In a few years the Spring Garden became well known. Fine people came thither to divert themselves and the citizen also spent his holiday there, “pulling off cherries [says Pepys] and God knows what.” The song of the birds was charming, but from about 1667 more sophisticated harmony was furnished by a harp, some fiddles, and a Jew’s trump. About this time the rude behaviour of the gallants of the town began to be noted at the Spring Garden. Gentlemen like “young Newport” and Harry Killigrew, “a rogue newly come back out of France, but still in disgrace at our Court,” would thrust themselves into the supper-arbours and almost seize on the ladies, “perhaps civil ladies,” as Pepys conjectures. “Their mad talk [he adds] did make my heart ake,” though he himself, at a later time, was found at the gardens eating and drinking with Mrs. Knipp, “it being darkish.” During the last thirty years of the seventeenth century, the Spring Garden, if less perturbed by the Killigrews and Newports, was not a little notorious as a rendezvous for fashionable gallantry and intrigue. “’Tis infallibly some intrigue that brings them to Spring Garden” says Lady Fancyful in ‘The Provoked Wife’ (1697), and Tom Brown (_Amusements_, 1700, p. 54) declares that in the close walks of the gardens “both sexes meet, and mutually serve one another as guides to lose their way, and the windings and turnings in the little Wildernesses are so intricate, that the most experienced mothers have often lost themselves in looking for their daughters.” It is not hard to picture Mrs. Frail “with a man alone” at Spring Garden; Hippolita eating a cheese-cake or a syllabub “with cousin,” and the gallant of Sedley’s ‘Bellamira’ (1687) passing off on Thisbe the fine compliments that he had already tried on “the flame-coloured Petticoat in New Spring Garden.”