Note 77 — No. 60. [Steele.[75]
Reading edition
This "lake of love" (No. 170) was a sheet of water in the south-west corner of St. James's Park, "long consecrated," as Warburton says, "to disastrous love and elegiac poetry." It is frequently mentioned in plays of the time as a place of assignation. See Pope's "Rape of the Lock":
"This the blest lover shall for Venus take, And send up vows from Rosamonda's lake."
The anxious father of an heiress, who had given him the slip, says (Spectator, No. 311), "After an hour's search she returned of herself, having been taking a walk, as she told me, by Rosamond's Pond." The pond was filled up in 1770.