The herds around o’er herbage green
And bleating flocks are sporting seen
While Phœbus with its brightest rays
The fertile soil doth seem to praise.[46]
As late as 1803 mention is made of the tall poplars, graceful willows, sloping banks and flowers of Sadler’s Wells; and the patient London fisherman, like his brethren of the angle of the eighteenth century, still stood by the stream.[47]
From about 1698 the gardens ceased to be a prominent feature of Sadler’s Wells, and the fortunes of the place from that time to the present day mainly concern the historian of the Theatre and the Variety Stage, and can only be dealt with briefly in the present work.
SADLER’S WELLS ANGLERS. 1796.
In 1698 (23 May) a vocal and instrumental concert was given, and the company enjoyed such harmony as can be produced by an orchestra composed of violins, hautboys, trumpets and kettledrums. This was one of the concerts given in the Music House twice a week throughout the season and lasting from ten o’clock to one. In 1699 James Miles and Francis Forcer (d. 1705?), a musician, appear to have been joint proprietors of Sadler’s Wells, which was for some years styled Miles’s Music House. In this year (1699) there was an exhibition of an “ingurgitating monster,” a man, who, for a stake of five guineas, performed the hardly credible feat of eating a live cock. This disgusting scene was witnessed by a very rough audience, including however some beaux from the Inns of Court. A brightly painted gallery in the saloon used for the entertainments appears to have been occupied by the quieter portion of the audience, who were able from thence to survey the pit below, which was filled, according to Ned Ward (circ. 1699), with butchers, bailiffs, prize-fighters, and housebreakers. The audience smoked and regaled themselves with ale and cheese-cakes; while the organ played, a scarlet-clad fiddler performed, and a girl of eleven gave a sword dance.
In 1712, Miles’s Music House was the scene of a fatal brawl in which Waite, a lieutenant in the Navy, was killed by a lawyer named French, “near the organloft.” In 1718 it is mentioned as the resort of “strolling damsels, half-pay officers, peripatetic tradesmen, tars, butchers and others musically inclined.”