QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE SECOND: WOMANHOOD.

CHAPTER XLV. HIGH SCHOOL OF HORSEMANSHIP.

RANELAGH! Ranelagh! Are you quite sure?
Ranelagh? Is the word no misprint, no clerical
error? I think I hear the judicious critic ask
this question as he reads the last chapter of this
story, scratching his ear meanwhile. Then, he
may haply fling the book by, altogether.
Ranelagh! Come, this exceeds human patience.
Had I said White Conduit House, that might
have been barely tolerable. But Ranelagh! Why,
that was a place whither Horace Walpole went
when he was a beau, and the Miss Gunnings
when they were belles. It was altogether an
eighteenth-century place, devoted to periwigs,
hoops, powder, patches, brocaded sacks, clocked
hose, high-heeled shoes, fans, small-swords,
cocked-hats, and clouded canes. Our great-
grandmothers went to Ranelagh in sedan-chairs,
and attended by little black boys. A certain
Mrs. Amelia Booth (wife of a captain in a
marching regiment, and known to a certain Mr.
Henry Fielding) supped there one night, more
than a hundred years ago, in company with a
clerical gentleman who had a few words during
the evening with a British nobleman.

To which I reply that I know what I am
about, and that there is reason in the roasting of
eggs. The place of amusement to which the
Pilgrims repaired, after dining so well in Park-
lane, shall be Ranelagh, if you please. This is
an age in which the exercise of some discretion
in literature is necessary. Your contemporaries
will forgive everything but the naming of names.
You may write and say the thing which is not;
but beware of giving utterance to that which
is. You know that the Memoirs of the candid
Talleyrand are not to be published until full
thirty years have elapsed from the period of his
lamented death. Some few of the contemporaries
of Charles Maurice, who might be
compromised, are still alive; and the candid
creature could be discreet, even in the tomb. For
a similar reason, the place I have in my eye shall
be Ranelagh. There are numbers of ladies and
gentlemen still extant, and flourishing like green
bay-trees, who have heard the chimes at midnight
in Ranelagh's leafy orchards, and have occasionally
taken slightly more lobster-salad than was
good for them in those recesses. So, let the
place I have in my eye be Ranelagh; though,
if you choose to get a private Act of Parliament,
or the Royal Permission, or a License
from the Heralds' College, or to exercise your
own sweet will, there is nothing to prevent
your calling it Tivoli, or Marylebone, or Spring
Gardens.

Besides, did not a gentleman, a few pages
since, make the profoundly philosophical, if not
entirely original remark, that there was a river
in Macedon and a river in Monmouth. How
many Ptolemys were there? There may have
been Ranelaghs and Ranelaghs. All were not
necessarily patronised by Horace Walpole and
the Misses Gunning. Is there not a London
in Middlesex, and a London in Canada? A
Boulogne in the department of the Seine, and
a Boulogne in the department of the Pas de
Calais? An Aix in Savoy, an Aix in Provence,
and an Aix in Rhenish Prussia? An Alexandria
in the land of Egypt, and an Alexandria in the
state of Virginia?

At all events, all the Ranelaghs are gone by
this time—your Ranelagh and my Ranelagh.
Yes; thepleasant place is departed. The fifty
thousand additional lamps are fled, and the
garlands of flowers, real and artificial, are dead. The
plaster statues have reverted to dust and their
primitive gypsum; the trees have been cut
down; their very roots grubbed up. Bricks
and mortar invade the once verdant expanse of
the Ramilies ground. No more balloons ascend
from that Campus Martius. There are wine-
cellars where once the lake was; pantries and
sculleries where once the panorama of Moscow
raised its cupolas of painted canvas, profusely
festooned with squibs and crackers, to the starlit
sky. Pulled down, laid waste; and laid out
again: such has been the fate of Ranelagh. Its
present desolation of hods, scaffold-poles, and
places where rubbish may be shot, seems even
more dreadful than would be utter solitude and
silence. Somebody Else—that ruthless and im-
movable Somebody Else—has got hold of
Ranelagh, and turned it to other uses. May it,
under its new aspect, be profitable to Somebody!
It is certain that Ranelagh, as Ranelagh, never
did pay Anybody.

Is it necessary to shed a few sympathetic
tears over the parterres, the fountains, the
umbrageous alleys, the labyrinths and grottos,
the supper-arbours, the long ball-room—over