THE LAST YEARS OF VAUXHALL GARDENS.

I was a frequent visitor at Vauxhall Gardens during the last three or four seasons they were open.

It was a dirty, dingy old place, with hardly a good feature to redeem it from rottenness and infamy.

There was some good singing now and then, both comic and sentimental; but the sentimental was seldom listened to with any very great interest or pleasure, and I am not sure that the comic element would not have fared worse, had not it been spiced with enough vulgarity to make it border on the indecent.

I remember well one of the singers at Vauxhall Gardens in its latest days, a man named Charles Sloman. He was rather small in stature, but had a very harsh, loud, bass voice, and was an old favourite with the regular frequenters of the place. Sloman had in his time written a great many songs, and a few of them had been very popular, being liked and sung because they were good, healthy ballads.

Sloman—or old Charley Sloman, as he was called —was what might be called a writer of rhyme to order. He was, besides being a professional singer, a very good improviser of rhymes. He would ask for the Christian name of any young lady, and upon the first given him he would there and then make up some twenty or thirty lines of what he was pleased to call poetry.