Chapter 3

GREAT PULTENEY STREET

of the Americans, not as cousins, but as brothers and sisters; and I began to be sorry for all the unkind things I had said of the English, and mutely to pray that she might never see them, however just they were. She had been in America, as well as most other parts of the world, and we tried hard for some mutual acquaintance. Our failure did not matter; we were friends for that trip and train at least, and when we came to Bristol, where our own party was to change, we were fain to run away from our tea in the restaurant to take the hand held out to us from the window of her parting train.

It was very pretty, and we said, If the English were all going to be like that! I do not say that they actually were, and I do not say they were not; but no after-experience could affect the quality of that charming incident, and all the way from Bristol to Bath we turned again and again from the landscape, that lay soaking in the rains of the year before, and celebrated our good-fortune. We were still in its glamour when our train drew into Bath; and in our wish to be pleased with everything in the world to which it rapt us, we were delighted with the fitness of the fact that the largest buildings near the station should be, as their signs proclaimed, corset-manufactories. We read afterwards that corset-making was, with the quarrying of the Bath building-stone, the chief business interest of the place, as such a polite industry should be in a city which was for so long the capital of fashion. Our pleasure in it was only less than our joy in finding that our hotel was in Pulteney Street, where the Allens of “Northanger Abbey” had their apartment, and where Catherine Morland had so often come and gone with the Tilneys and the Thorpes, and round the farthest cornerof which the dear, the divine, the only Jane Austen herself had lived for two years in one of the large, demure, self-respectful mansions of the neighborhood.

Our hotel scarcely distinguished, and it did not at all detach itself from the rank of these handsome dwellings; and everything in our happy circumstance began at once to breathe that air of gentle association which kept Bath for a fortnight the Bath of our dreams. There was a belief with one of us that he had come to drink the waters, but an early consultation with possibly the most lenient of the medical authorities of the place, who make the doctors of German springs seem such tyrannous martinets, disabused him. Since he had brought no rheumatism to Bath, his physician owned there was a chance of his taking some away; but in the mean time he might go once a day to the Pump Room, for a glass of the water lukewarm, and be a little careful of his diet. A little careful of his diet, he who had been furiously warned on his peril at Carlsbad that everything which was not allowed was forbidden! But he found that the Bath medical men said the same thing to the patients whom he saw around him, at the hotel, doubled up with rheumatism, and eating and drinking whatever their stiffened joints could carry to their mouths. All the greater was the miraculous virtue of the waters, for the sufferers seemed to make rapid recovery in spite of themselves and their doctors. There were no lepers among them, and since Prince Bladud’s day few are noted as having resorted to Bath; but there is rheumatism enough in England to make up the defect of leprosy, and the American, who had come with only a mild dyspepsia, found himself quite out of the running, or limping, with his fellow-invalids.

He had apparently not even brought an Americanaccent with his malady, and that was a disappointment to one of the worst sufferers, who constantly assured him, in a Scotch burr so thick that he had to be begged to speak twice before he could be understood, that he was the only American without a twang whom he had ever met. The twangless dyspeptic wished at times to pretend that he was only twangless in British company, and that when his party went to their rooms they talked violently through their noses till they were out of breath, as a slight compensation for their self-denial in society. But, upon the whole, the Scotch gentleman was so kind and sweet a soul, and seemed, for all his disappointment, to value the American so much as a phenomenon that he forebore, and in the end he was not sorry.

He would have been sorry to have put himself at odds with any of the pleasant people at that hotel, who seemed to regard their being thrown together as a circumstance that justified their speaking to one another much more than the wont is in American hotels. They were more conversible even than those at the Plymouth hotel; the very women talked to other women without fear; and the Americans, if they had been nationally vainer than they were, might have fancied a specially hospitable consideration of their case. In hotels of that agreeable type there is, besides the more formal drawing-room, a place called the lounge, where there are writing-desks and stationery, and a large table covered with the day’s papers, and a comfortable fire (or, at least, the most comfortable in the house) burning in the grate; and here people drop in before breakfast and after dinner, and chat or read or write, as they please. It is all very amiably informal and uncommitting, and in our Bath hotel there were only two or three kept ata distance in which they were not molested. There was all the while a great nobleman in the house who was apparently never seen even by those superior people. He came, sojourned, and departed in as much secrecy as a great millionaire would at home, and I could not honestly say that he psychologically affected the others any more than the presence of a great millionaire would have affected the same number of Americans. Perhaps they were less excited, being more used to being avoided by great noblemen in the course of many generations. What I know is that they were very friendly and intelligent, and, if their talk began and ended with the weather, there was plenty of weather to talk about.

