At this distance, however, the fêtes, frolics, fire-works and all the fashionable frivolity of the place look bright and bewildering. Nor did grave and reverend men disdain to spend their evenings at Ranelagh—“to give expansion and gay sensation to the mind,” as staid old Dr. Johnson asserted! Goldsmith felt its gaiety, when he came here to forget the misery of his lodging in Green Arbour Court, where now stands the Holborn Viaduct station. Laurence Sterne, fresh to the town from his Yorkshire parsonage, finding himself in great vogue—his portrait much stared at, in Spring Gardens, one of the four sent there, selected by Sir Joshua as his choicest works—plunged forthwith into all sorts of frivolities, and was seen in Ranelagh more often than was considered seemly. Smollett sometimes emerged from out his Chelsea solitude for a sight of this festive world; Fielding came here to study the scenes for his “Amelia”; and Addison, too, who chats about the place in his _Spectator_. {80} It is spoken of in the _Connoisseur_ and the _Citizen of the World_; the poet Bloomfield introduced it, and Fanny Burney placed here a scene in her “Evelina.” At this time—just one hundred years ago—she was a little past twenty-six, and was living with her father, Dr. Burney, recently made organist of the hospital chapel, next door. Ranelagh had then begun to “decline and fall off,” in Silas Wegg’s immortal phrase: having been open since 1742, it was finally closed at the beginning of this century, its artificial oil-moon paling before the rising radiance of gas-lighted new Cremorne. * * * * *