1737-1783.] RANELAGH-VAUXHALL. 97 nation of the building; the music; the cheap refreshments (half-a-crown entrance included tea, coffee, or punch); the opportunity of looking upon lords with stars and ladies with hoops,-these attractions drew a motley group to Ranelagh, who were either genteel or affected gentility. The landlady of the Prussian clergyman, a tailor's widow, told him that she always fixed on one day of the year in which, without fail, she hired a coach and drove to Ranelagh. Johnson moralises upon this scene: "When I first entered Ranelagh it gave an expansion and gay sensation to my mind, such as I never experienced anywhere else. But, as Xerxes wept when he viewed his immense army, and considered that not one of that great multitude would be alive a hundred years afterwards, so it went to my heart to consider that there was not one in all that brilliant circle that was not afraid to go home and think."+ Vauxhall was cheaper than Ranelagh in its price of admission, but far more costly in its refreshments. The citizen takes his wife and two daughters to the garden; grumbles over a chicken, no bigger than a partridge, which costs half-a-crown, and vows that the ham is a shilling an ounce. As he leaves the lamp-lit walks, he moralises also: "It would not have cost me above fourpence-halfpenny to have spent my evening at Sot's Hole; and what with the coach-hire, and all together, here's almost a pound. gone, and nothing to show for it." There was a great deal of good com * Moritz, "Travels through England." Connoisseur, No. 68. Boswell, 1777. VOL VII. H 98 RANELAGH-VAUXHALL-THE PANTHEON. [1737-1783. pany indeed, declared the citizen's wife, though the gentlemen were so rude as to stare at her through their spy-glasses. Lady Caroline Petersham, "looking gloriously jolly and handsome," goes to Vauxhall with a large party, of which were lord Granby, "very drunk," and Horace Walpole, and Harry Vane. Lady Caroline minced seven chickens in a china dish, and stewed them over a lamp; and Betty the fruit-girl brought her strawberries and cherries, and supped by them at a little table. "The whole air of our party was sufficient to take up the whole attention of the gardens; so much so, that from eleven o'clock till half an hour after one, we had the whole concourse round our booth," and Harry Vane took up a bumper and drank their healths. Mr. and Mrs. Tibbs were humble imitators of lady Caroline Petersham and Harry Vane. They " would sit in none but a genteel box; a box where they might see and be seen." The Pantheon was opened in 1772-"a new winter Ranelagh in Oxford Road." Dr. Campbell was there in 1775, and saw "the duke of Cumberland and lady Grosvenor, a fine woman, lost to all sense of modesty ;" and "lady Archer, painted like a doll, whose feathers nodded like the plumes of Mambrino's helmet; and some still more disreputable ladies who had longer peacock feathers. Such was the mixed society of the public places of London, before the people of quality grew more exclusive, and set up coteries in which profligacy could be screened from vulgar eyes. It has been said, "The Stage, at this period (1774), was either a school of immorality, or a vehicle of slander."§ We venture to think that the Stage, at this period, was singularly untainted with the grosser vices of society; and that what is termed its slander was a fearless expression of contempt for crimes and follies which even the pulpit suffered to flourish in their rankness. Looking candidly at the time when Wycherley, Vanbrugh, Walpole to Montague, June 23, 1750. "Diary," p. 47. § Massey-"History of England during the reign of George III.," vol. ii. p. 220. 1737-1783.] THE THEATRE. 99 Congreve, Farquhar, and Mrs. Centlivre, had been succeeded, as the popular dramatists, by Goldsmith, Colman, Cumberland, Murphy, Sheridan, and Mrs. Cowley, it can scarcely be denied that the theatre was, comparatively, a school of purity. Blemishes of course there were. It was still too much the fashion to assign the virtues of truth and sincerity to the dissipated, and the vices of hypocrisy and meanness to the decorous. Situations and expressions that would not now be tolerated were presented and uttered without offence. But there was no systematic endeavour to make licentiousness the foundation and corner-stone of wit. The chief complaint against the stage of that time was, that "the most popular plays and farces, if they were not founded on the scandal of the day, contained pointed allusions to the gossip of political and fashionable society, and persons conspicuous in either." * Political and fashionable society had scarcely a right to complain of the scandal, when it was so little careful