There was almost as much weather and as various as the forms of cabbage at dinner, which here first began to get in their work on the imagination, if not the digestion. Whatever else there was of vegetable fibre, there was always some form of cabbage, either cabbage in its simple and primitive shape, or in different phases of cauliflower, brussels sprouts, broccoli, or kale. It was difficult to escape it, for there was commonly nothing else but potatoes. But one night there came a dish of long, white stems, delicately tipped with red, and looking like celery that had grown near rhubarb. We recognized it as something we had admired, longingly, ignorantly, at the green-grocers’, and we eagerly helped ourselves. What was it? we had asked; and before the waiter could answer that it was sea-kale we had fallen a prey to something that of the whole cabbage family was the most intensely, the most passionately cabbage.

Apart from the prevalence of this family, the table was very good and well-imagined, as I should like to say once for all of the table at every English hotel of our experience. Occasionally the ideal was vitiated by anattempted conformity to the raw American appetite, as it arrived unassorted and ravenous from the steamers. In a moist cold that pierced to the marrow you were offered ice-water, and sometimes the “sweets” included an ice-cream of the circumference and thickness of a dollar, which had apparently been put into the English air to freeze, but had only felt its well-known relaxing effect. One drinks, of course, a great deal of the excellent tea, and, indeed, the afternoon that passes without it is an afternoon that drags a listless, alexandrine length along till dinner, and leaves one to learn by experience that a thing very essential to the local meteorology has been omitted. With us, tea is still a superfluity and in some cases a naughtiness; with the English it is a necessity and a virtue; and so apt is man to take the color of his surroundings that in the rare, very rare, occasions when he is not offered tea in an English house, the American comes away bewildered and indignant. I suppose nothing could convey the feelings of an equally defrauded Englishman, who likes his tea, and likes it good and strong; in fact, tea cannot be good without being strong. While I am about this business of noting certain facts which are so essential to the observer’s comfort, but which I really disdain as much as any reader can, I will say that the grates of the hotel in Bath were distinctly larger than those at Plymouth and were out of all comparison with those at Exeter. They did not, indeed, heat our rooms, even at Bath, but if they had been diligently tended I think they would have glowed. In the corridors there were radiators, commonly cold, but sometimes perceptibly warm to the touch. The Americanization of the house was completed by the elevator, which, being an after-thought, was crowded into the well of the staircase. It was aformidable matter to get the head porter, in full uniform, to come and open the bottom of the well with a large key, but it could be done; I saw rheumatic old ladies, who had come in from their Bath chairs, do it repeatedly.

When, however, you considered the outside of our hotel, you would have been sorry to have it in any wise Americanized. The front of it was on Pulteney Street, where it leaves that dear Laura Place which blossomed to our fancy with the fairest flowers of literary association; but at the back of it there was a real garden, and the gardens of other houses backing upon it, and the kitchen doors of these houses had pent-roofs which formed sunny exposures for cats of the finest form and color. When there was no sun there were no cats; but they could not take the rest of the prospect into the warm kitchens (I suppose that even in England the kitchens must be warm) with them, and so we had it always before our eyes. With gardens and little parks, and red-tiled house-roofs, bristling with chimney-pots and church-spires, it rose to a hemicycle of the beautiful downs, in whose deep hollows Bath lies relaxing in her faint air; and along the top the downs were softly wooded, or else they carried deep into the horizon the curve of fields and pastures, broken here and there by the stately bulk of some mansion set so high that no Bath-chairman could have been induced by love or money to push his chair to it. All round Bath these downs (a contradiction in terms to which one resigns one’s self with difficulty in the country where they abound) rise, like the walls of an immense scalloped cup, and the streets climb their slope, and can no otherwise escape in the guise of country roads, except along the bank of the lovely Avon. By day, except when a

THE RED-TILED HOUSE-ROOFS AND CHURCH SPIRES OF BATH

fog came down from the low heaven and took them up into it, the form of the downs was a perpetual pleasure to the eye from our back windows, and at night they were a fairy spectacle, with the electric lamps starring their vague, as if they were again part of the firmament.

