ait-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 lo