_August 20, 1800._ _Summer Amusement; or, a Game at Bowls._ Published by T. Rowlandson, 1 James's Street, Adelphi.--It has been a custom immemorial to laugh at the exertions which were made by our ancestors to obtain rational open-air recreation. The fashionable part of society have, for once, found congenial allies in the wits. The papers which doubtless obtained the most popular reception in their day, since they laughed at the simple citizens 'on pleasure bent,' and held up their relaxations to a ridicule which was often neither subtle nor polished, were the essays in the _Spectator_, _Tatler_, _Guardian_, _Humourist_, _&c._, which made fun of the countrified loungings of the Londoners. The squibs, in the shape of poetical broadsheets and songs of the Stuart era, against sylvan aspirations, were but re-echoed by the bright and cultivated humourists who flourished when 'Anna ruled the realm.' Sturdy Hogarth, with his pictures, brought the commonplace pleasures--although he was addicted to them with no half-spirit himself--of his neighbours into ludicrous prominence. The _Connoisseur_, _World_, _Mirror_, _Adventurer_, _Observer_, _Lounger_, _Looker-on_, and even Johnson's _Rambler_, are particularly caustic on the comic side of humanity, as seen in their out-of-door pastimes. As to the days of transition, when the early Georgian generation was being rapidly submerged and effaced by the tide of progression, both writers and caricaturists combined to satirise cockney jauntings unmercifully. Gillray, Rowlandson, Collings, Boyle, Bunbury, Deighton, Woodward, Nixon, Newton, and a swarm of amateur followers, were always ready to make fun of suburban excursions; such productions were certain to obtain fame for the designers, and a ready patronage at the hands of a public which encouraged similar everyday irony. It seems, however, now the suburbs have disappeared, where tea-gardens were once abundant--to which, armed with lanterns and in groups, for better security against the knights of the road, footpads, and similar dangers which were then rife, our forefathers repaired with light hearts, released from the culture of Mammon and money-grubbing--that we have lost a great deal which modern improvements are powerless to restore. A little generation back there were still relics of past pleasure haunts, a Sluice House, a Hornsey Wood House, and numberless similar resorts for the dwellers in Babylon, who sighed to turn, for a brief afternoon of diversion, their respectable backs on groves of brick, and to regale their pastoral-longing eyes with a semblance of the country. Now the monster metropolis, with unsparing strides, has finally absorbed such patches of verdure, as made homely retreats on red-letter holidays; and life is considerably restricted, as regards the variety which an hour's jaunt could introduce into the prosaic current of yearly existence, as far as the boundaries of the giant city are concerned.