When, later, we began to climb them, either on foot or on tram-top, we found them in command of prospects of Bath which could alone have compensated us for the change in our point of view. The city then showed large out of all proportion to its modest claim of population, which is put at thirty or forty thousand. But in the days of its prosperity it was so generously built that in its present decline it may really be no more populous than it professes; in that case each of its denizens has one of its stately mansions to himself. I never like to be extravagant, and so I will simply say that the houses of Bath are the handsomest in the world, and that if one must ever have a whole house to one’s self one could not do better than have it in Bath. There one could have it in a charming quiet square or place, or in the shallow curve of some high-set crescent, or perhaps, if one were very, very good, in that noblest round of domestic edifices in the solar system—I do not say universe—The King’s Circus. This is the triumph of the architect Wood, famous in the architectural annals of Bath, who built it in such beauty, and with such affectionate mastery of every order for its adornment, that his ghost might well (and would, if I were it) come back every night and stand glowing in a phosphorescent satisfaction till the dreaming rooks, in the tree-tops overhead, awoke and warned him to fade back to his reward in that most eligible quarter of the sky which overhangs The King’s Circus. I speak of him as if he were one, and so he is, as a double star isone; but it was Wood the elder who, in the ardor of his youth at twenty-three, imagined the Circus which his son realized. Together, or in their succession, they wrought the beautification of Bath from an amateur meanness and insufficiency to the effect for which the public spirit of their fellow-citizens supplied the unstinted means, and they left the whole city a monument of their glory, without a rival in unity of design and completeness of execution.

In the fine days when Bath was the resort of the greatness to which such greatness as the Woods’ has always bowed, every person of fashion thought he must have some sort of lodgment of his own, and, if he were a greater person than the common run of great persons, he must have a house. He might have it in some such select avenues as Milsom Street and Great Pulteney Street, or in St. James’s Square or Queen’s Square, or in Lansdowne Crescent or the Royal Crescent, but I fancy that the ambition of the very greatest could not have soared beyond a house in the Circus. As I find myself much abler to mingle with rank and fashion in the past than in the present, I was always going back to the Circus after I found the way, and making believe to ring at the portals set between pillars of the Ionic or Corinthian orders, and calling upon the disembodied dwellers within, and talking the ghostly scandal which was so abundant at Bath in the best days. In that way one may be a ghost one’s self without going to the extreme of dying, and then may walk comfortably back to dinner at one’s hotel in the flesh. In my more merely tourist moments I went and conned all the tablets let into the walls of the houses to record the memorable people who once lived in them. In my quality of patriot I lingered longest before that where

CIRCUS FROM BENNET STREET

the great Earl of Chatham had lived: he who, if he had been an American as he was an Englishman, while a foreign foe was landed on his soil would never had laid down his arms—never, never, never! The eloquent words filled my own throat to choking, and the long struggle fought itself through there on the curbstone with an obstinate valor on the American side that could result only in the independence of the revolted colonies. Then, in a high mood of impartial compassion, I went and paid the tribute of a sigh at that other house of the Circus, so piteously memorable for us Americans, where Major André had once sojourned. Was it in Bath, and perhaps while he dwelt in the Circus, that he loved Honora Sneyd? Almost anything tender or brave or fine could have been there; and I was not surprised to find that Lord Clive of India and Gainsborough of all the world were in their times neighbors of Lord Chatham and Major André. What other famous names were inscribed on those simple tablets (so modestly that it was hard to read them), I do not now recall, but when one is reminded, even by his cursory and laconic Baedeker, that not only the first but the second Pitt was a sojourner in Bath with other such sojourners as Burke, Nelson, Wolfe, Lawrence, Smollett, Fielding, Sheridan, Goldsmith, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Southey, Landor, Wordsworth, Cowper, Scott, and Moore, and a whole nameless herd of titles and royalties, one perceives that many more celebrities than I have mentioned must have lived in the Circus.

