[1] Some of the rarer items of the collection which it seemed desirable to cite as authorities are marked W. or W. Coll.
[2] Several London pleasure gardens were in existence before the Restoration, the Mulberry Garden on the site of Buckingham Palace and the Spring Gardens at Charing Cross being well-known instances. But in the present volume only such seventeenth-century gardens as survived till the succeeding century are noticed.
[3] The English Grotto.
[4] Cp. The Idler, No. 15, July 1758.
[5] At Vauxhall fireworks were not introduced till 1798, but illuminations were always a feature of the gardens.
[6] Bermondsey Spa and Finch’s Grotto, above mentioned, might be classed among the spas and springs, but their amusements resembled those of Vauxhall.
[7] Islington Wells, a song of all the virtues of those old waters newly found out. London, 1684 (Brit. Mus.), cp. A morning ramble; or Islington Wells burlesqt. London, 1684 (Cunningham, London, 1850, s.v. “Islington”).
[8] London Gazette, 24 September, 1685.
[9] Nearly all modern writers—Mr. Pinks is an exception—have in some way or other confused Sadler’s Wells with New Tunbridge Wells (Islington Spa). The mistake may have first arisen from the circumstance that Sadler, in his printed prospectus concerning the discovery of the wells on his premises, describes them as “Sadler’s New Tunbridge Wells near Islington.” The sub-title of New Tunbridge Wells never, however, took root at Sadler’s, though it was soon permanently adopted (as is stated in our text) by the rival Islington Wells, i.e. Islington Spa.
[10] The following details are mainly derived from Islington Wells, or the Threepenny Academy, 1691, and from Edward Ward’s Walk to Islington, 1699, fol. (Ward’s Works, ii. 63, ff. ed. 1709).