Here and there in London by James Ewing Ritchie

Vauxhall is alive. At one time it was thought dead, and people affirmed the fact to be an evidence of the improved state of the metropolis. (Moralists are too prone to be thankful for small mercies.) Had the fact been so, the inference was a fallacy; but we need not trouble ourselves about that, as the fact is otherwise. It is a mistake to suppose that progress is made only in one direction. Vauxhall is associated with the fast life of centuries. It was born in the general and fearful profligacy -- the fearful price England paid for the Restoration. In 1661 Evelyn writes of it as a pretty contrived plantation. In 1665, in the diary of Pepys, we find entries of sundry visits to Fox-hall and the Spring Gardens, and "of the humours of the citizens pulling off cherries, and God knows what. " Again we are told, "to hear the nightingales and the birds, and here fiddlers, and there a harp, and here laughing, and there the people walking, is mighty diverting. " That respectable Secretary of the Admiralty also tells us of supper in an arbour, of ladies walking with their masks on, and his righteous soul was shocked to see "how rude some of the young gallants of the town are become," and "the confidence of the vice of the age. " To Vauxhall Addison took Sir Roger de Coverley, and Goldsmith the Citizen of the World, who exclaimed, "Head of Confucius, this is fine! this unites rural beauty with courtly magnificence. " Here Fielding's Amelia was enraptured with the extreme beauty and elegance of the place. Here Miss Burney gathered incidents for her once popular but now forgotten tales. And here Hogarth, for suggesting paintings, some of which still remain, was presented with a perpetual ticket of admission, and which was last used in 1836. Strange scenes have been done here.

One of them is described by Horace Walpole, who graphically narrates how Lady Caroline Petersham stewed chickens over a lamp; and how Betty, the fruit girl, supped with them at a side table. All that is past. Dust and ashes are the fine lords and fine ladies who made Vauxhall the resort of folly and fashion -- the fashion is gone, the folly remains. Yet never were there more funds subscribed for the conversion of the Jews, or more missionaries sent out to Timbuctoo.