Many very nice people must live there yet, but it has somewhat gone off into business of the quieter professional type, and I would not swear that behind the tracery of a transom here or there I did not find a lurking suggestion of Apartments. I am quite ready tomake oath to at least one such suggestion in the very centre of Lansdowne Crescent, where I was about buying property because of its glorious site and its high, pure air. I instantly transferred my purchase to the Royal Crescent, where I now have an outlook forever over the new Victoria Park and down into the valley of the Avon, with the river running as of old between fields and pastures in a landscape of insurpassable loveliness.

But you cannot anywhere get away from the beautiful in Bath. For the temperate lover of it, the soft brownish tone of the architecture is in itself almost of a delicate sufficiency; but if one is greedier there is an inexhaustible picturesqueness in the winding and sloping streets, and the rounding and waving downs which they everywhere climb as roads when they cease to be streets. I do not know that Bath gives the effect of a very obvious antiquity; a place need not, if it begins in the age of fable, and descends from the earliest historic period with the tradition of such social splendor as hers. She has a superb mediæval abbey for her principal church which is a cathedral to all æsthetical intents and purposes; for it is not less beautiful and hardly less impressive than some cathedrals. Mostly of that perpendicular Gothic, which I suppose more mystically lifts the soul than any other form of architecture, it is in a gracious sort of harmony with itself through its lovely proportions; and from the stems of its clustered columns, the tracery of their fans spreads and delicately feels its way over the vaulted roof as if it were a living growth of something rooted in the earth beneath. The abbey began with a nunnery founded by King Osric in 676 and rose through a monastery founded later by King Offa to be an abbey in 1040, attached to thebishopric of Wells; but it waited its final grandeur and glory from Bishop Oliver King, who while visiting Bath in 1499 saw in a dream angels ascending and descending by a ladder set between the throne of God and an olive-tree, wearing a crown, and heard a voice saying, “Let an Olive establish the crown, and a King restore the church.” Moved by this vision, which was as modest as most dreams of charges delivered from on high, the bishop set vigorously about the work, but before it was perfected, the piety of Henry VIII. being alarmed by the pope’s failure to bless his divorces, the monastery was with many others suppressed, and the church stripped of everything that could be detached and sold. The lands of the abbey fell into private hands, and houses were built against the church, of which an aisle was used as a street for nearly a hundred years, even after it had been roofed in and restored, as it was early in the seventeenth century, by another bishop who had not been authorized in a dream.

The failure of Cromwell’s troopers to stable their horses in it is another of those conspicuous instances of their negligence with which I was destined to be confronted in the sacred edifices so conscientiously despoiled by Henry VIII. But among the most interesting monuments of the interior is one to that Lady Waller, wife of the Parliamentary general, Sir William Waller which more than repairs the oversight of the Puritan soldiery. Her epitaph is of so sweet and almost gay a quaintness that I will frankly transfer it to my page from that of the guide-book, though I might easily pretend I had copied it from the tomb.

“Sole issue of a matchless paire,Both of their state and virtues heyre;In graces great, in stature small,As full of spirit as voyd of gall;Cheerfully grave, bounteously close,Holy without vain-glorious showes;Happy, and yet from envy free,Learn’d without pride, witty, yet wise,Reader, this riddle read with mee,Here the good Lady Waller lies.”

