On the west side was the circus; the theatre was in the south of the garden. A smaller theatre, north of the lawn, was appropriated to a troupe of marionettes, introduced by Simpson in 1852. They were great favourites of the public and of the proprietor, who liked ‘the little beggars who never came to the treasury on Saturday.’ Besides this, there was a maze and (as Vauxhall had its hermit) a gipsy’s tent and a ‘double-sighted youth.’ The admission to the gardens was one shilling, and the season tickets cost one guinea or two guineas. Simpson’s management (_i.e._, till 1861) provided some special diversions, of which the most curious, perhaps, was an Aquatic Tournament or Naval Fête (1851). About eleven at night a fortress (either St. Jean d’Acre or Gibraltar) on the river esplanade was vigorously attacked by a squadron consisting of fourteen steamers of the Citizen Company (whose ‘entire fleet’ was embarked in the enterprise), seconded by the hull of a retired Citizen steamer, which was laden with combustibles. To this attack the land battery—its necessary smoke, fire, and noise supplied by Mortram and Duffell, the Cremorne fireworkers—made a suitable reply, and eventually the old hull was blown to pieces amid the cheers of the spectators. The Italian Salamander, ‘Cristoforo Buono Core,’ was, later on, in 1858, another attraction of a fiery kind. Like Chabert, the more famous Salamander of 1826, {8a} this man entered a burning furnace with apparent unconcern, and (as he informed an inquisitive spectator) ‘titt as fell as he cott,’ though the performance made him very ‘dursty.’ In contrast to these popular shows, the manager on Friday, July 9, 1858, gave an ‘Aristocratic Fête,’ arranged by a committee of gentlemen assisted by lady patronesses, who are said to have been very chary of issuing tickets to other ladies whom the gentlemen proposed to invite. But the invitations mattered little, for the 9th turned out to be one of the wettest days of an English July, and the aristocratic ambitions of Cremorne were damped down for ever. {8b} In the balloon ascents of Cremorne (as already remarked) there was often a dangerous element, usually a parachute descent. Without dwelling on the ascents of balloonists like Lieutenant Gale and the celebrated Charles Green, who made his three hundredth and sixty-fifth voyage (of course including his ascents at Vauxhall and many other places) on August 2, 1847, we can notice only the Bouthellier, Poitevin, and Latour performances.