Chelsea, too, was a very picturesque village in old days,--when the "Old Chelsea Bun-House" was a favourite resort of the Court,--when "Ranelagh" and "Vauxhall" flourished in the neighbourhood,--and when the then fashionable race of London's "jolly young watermen" for their annual badge attracted, as the Oxford and Cambridge boat-race does nowadays, crowds of spectators. Ranelagh and Vauxhall! what recollections do they not suggest of Fielding, of Richardson, of Fanny Burney! Both these places of amusement flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century; Vauxhall (earlier called "Spring Garden"), was, so to speak, the "Earl's Court," the summer resort of the day; just as "Ranelagh," with its famous "Rotunda," was the "Olympia," or winter one. Only, both the ancient pleasure resorts rejoiced in being the centre of fashion, which can hardly be said with truth of the modern ones. Also, from old novelists the reader gathers that it was very dangerous for young ladies to go unprotected to either place, in case of being run away with by bold, bad young men of the "Lovelace" type. Charming young ladies are, perhaps, more of "a drug in the market" now: and they are besides, as a rule, perfectly well able to take care of themselves. That managers of those days were not more ignorant than their twentieth-century successors of the great art of advertising,--the following extract (from Rogers's _Table Talk_) shows: "The proprietors of Ranelagh and Vauxhall used to send decoy-ducks among the ladies and gentlemen who were walking in the Mall, that is, persons attired in the height of fashion, who every now and then would exclaim in a very audible tone, 'What charming weather for Ranelagh,' or 'for Vauxhall!'" At any rate, old Vauxhall Gardens must have been a charming place for flirtation, for "the windings and turnings in little wildernesses (were) so intricate, that the most experienced mothers often lost themselves in looking for their daughters." Part of the site of old Ranelagh is now appropriated as the gardens of Chelsea Hospital; the site of Vauxhall (in South Lambeth, on the Surrey side) is now covered by St. Peter's, Vauxhall, and its adjacent streets.