple ground put forward by the elder Miss Rose in the 'Connoisseur' that it was 'solentary,' or upon the more specious excuse, advanced by the generality, that the music of the Orchestra sounded better through the thick foliage of the trees. But the pretexts for seeking these attractive shades were probably as inexhaustible as Dean Aldrich's reasons for drinking, the last of which was 'any other reason.' In Miss Burney's 'Evelina,' that delightful heroine is decoyed into the Dark Walk by her vulgar friends, the Branghtons.
There she is insulted by a gang of rakes, and is rescued by Sir Clement Willoughby, who, apparently under the influence of the genius of the place, proceeds, after certain impertinences, to make her a spasmodic declaration, plentifully punctuated with dashes in this wise,—'O Miss Anville,—loveliest of women,—forgive me,—my—I beseech you forgive me;—if I have offended—if I have hurt you,—I could kill myself at the thought!' etc. Thus this 'most impetuous of men;' and thus did they make love in Vauxhall's 'green retreats' 'when George was king.' Nor love alone, apparently; for if the old descriptions are strictly accurate in representing some of its frequenters as yelling 'in sounds fully as terrific as the imagined horrors of Cavalcanti's bloodhounds,' there must have been a considerable amount of more than questionable horse-play besides; and the licensing magistrates who, in 1763, bound the proprietors to do away with the 'dark walks,' and to appoint proper watchmen, were no doubt well advised.
From the use of the plural 'walks,' it may be that the prohibition also included the numerous wildernesses which occupied the north of the inclosure,—wildernesses so intricate that, even in the prehistoric era of the place, the most experienced mothers—to use the expressive words of Tom Brown 'of facetious memory'—often 'lost themselves in looking for their daughters.' And this brings us to the final item in our catalogue, the walk which bounded the garden on the north, closing and terminating the four great promenades that traversed it from top to bottom. This, shaded like the rest by trees, had at each end one of the favourite 'scenes.' That to the east was a view in a Chinese garden; that to west, a building with a scaffold and a ladder before it, which at a distance 'often deceived the eye very agreeably.' History has neglected the artist of these ingenious performances. But Hayman had begun with stage decoration, and may perhaps have executed them. Or they may have been from the brush of George Lambert, the well-known scene-painter of Covent Garden, who, like Hayman, was a friend of Hogarth, and is reported to have borne his part in the beautifying of the place.
In the foregoing sketch we have endeavoured to revive some specific idea of the aspect of a forgotten place of amusement, rather than to produce that indefinite patchwork of anecdote which, with a judicious sprinkling of shoe buckles and periwigs, of hoops and gipsy-hats, so often does duty for 'a picture of the time.' But a last word must certainly be devoted to the proprietor and presiding spirit, Jonathan Tyers. Little seems to be known of him before he acquired the site of the old Spring Garden of the 'Spectator' in March, 1728, from one Elizabeth Masters, of London, upon a thirty years' lease. Even then it must have had many of the appurtenances of a public resort, for the deed enumerates a Ham-room and a Milk-house, and there were already primitive alcoves in the shape of tiled arbours entitled Royal George, Ship, Eagle, Phoenix, Checker, and the like. Nay, there were already lofty trees which dated from the seventeenth century and the days of an earlier possessor, the Sir Samuel Morland of Pepys's Diary. The rent whieh Tyers paid was £250. He added music; then by degrees the orchestra and organ, the statues, the pictures, and the other adornments. He opened the garden in June, 1732, with illuminations and a Ridotto al' fresco, at which Frederick, Prince of Wales, was present; and the company, numbering four hundred, wore masks, dominoes, and lawyers' gowns. Order was kept by a detachment of footguards, and the admission ticket was designed by Jack Laguerre, son of the Louis whose muscular saints sprawl, in Pope's verse, upon the ceilings of 'Timon's Villa.' Payment was subsequently made at the gate; but in 1738, apparently with a view to render the attendance somewhat more select, a thousand silver season tickets were issued. In 1752 Tyers purchased part of the estate out and out, and a few years afterwards acquired the remainder. To the last day of his life he retained the keenest interest in the place, and only a few hours before his death caused himself to be carried into the gardens to take a parting look at them. At his country-seat of Denbies near Dorking in Surrey, he had another private garden, in the embellishment of which he must have found an outlet for some otherwise obstructed eccentricity, since it contained a representation of the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where, in an alcove, had been depicted, in two compartments, the ends of the infidel and the Christian. According to the 'Gentleman's Magazine,' Tyers passed through the Valley himself in July, 1767. His descendants long continued to manage Vauxhall Gardens. Perhaps the most notable of these was his eldest son Tom, the friend and biographer of Johnson, and the 'Tom Restless' of the 'Idler.'
XXI. AT LEICESTER FIELDS.
IT is with places as with persons: they often attract us more in their youth than in their maturer years Apart from the fact that these papers are confessedly confined to the Eighteenth Century, this threadbare truth affords a sufficient excuse for speaking of Leicester Square by its earlier, rather than by its existing name. And, indeed, the abiding interest of the locality lies more in the past than in the present. Not even the addition to the inclosure of busts and a Shakespeare fountain, has been able to regenerate entirely the Leicester Square that most of us remember, with its gloomy back streets,—its fringe of dingy cafés and restaurants,—its ambiguous print and curiosity shops,—its incorrigibly unacclimatized Alhambra, whose garish Saracenic splendours scale and peel perpetually in London's imber edax. If we call anything forcibly to mind in connection with the spot, it is a certain central statue, long the mock of the irreverent,—a statue of the first George, which had come of old, gilded and magnificent, from 'Timon's Villa' at Canons, to fall at last upon evil days and evil tongues, to be rudely spotted with sacrilegious paint, to be crowned with a fool's cap, and, finally, to present itself to the spectator in the generally dishonoured and dilapidated condition in which, some twenty years ago, it was exhibited by the late John O'Connor on the walls of the Royal Academy. But when, travelling rapidly backwards, past the Empire and the Alhambra, past Wylde's Globe and the Panopticon, past Burford's Panorama and Miss Linwood's needlework, we enter the last century, we are in the Leicester Fields of Reynolds and Hogarth, of Newton and John Hunter,—the Leicester Fields of Sir George Savile and Frederick, Prince of Wales, of Colbert and Prince Eugene. This is the Leicester Fields of which we propose to speak. Leicester Square and its notorieties may be left to the topographers of the future. *
* The name 'Leicester Square'—it is but right to say—is
also of fairly early date. In 'A Journey through England,'
4th cd., 1724, 1778, the writer, speaking of the space
before Leicester House, says: 'This was till these Fourteen
Years always called Leicester-Fields, but now Leicester-
Square.'' There is, however, abundant evidence that the
older name continued to be freely used throughout the
century. For example, in 1783, Mrs. Hogarth's house is
advertised as 'The Golden Head, in Leicester Fields;' and it
is "at his house in Leicester Fields,' in 1792, that Malone
makes Reynolds die.