There is almost an exultant note in this, and in its rendering of a most appreciable personality is a hint of the quality of all Bath annals. These are the history less of events than characters, marked and wilful, and often passing into eccentricity; and in the abbey is the municipal monument of the chiefest of such characters, that Beau Nash—namely, who ruled the fashion of Bath for forty or fifty years with an absolute sway at a period when fashion was elsewhere a supreme anarchic force in England. The very sermon which I heard in the abbey (and it was a very good and forcible homily), was of this personal quality, for taking as his theme the divine command to give, the preacher enlarged himself to the fact that the flag of England was then flying at half-mast on the abbey, and that all the court would presently be going into mourning for the death of the Duke of Cambridge, in obedience to the King’s command; and “How strange,” the preacher reflected, “that men should be so prompt to obey an earthly sovereign, and so slow to obey the King of Kings, the lord of lords.” But he did not reflect as I did for him, though I had then been only a week in England, and was very much less fitted to do it, that in the close-knit system which he himself was essentially part of, there was such a consciousness of social unity, identity, as has never been anywhere else on earth, much lessspiritually between the human and divine, since Jehovah ceased conversing with the fathers of the children of Israel. I do not report it as a message, then and there delivered to me in round terms, but I had in my cheap sympathy with the preacher, a sense of the impossibility of his ideal, for between any decently good King of England and his subjects there is such affiliation through immemorial law and custom as never was between a father and his children, any more than between a God and his creatures. When the King wills, in beautiful accordance with the laws and customs, it is health for the subjects to obey, as much as for the hands or feet of a man’s body when he wishes to move them, and it is disease, it is disorder, it is insanity for them to disobey, whereas it is merely sin to disregard the divine ordinances, and is not contrary to the social convention or the ideals of loyalty. But I could not offer this notion to the preacher in the Abbey of Bath, and I am not sure that my readers here will welcome it with entire acceptance.

From time to time, in those first days the sense of England (not the meaning, which heaven forbid I should attempt to give) sometimes came upon me overwhelmingly; and I remember how once when I sat peacefully at dinner, a feeling of the long continuity of English things suddenly rose in a tidal wave and swept me from my chair, and bore me far away from the soup that would be so cold before I could get back. There, like one

“Sole sitting by the shores of old romance,”

I visualized those mostly amiable and matter-of-fact people in their ancestral figures of a thousand years past, and foresaw them substantially the same for athousand years to come. Briton and Phœnician and Roman and Saxon and Dane and Norman, had come to a result so final in them that they would not change, if they could, and for my pleasure I would not have had them change, though in my American consciousness I felt myself so transient, so occasional, so merely provisional beside them. Such as I then saw them, passing so serenely from fish to roast, from salad to sweets, or as I could overhear them, talking of the weather with an effect of bestowing novelty upon the theme by their attention to it, they had been coming to Bath for untold generations with the same ancestral rheumatism which their humid climate, their inclement houses, and their unwholesome diet would enable them to hand down to a posterity remote beyond any horizons of the future. In their beautiful constancy, their heroic wilfulness, their sublime veracity, they would still be, or believe themselves, the first people in the world; and as the last of the aristocracies and monarchies they would look round on the classless equalities of the rest of the world with the pity which being under or over some one else seems always to inspire in master and man alike. The very gentleness of it all, testified to the perfection of their ultimation, and the universally accepted form by which the servant thanked the served for being served, and the served thanked the servant for serving, realized a social ideal unknown to any other civilization. There was no play of passion; the passions in England mean business; no voice rose above the high chirpy level, which all the voices reached; not a laugh was heard; the continental waiters who were there to learn the English language had already learned the English manner, which is a supreme self-containment; but the result was not the gloom which Americansachieve when they mean to be very good society in public places; far less was it a Latin gayety, or a Germanic fury of debate. The manner was such indeed that in spite of my feeling of their unity of nature and their continuity of tradition, I could scarcely believe that the people I saw in these psychological seizures of mine were one with the people who had been coming to Bath from their affairs in the towns, or from their pleasures in the country, ever since the English character had evolved itself from the blend of temperaments forming the English temperament. Out of what they had been how had they come to be what they were now, and yet not essentially changed? None of the causes were sufficient for the effect; the effect was not the logic of the causes.

History is rather darkling after the day of Prince Bladud and his pigs, and the Romans testify of their resort to the healing waters by the mute monuments left of the ancient city, still mainly buried under the modern town, rather than by any written record, but after the days of Elizabeth the place begins to have a fairly coherent memory of its past. In those days the virtue of the waters was superior to such material and moral tests as the filth of streets where the inhabitants cast the sewage of their houses and the butchers slaughtered their cattle and left the offal to rot, and the kine and swine ran at large, and the bathers of both sexes wallowed together in the springs, after the manner of their earliest exemplars, and were pelted with dead cats and dogs by the humorous spectators. This remained much the condition of Bath as late as the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and it was not till well into the eighteenth that the springs were covered and enclosed. Even then they were not so covered and enclosed but that the politer public frequented them to see the bi-sexual bathing which was not finally abolished till the reign of the good Beau Nash.

