Ranelagh and Vauxhall were places of frivolous amusement resorted to even by the higher classes. From these and other haunts of folly, lumbering coaches or sedan chairs conveyed home the ladies through the dimly lighted or pitch dark streets, and the gentlemen picked their way over the ruggedly paved thoroughfares, glad of the proffered aid of the link boys, who crowded round the gates of such places of public entertainment or resort as were open at night, and who, arrived at the door to which they had escorted some fashionable foot passenger, quenched the blazing torch in the trumpet-looking ornament, which one now and then still sees lingering over the entrance to some house in an antiquated square or court, a characteristic relic of London in the olden time. A walk along some of the more quiet and retired streets at the west end of the metropolis, which were scenes of fashion and gayety a hundred years ago, awaken in the mind, when it is in certain moods, trains of solemn and healthful reflection. We think of the generations that once, with light or heavy hearts, passed and repassed along those ways, too many of them, we fear, however burdened with earthly solicitudes, sadly heedless of the high interests of the everlasting future. Led away by the splendid attractions of this world, its wealth, power, praise, or pleasure, they too surely found at last that what they followed so eagerly, and thought so delightful, was only a delusion, like the gorgeous mirage of the desert. Some few years hence, and we shall have ourselves gone the way of all the earth. Other feet will tread the pavement, and other eyes drink in the light, and look upon the works and ways of fellow-mortals; and other minds will call up recollections of the past, and moralize with sombre hues of feeling as we do now; and where then will the reader be? It is no impertinent suggestion in a work like this, that he should make that grave inquiry--nor pause till, in the light which illumines the world to come, he has duly considered all the materials he possesses for supplying a probable answer. CHAPTER VII. LONDON DURING THE LATTER HALF OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.