Letter 59.—­It is a little astonishing to read, as one does in this and the last letter, of race meetings, and Dorothy, habited in a mask, disporting herself at New Spring Gardens or in the Park.  It opens one’s eyes to the exaggerated gloom that has been thrown over England during the Puritan reign by those historians who have derived their information solely from State papers and proclamations.  It is one thing to proclaim amusements, another to abolish them.  The first was undoubtedly done, but we doubt if there was ever any long-continued effort to do the last; and in the latter part of Cromwell’s reign the gloom, and the strait-laced regulations that caused it, must have almost entirely disappeared.

Spring Gardens seems at one time to have had no very good reputation.  Lady Alice Halkett, writing in 1644, tells us that “so scrupulous was I of giving any occasion to speak of me as I know they did of others, that though I loved well to see plays, and to walk in the Spring Gardens sometimes (before it grew something scandalous by the abuses of some), yet I cannot remember three times that ever I went with any man besides my brother.”  However, fashions change in ten years, and Spring Gardens is, doubtless, now quite demure and respectable, or we should not find Dorothy there.  Spring Gardens was enclosed and laid out towards the end of the reign of James I. The clump of houses which still bears its name is supposed to indicate its position with tolerable exactness.  Evelyn tells us that Cromwell shut up the Spring Gardens in 1600, and Knight thinks they were closed until the Restoration, in which small matter we may allow Dorothy to correct him.  The fact of the old gardens having been closed may account for Dorothy referring to the place as “New Spring Gardens.”  Knight also quotes at second hand from an account of Spring Gardens, complaining that the author is unknown to him.  This quotation is, however, from one of Somers’ Tracts entitled “A Character of England as it was lately represented in a Letter to a Nobleman of France, 1659.”  The Frenchman by whom the letter is written—­probably an English satirist in disguise—­gives us such a graphic account of the Parks before the Restoration, that as the matter is fresh and bears upon the subject, I have no hesitation in quoting it at length:—­

“I did frequently in the spring accompany my Lord N. into a field near the town which they call Hyde Park,—­the place not unpleasant, and which they use as our ‘Course,’ but with nothing that order, equipage, and splendour; being such an assembly of wretched jades and hackney coaches, as, next to a regiment of car-men, there is nothing approaches the resemblance.  The Park was, it seems, used by the late King and nobility for the freshness of the air and the goodly prospect, but it is that which now (besides all other exercises) they pay for here in England, though it be free in all the world beside; every coach and horse which enters buying his mouthful and permission of the publican who has purchased it, for which the entrance is guarded with porters and long staves.