If any one would read all about Nash and the customs (there were no manners) which he amended, I could not do better than commend such a one to the amusing series of sketches reprinted from theBath Chronicle, by William Tyte, with the title ofBath in the Eighteenth Century, its Progress and Life described. It is only honest (but one is honest with so much effort in these matters) to confess my indebtedness to this most amusing and very valuable book, and to warn the reader that a great deal of the erudition which he will note in my page can be finally traced to Mr. Tyte’s. He will learn there at large why I call Beau Nash good though he was a reprobate in so many things, a libertine and gambler, and little better than a blackguard when not retrieving and polishing others. It seems to be essential to the civic and social reformer that he should more or less be of the quality of the stuff he deals with; we have seen that more than once in our municipal experience; and Nash, who reformed Bath, might in turn have asked a like favor of Bath. He was, in the English and the eighteenth century terms, that familiar phenomenon which we know as the Boss; and his incentive was not so much the love of virtue as the love of rule. By the pull on the reins he knew just how close he might draw them, and when and where he must loose the curb. He could refuse to allow the royal Princess Amelia a single dance after the clock struck eleven; he could personally take off the apron of the Duchess of Queensbury and tell her that “none but Abigails appeared in white aprons,” as he threw it aside; he could ask a country squire who wore his spurs to the ball, if he had not forgotten his horse; he could forbid ladies coming in riding-hoods; he could abolish the wearing of swords; he could cause the arrest of any one giving or accepting a challenge; but he could not put down gaming or drinking, and he did not try, either by the irony of the written rules for the government[A]of Bath Society, or by the sarcastic by-laws which he orally added on occasions. He was one of those Welshmen who, at all periods haveinvaded England so much less obviously than the Scotch, and have come so largely into control of the Sassenach, while seeming to merge and lose themselves in the heavy mass. He had the hot temper of his race; but he was able to cool it to a very keen edge, and he cut his way through disorder to victory. He wished to establish an etiquette as severe as that of the French or English court, and he succeeded, in a measure. But though not an easy Boss, he was a wise one and he really moulded the rebellious material to a form of propriety if not of beauty. When he passed to his account, insolvent both morally and financially, it lapsed again under the succeeding Masters of Ceremony to its elemental condition, and social anarchy followed; a strife raged between the old and new assembly rooms for primacy, and at a ball, where the partisans of two rival candidates for the mastership met in force, a free fight followed the attempt of a clergyman’s wife to take precedence of a peer’s daughter; “the gentlemen fought and swore; the ladies, screaming, tore each other’s garments and headgear; the floor was strewn with fragments of caps, lappets, millinery, coat-tails and ruffles. The non-combatants hurried to the exits, or mounted the chairs near the walls to be out of danger or to watch the foes mauling and bruising each other.” Before the fight ended the Mayor of the city had to appear and read the Riot Act three times.

Of course matters could not go on so. Both the contestants for the Master of the Ceremonies retired and a third was chosen. The office though poorly paid, and wholly unremunerative except in hands so skilled as those of Nash (who died poor by his own fault, but who lived rich), was honored in him by a statue in the Pump Room and a monument in the Abbey. This to be surewas after his death, but the place was always of such dignity that in 1785 Mr. J. King, “who had highly distinguished himself in the British army during the American war,” by no means disdained to take it. His distinction does not form any ornament of our annals as I recall them, but that is perhaps because it was achieved to our disadvantage. He had indeed the rare honor of introducing Jane Austen’s most charming hero to her sweetest and simplest heroine; but though he could fearlessly present Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland, his courage was apparently not equal to upholding his general authority with the satirical arrogance of Nash. Where Nash would have laid down the law and enforced it if need be with his own hands, King “humbly requested,” though in the matter of wearing hats “at the cotillions or concerts or dress balls,” our distinguished enemy plucked up the spirit to warn any lady who should “through inattention or any other motive infringe this regulation, that she must not take it amiss if she should be obliged to take off her hat or quit the assembly.”

From Nash’s time onward several Masters of Ceremonies were scandalized by people’s giving tickets for the entertainments to their domestics, and one of them took public notice of the evil. “Servants, hair-dressers, and the improper persons who every night occupy some of the best seats, and even presume to mix with the company, are warned to keep away, and to spare themselves the mortification of being desired to withdraw, a circumstance which will inevitably happen if they continue to intrude themselves where decency, propriety and decorum forbid their entrance.”

