The million-peopled city
Garwood, John
1853
These Gardens were the former famed Ranelagh.
It is a circumstance also not to be passed over without a thought, that these very gardens now so devoted were the celebrated -the resort of fashion, gaiety, and wit- in the last century. Not more remarkable is the change in the gardens than in the Hospital itself; when it became a college of peace to soldiers after the use of the material sword, instead of a college for polemic warfare to divines. To these gardens resorted the gay world of the eighteenth century for dancing and music, and too frequently for display of person and dress, and, it is to be feared, in many cases for still worse purposes of folly and sin. Here, appropriately enough, Fielding makes his " Amelia" to have been ruined, and here "The Connoisseur," among our essayists, and among our poets, found subjects for their satire. Nature and art combining their powers here caused to represent the spot as " presenting the finest coup d'oeil he had ever seen." But the purposes to which is now devoted, to the benevolent mind presents still more attractive features of beauty, although the elegant and the young from high life have given place to the aged and the sturdy pensioner from the ranks of privates. | |