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s before me; I fancied I could still hear an air of Mara's; I turned my eye aside, and what a contrast appeared!--No glittering lights!--No brilliant happy company!--No peals of laughter from thronged boxes!--No chorus of a hundred instruments and voices!--All was death-like stillness! Is such, I exclaimed, the end of human splendour?--Yes, truly, all is vanity--and here is a striking example!--Here are ruins and desolation, even without antiquity! I am not mourning said I, over the remains of Babylon or Carthage--ruins sanctioned by the unsparing march of time!--But here it was all glory and splendour, even yesterday! Here, but seven years have flown away, and I was myself one of three thousand of the gayest mortals ever assembled, in one of the gayest scenes which the art of man could devise--aye, on this very spot--yet the whole is now changed into the dismal scene of desolation before me!--Full of such reflections, I cast my eyes eastward, when Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Church presented themselves in a continued line--Ah! thought I, that line may at some distant epoch enable the curious antiquary to determine the scite of our British Daphne; but I could not avoid feeling, that if the pile of Ranelagh and its glories have so totally disappeared, in so short a season, no human work, even yonder colossal specimens of Gothic and Grecian art, or the great Metropolis itself, can be deemed a standard of locality for the guide of distant ages! I moved pensively from a spot which exciting such solemn and affecting emotions, had diminished the vigour of my frame by exhausting my nervous energies. I soon turned the corner of a street which took me out of sight of the space on which once stood the gay Ranelagh; but it will be long ere I can remove from my heart the poignant sensations to which its sudden destruction had given rise.[1] [1] I afterwards learnt in Chelsea, that, latterly, Ranelagh did not pay the proprietors five per cent. for their capital, and therefore they sold the materials to the best bidder. Before me appeared the shops so famed for _Chelsea buns_, which, for above thirty years, I have never passed without filling my pockets. In the original of these shops, for even of Chelsea buns there are counterfeits, are preserved mementos of domestic events, in the first half of the past century. The bottle-conjuror is exhibited in a toy of his own age; portraits are also disp
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