Apparently in spite of all the efforts of all the Masters of Ceremonies, society in Bath was not only veryfast, which society never minds being, but a good deal mixed, which it professes not to like, though it was at the same time always very gay. When at last the respective nights of the New Assembly Rooms and the Old Assembly Rooms were ascertained, the fashionable week began on Monday with a Dress Ball at the New Rooms; it continued on Tuesday with Public Tea and Cards at the New Rooms; on Wednesday with a Cotillion Ball at the Old Rooms; on Thursday with a Cotillion Ball at the New Rooms, and Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; on Friday with a Dress Ball at the Old Rooms; on Saturday with Public Tea and Cards at the Old Rooms; and it ended on Sunday with Tea and Walking, alternately at the New Rooms and the Old Rooms. The cost of all these pleasures either to the person or the pocket, was not so great as might be imagined from their abundance. The hours were early, and except for the gaming, and the drinking that slaked the dry passion of chance, the fun was over by eleven o’clock. Then the last note was sounded, the last step taken, the last sigh or the last look exchanged, so that those who loved balls might not only tread the stately measures of that time with far less fatigue than the more athletic figures of our period cost, but might be at home and in bed at the hour when the modern party is beginning. For their pleasure they paid in the proportion of a guinea for twenty-six dress balls, and half a guinea for thirty fancy balls. Two guineas supplied two tickets for twelve concerts, and sixpence admitted one to the Rooms for a promenade and a cup of tea.

It will be seen that with that “large acquaintance” which Mrs. Allen so handsomely but hopelessly desired for Catherine Morland at her first ball, where they had no acquaintance at all, one could have a very goodtime at Bath for a very little money, and every one apparently who had the money could have the good time. There were many public gardens, where all sorts of people went for concert-breakfasts, and for tea and for supper, at a charge of a shilling, or the classic one-and-six. Jane Austen writes in one of her charming letters that she liked going to the concerts of Sydney Gardens because, having no ear for music, she could best get away from it there; but there were besides the Villa Gardens, the Bagatelle, and the Grosvenor Gardens, which were most resorted to because they were so convenient to the Pump Rooms. Some of the lawns, if not the groves of these gardens still remains, and hard by the Avon babbles still, rushing under the walls and bridges of the town, with a busy air of knowing more than it has time to tell of the old-time picnics on its grassy shores, and the water-parties on its tumultuous bosom, as well as the fireworks and illuminations in its bowers. The river indeed is one of the chief beauties of Bath, winding into it through a valley of the downs, and curving through it with a careless grace which leaves nothing to be asked.

The highest moment of fashion in Bath seems to have been when the Princess Amelia, daughter of George II., came to drink its waters and partake its pleasures in 1728. She was rather a plain body, no longer young, very stout, and with a simple taste for gambling, fishing, riding, and beer. “Her favorite haunt,” says Mr. Tyte, “was a summer-house by the riverside in Harrison’s Walk, where she often was seen attired in a riding-habit and a black velvet postilion-cap tied under her chin.” But she also liked to wear when on horseback “a hunting-cap and a laced scarlet coat,” which must have set off her red face and portly bulk to peculiar advantage. Her particular friend was a milliner in the abbey church-yard who wrote verses in praise of the princess and of Bath, but she seems to have been friendly enough with people of every kind and she went freely to the dress balls, the fancy balls, the teas, the walks, the breakfast-concerts, the gardens, and whatever else there was of elegant or amusing in the place. One of the customs of Bath was the ringing of the abbey bells to welcome visitors of distinction, who were expected to pay the vergers in proportion to the noise made for them. This custom was afterwards abused to include any comer from whom money could reasonably or unreasonably be hoped for, as the supposed writer in theNew Bath Guiderecords. But the custom has long been obsolete, and no American invader arriving by train need fear being honored and plundered through it.

