This passage, so vivid and fantastical in its detail, is immediately followed by a repellent image of the fair's busy "tents and booths," which are "vomiting, receiving, on all sides,/Men, women, three-years' children, babes in arms" (692, 694-695). From their association with the "monsters" of the fair, the range of humanity, specifically including its most innocent members, are described as themselves monstrous, dehumanized by their characterization, in which they are digested by the fair and expelled by "vomiting."
And rather ironically, Wordsworth's catalogue contains "albinos, painted Indians, dwarfs" (681), who are not like the "Promethean" creations he is largely emphasizing, but members of the "mankind" he is supposed to be learning to love (as in the subtitle of Book Eight of The Prelude), who are otherwise largely left out of what people often picture as making up "mankind," and who otherwise have no place in Wordsworth's verse. They are also members whose differences from the mainstream of "mankind" are dictated by nature, in having size, skin color, ethnic background different from the perceived norm. Their inclusion adds to the problematic quality of the phrase "freaks of Nature" to describe the monstrousness at the fair. Not only are these people, by virtue of their differences, lumped in with the non-human, but a larger question is raised. Whether in reference to a human being, like a giant or a dwarf, or to creatures like the "learned pig," what can it mean to be a "freak of Nature"? Are not "freaks" part of the natural order? If it is the "Love of Nature Leading to Love of Mankind," as the subtitle to Book Eight reads, how can judgment be placed upon the creations of Nature --or even more so if one were to look at them as the creations of a God--as "perverted" for the way they were naturally born to be? Wordsworth's text does not seem to notice any contradiction between "Love of Nature" and a negative judgment of "freaks of Nature," simply presenting these aberrations from the norm as monstrous, and seeming to assume we all share the same standards by which we know what is not freakish or "perverted."
From the point of view of the contemporary age, Wordsworth almost seems prophetic in this episode, as if he's viewing the birth of the kind of "society of the spectacle" that came to such prominence in the twentieth century. On the other hand, he is so over-the-top in his distaste that he seems entirely divorced from the common life of humanity, in his finding the spectacle so vile that not a single individual or aspect of experience found within the spectacle can be seen to have any value. Although the point of a fair is to be a place of entertainment, even of "misrule," in Wordsworth's description it's as if people couldn't possibly have a good time there unless they were in some way morally deficient.
The lengthy passage describing St. Bartholomew's Fair approaches its conclusion by attributing the monstrousness of the scene to a lack of individuality. Previously, what seemed to be wrong with the monsters was their singularity, since what they most had in common was being "freaks" and "far-fetched, perverted things" (689). However, Wordsworth turns this around by saying that their differences have "no law, no meaning, and no end" (704); their separate forms of individual perversity seem to dissolve into one vast freakish melange--too much strangeness becomes a sameness. With "no law" and "no meaning" (although both of these phrases are questionable, since we cannot know the criteria of judgment here, either whose law or what idea of meaning) to qualify their individuality, the separate entities blur into a generality, a "perpetual flow/Of trivial objects" (702-703).
At the end of Book Seven, Wordsworth transitions from his "infernal" picture of the city at play back to his larger themes, to contrast this chaos with the "order and relation" (730) to be derived from a meditation in which, more characteristically,
The mountain's outline and its steady form
Gives a pure grandeur, and its presence shapes
The measure and prospect of the soul
To majesty: such virtue have the forms
Perennial of the ancient hills-- (723-727)