Under Tyers’s management the concert began at five or six and lasted till nine or ten. It consisted of sixteen pieces, songs alternating with sonatas and concertos. An overture on the organ, always formed part of the entertainment. Not much is known of the instrumental music, for the Vauxhall advertisements, until late in the eighteenth century, never gave the details of the programme. Arne, and Dr. John Worgan, (the Vauxhall organist) were the composers during this period. Valentine Snow, serjeant-trumpeter to the king, was a favourite about 1745, and Burney remarks that “his silver sounds in the open air, by having room to expand, never arrived at the ears of the audience in a manner too powerful or piercing.” The songs consisted chiefly of sentimental ballads, and of a few more sprightly ditties, such as Miss Stevenson’s song “You tell me I’m handsome”:-- All this has been told me by twenty before, But he that would win me must flatter me more. The verse is highly conventional, but sometimes shows a glimmering of poetic form that raises it somewhat above the level of our own drawing-room ballads. The average Vauxhall song seems to our ears sufficiently thin and trivial, but on the lips of Lowe or Mrs. Weichsell, may easily have been successful. Of the popularity of the songs at the time, there can be no question. The magazines, especially _The London Magazine_, regularly published the words, and often the music, of “A new song sung at Vauxhall,” and the contemporary collections of Vauxhall songs, such as _The Warbler_ published at a shilling in 1756, were numerous. In the period 1745–1767, when the singers were few in number, the chief male vocalist was Thomas Lowe, who possessed an inexhaustible répertoire of Delias and Strephons which he sang with great applause from 1745 till about 1763, when he entered on the management of the Marylebone Gardens.[337] Mrs. Arne sang for a few years from 1745, and Miss Stevenson frequently _circ._ 1748–1758. Miss Isabella Burchell, better known as the Mrs. Vincent of Marylebone Gardens, sang at Vauxhall from 1751 to 1760. She was originally a milk-girl employed on Tyers’s estate in Surrey, and it was through his instrumentality that she obtained instruction in music. In 1764, the chief singers were Vernon and Miss Brent, who belong rather to our next period. Miss Wright’s “Thro’ the wood, laddie,” was popular in 1765. [Illustration] Jonathan Tyers died on 1 July, 1767. He had amassed a large fortune and owned the estate of Denbies at Dorking, where he laid out a curious garden containing a hermitage, called the Temple of Death, and a gloomy valley of the Shadow of Death. In spite of these lugubrious surroundings this “Master-builder of Delight” retained his love for Vauxhall till the last, and shortly before his death had himself carried into the Grove to take a parting look at the Spring Gardens.