of its own reputation. We may well believe that the personalities of Foote, objectionable as a system of personal satire always must be, kept many of the fashionable in awe of ridicule, who held in scorn the disapprobation of the classes below them in rank; and somewhat abated the imitative ambition of many of the rich pretenders to distinction of the middle classes, who esteemed their fellows only in the proportion of their wealth.t The Theatre, under the management of Garrick, directed, however imperfectly, the course of public taste. He did, what Betterton had done before him, he gave Shakspere an extended popularity by his wonderful power as an actor. But it was amongst the exaggerations of that flattery which had attended Garrick when living, and followed him in death, to pretend that the actor had given new life to the poet; that Garrick and Shakspere were for ever to shine as "twin stars." There had been thirteen editions of Shakspere's Plays when it was pretended that they were sunk to death and lay in * Massey-vol. ii. p. 220. The masterly essay of Mr. Forster on "Samuel Foote," amply refutes the notion that he was a mere mimic who caricatured peculiarities of manner, and an unprincipled lampooner who sold his forbearance. 100 * THE THEATRE-GARRICK. [1737-1783. night; of which nine editions had appeared in the preceding forty years. Garrick did also what Tate had done before him. He mangled Shakspère, giving improved versions of Romeo and Juliet, the Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, the Taming of the Shrew, the Winter's Tale, Cymbeline, and Hamlet. He patched the mammock'd plays with tawdry rags, in the "design to adapt them to the present taste of the public." + His conception of Shakspere was as imperfect as his notion of the costume in which Shakspere's characters should be presented. But Garrick unquestionably made the people understand the true and the natural in dramatic art, as opposed to the pomposity and the exaggeration of the actors whom he supplanted. Garrick, according to the critical Mr. Partridge, did nothing in Hamlet beyond what any man would do in similar circumstances: "I am sure if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did." The king, who spoke "half as loud again," was the actor for Partridge's money. The town had sense enough to confirm the verdict of Churchill, in the "Rosciad," of "Garrick, take the chair." The Bath of the middle of the last century is familiar to all readers of the light literature of that period. The city, early in the reign of Anne, began to be frequented by people of fashion; but the nobility refused to associate with the gentry at any public entertainments. Gentlemen came to the balls in boots, and ladies in aprons. A dictator arose in the person of Mr. Richard Nash, who was elected Master of the Ceremonies, and presided over the company who assembled in a booth to dance and game.§ During a reign of many years this king of Bath had got his unruly subjects into tolerable * Epitaph on Garrick in Westminster Abbey: "Though sunk to death the forms the Poet drew, "Biographica Dramatica." § Goldsmith-"Life of Nash." 1737-1783.] order. BATH.-GAMING-TABLES. He had compelled the squires to put off their boots when they came to the balls, and the ladies to forego their aprons. His dominions were the resort of all the sharpers and dupes in the land, when the London season was over. Every game of chance was here played without restraint, and Nash had his full share of the spoil of the unwary. At Tunbridge he established a colony; and, like a great monarch, he often travelled there in state to receive the homage of his subjects, drawn in a post-chariot by six grays, with out-riders, footmen, and French borns. All went merrily till a cruel legislature passed an Act to declare Basset and Hazard and all other games of chance illegal. The statute was evaded; and an amended law was next year passed, to declare all games with one die or more, or with any instrument with numbers thereon, to be illicit. The law-makers did not foresee that an instrument with letters thereon might be as effectual; and the wellknown game of E. O. was invented, and first set up at Tunbridge. Nash brought the game to Bath, not to offend the decorum of the Assembly-Room, but to be carried on snugly in private houses, to which Nash introduced those who had money to lose, confederating with the E. O. table-keepers for a share of their profits. This answered for some time, until another statute effectually put down all gaming-houses and gaming-tables, as far as law could accomplish their suppression. There was no resource for the persecuted people of quality but to establish private clubs. |