Vauxhall is a composition of baubles, overcharged with paltry
ornaments, ill conceived, and poorly executed; without any unity
of design, or propriety of disposition. It is an unnatural
assembly of objects, fantastically illuminated in broken masses;
seemingly contrived to dazzle the eyes and divert the imagination
of the vulgar -- Here a wooden lion, there a stone statue; in one
place, a range of things like coffeehouse boxes, covered a-top;
in another, a parcel of ale-house benches; in a third, a puppet-show
representation of a tin cascade; in a fourth, a gloomy cave
of a circular form, like a sepulchral vault half lighted; in a
fifth, a scanty flip of grass-plat, that would not afford pasture
sufficient for an ass's colt. The walks, which nature seems to
have intended for solitude, shade, and silence, are filled with
crowds of noisy people, sucking up the nocturnal rheums of an
aguish climate; and through these gay scenes, a few lamps glimmer
like so many farthing candles.
When I see a number of well dressed people, of both sexes,
sitting on the covered benches, exposed to the eyes of the mob;
and, which is worse, to the cold, raw, night-air, devouring
sliced beef, and swilling port, and punch, and cyder, I can't
help compassionating their temerity; white I despise their want
of taste and decorum; but, when they course along those damp and
gloomy walks, or crowd together upon the wet gravel, without any
other cover than the cope of Heaven, listening to a song, which
one half of them cannot possibly hear, how can I help supposing
they are actually possessed by a spirit, more absurd and
pernicious than any thing we meet with in the precincts of
Bedlam? In all probability, the proprietors of this, and other
public gardens of inferior note, in the skirts of the metropolis,
are, in some shape, connected with the faculty of physic, and the
company of undertakers; for, considering that eagerness in the
pursuit of what is called pleasure, which now predominates
through every rank and denomination of life, I am persuaded that
more gouts, rheumatisms, catarrhs, and consumptions are caught in
these nocturnal pastimes, sub dio, than from all the risques and
accidents to which a life of toil and danger is exposed.
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