Come, bless your sweet stars that you’re none of you drowned.
ADMISSION TICKET, BY CIPRIANI AND BARTOLOZZI.
From this time (1775) till about 1790 the concerts continued as usual, but Ranelagh seems during the period to have suffered a certain eclipse. In May 1788 the shares are said to have fallen from their par value (£1,000) to £900. Ranelagh was “voted a bore with the fashionable circles,” and its distance from town began to be considered an obstacle.
About 1791, however, its fortunes revived, and numerous masquerades, sometimes lasting till six or eight in the morning, and firework displays (chiefly by Caillot and by Rossi and Tessier) remained a feature of Ranelagh till its close.
Henry Angelo (Reminiscences, ii. p. 3 f.), speaking of its later days, declares that it was frequented by “the élite of fashion.” The gentlemen wore powder, frills and ruffles, and had gold-headed canes. “Cropped heads, trousers or shoe-strings” were not to be seen there. The men used to buy in the ante-room myrtles, hyacinths and roses, not to wear themselves, but for presentation to the ladies.
A masquerade of 1792 (14 February) was attended by Mrs. Jordan, “supported” (as the newspapers said) “between the friendly arms of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence.” Mr. Petit was good as a man walking in his sleep with a candle, and amid the usual crowd of harlequins, sailors and flower-girls, “a monkey of the largest size was offensively dexterous.”[237] At another masquerade this year (16 May) a Guy Faux, a ‘Bath Maccarony,’ an African Princess, and three or four Romps attracted attention.
On May 7th, 1792, the exhibition called Mount Etna was introduced and remained popular at Ranelagh for several years. A special building with a scene designed by G. Marinari, ‘painter to the Opera,’ was prepared for it in the gardens. The idea was evidently borrowed from Torré’s Forge of Vulcan, the great attraction at the Marylebone Gardens some twenty years earlier. The scene represented Mount Etna and the Cavern of Vulcan with the ‘Cyclops’ forging the armour of Mars, “as described (the advertisements add) in the Aeneid of Virgil.” To an accompaniment of music “compiled from Gluck, Haydn, Giardini, and Handel,” we see the ‘Cyclops’ going to work. “The smoke thickens, the crater on the top of Etna vomits forth flames, and the lava rolls dreadful along the side of the mountain. This continues with increasing violence till there is a prodigious eruption, which finishes with a tremendous explosion.”
On June 27th, 1793, the Chevalier D’Eon fenced in the Rotunda with M. Sainville, and received the congratulations of the Prince of Wales and Mrs. Fitzherbert.[238]
In 1797 (April) there was an enjoyable masquerade, at which there reigned (we are told) “good nature and pleasant hilarity, without riot”: all this, in spite of a crowd of imaginary Dutch skippers, lunatics, coachmen, quack doctors and watercress girls.