s before me; I fancied I could still
hear an air of Mara's; I turned my eye aside, and what a contrast
appeared!--No glittering lights!--No brilliant happy company!--No
peals of laughter from thronged boxes!--No chorus of a hundred
instruments and voices!--All was death-like stillness! Is such, I
exclaimed, the end of human splendour?--Yes, truly, all is vanity--and
here is a striking example!--Here are ruins and desolation, even
without antiquity! I am not mourning said I, over the remains of
Babylon or Carthage--ruins sanctioned by the unsparing march of
time!--But here it was all glory and splendour, even yesterday! Here,
but seven years have flown away, and I was myself one of three
thousand of the gayest mortals ever assembled, in one of the gayest
scenes which the art of man could devise--aye, on this very spot--yet
the whole is now changed into the dismal scene of desolation before
me!--Full of such reflections, I cast my eyes eastward, when
Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Church presented themselves in a
continued line--Ah! thought I, that line may at some distant epoch
enable the curious antiquary to determine the scite of our British
Daphne; but I could not avoid feeling, that if the pile of Ranelagh
and its glories have so totally disappeared, in so short a season, no
human work, even yonder colossal specimens of Gothic and Grecian art,
or the great Metropolis itself, can be deemed a standard of locality
for the guide of distant ages! I moved pensively from a spot which
exciting such solemn and affecting emotions, had diminished the vigour
of my frame by exhausting my nervous energies.

I soon turned the corner of a street which took me out of sight of the
space on which once stood the gay Ranelagh; but it will be long ere I
can remove from my heart the poignant sensations to which its sudden
destruction had given rise.[1]

[1] I afterwards learnt in Chelsea, that, latterly, Ranelagh
did not pay the proprietors five per cent. for their
capital, and therefore they sold the materials to the best
bidder.

Before me appeared the shops so famed for _Chelsea buns_, which, for
above thirty years, I have never passed without filling my pockets. In
the original of these shops, for even of Chelsea buns there are
counterfeits, are preserved mementos of domestic events, in the first
half of the past century. The bottle-conjuror is exhibited in a toy of
his own age; portraits are also disp