It would be idle to catalogue the princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, lords and ladies, and titles of all degrees who resorted to Bath both before and after the good Amelia, and if one began with the other and real celebrities, the adventurers, and authors, and artists, and players, there would be no end, and so I will not at least begin yet. We were first of all concerned in looking up the places which the divine Jane Austen had made memorable by attributing some scene or character of hers to them, or more importantly yet by having dwelt in them herself. I really suppose that it was less with the hope of being helped with the waters that I went regularly to the Pump Room and sipped my glass of lukewarm insipidity, than with the insensate expectation of encountering some of her people, or perhaps herself, a delicate elusive phantom of ironical observance, in a place they and she so much frequented.I cannot say that I ever did meet them, either the characters or the author, though it was here that Catherine Morland first met the lively but unreliable Isabel Thorpe, and vainly hoped to meet Henry Tilney after dancing with him the night before. “Every creature in Bath except himself was to be seen in the room at different periods of the fashionable hours; crowds of people were every moment passing in and out, up the steps and down.”

I reconciled myself to a disappointment numerically greater than Catherine’s for there was not only no Tilney, but no crowd. At mid-day there would be two or three score persons scattered about the stately hall, so classically Palladian in its proportions, and so fitly heavy and rich in decoration, all a dimness of dark paint and dull gold, in which the sufferers sat about at little tables where they put their glasses, and read their papers, after they became so used to coming that they no longer cared to look at the glass cases full of Roman and Saxon coins and rings and combs and bracelets. There was nothing to prevent people talking except the overwhelming tradition of the talk that used to flow and sparkle in that place a century ago. But they did not talk; and in the afternoon they listened with equal silence to the music in the concert-room. In the Pump Room there was the largest and warmest fire that I saw in England, actually lumps of coal, openly blazing in a grate holding a bushel of them; in the withdrawal of the others from it one might stand and thaw one’s back without infringing anybody’s privileges or preferences. Under the Pump Room were the old Roman Baths with the old Romans represented in their habits of luxury by the goldfish that swam about in the tepid waters, and, as I was advised by a guide whostarted up out of the past and accepted a gratuity, liked it.

I visited these baths as a tourist, but as a patient whose prescription did not include bathing I saw nothing of the modern baths. There the sexes no longer bathe together, and in their separation and seclusion you have no longer the pleasure enjoyed by the spectator in the days of theNew Bath Guide, when—

“’Twas a glorious sight to behold the fair sexAll wading with gentlemen up to their necks.”

The modern equipment of the baths is such that the bathers are not now put into baize-lined sedan-chairs and hurried to their lodgings and sent to bed there to perspire and repose; and the chances of seeing a pair of rapacious chairmen settling the question of a disputed fare by lifting the lid of the box, and letting the cold air in upon the reeking lady or gentleman within, are reduced to nothing at all. In the ameliorated conditions, unfavorable as they are to the lover of dramatic incident, many and marvellous recoveries from rheumatism are made in Bath, and we saw people blithely getting better every day whom we had known at the beginning of the fortnight very gloomy and doubtful, and all but audibly creaking in their joints as they limped by. This was in spite of a diet which must have sent the uric acid gladly rioting through their systems, and of a capricious variety of March weather which was everything that wet and cold, and dry and raw, could be in an air notoriously relaxing to the victim whom it never released from its penetrating clutch.

I put it in this way so as to be at ease in the large freedom of the truth rather than bound in a slavishfidelity to the fact. The fact is that in the succession of days that were all and more than here suggested, there were whole hours of delicious warmth when one could walk out or drive out in a sunny mildness full of bird-song and bee-murmur, with the color of bloom in one’s eyes and the odor of flowers in one’s nostrils. It is not from having so rashly bought property right and left in every eligible and memorable quarter of Bath the very first day that I now say I should like to live there always. The reader must not suspect me of wishing to unload upon him, when I repeat that I heard people who were themselves in the enjoyment of the rich alternative say that you had better live in Bath if you could not live in London. A large contingent of retired army and navy officers and their families contribute to keep society good there, and it is a proverb that the brains which have once governed India are afterwards employed in cheapening Bath. Rents are low, but many fine large houses stand empty, nevertheless, because the people who could afford to pay the rents could not afford the state, the equipment of service and the social reciprocity so necessary in England, and must take humbler dwellings instead. Provisions are of a Sixth Avenue average in price, and in the article of butcher’s meat of a far more glaring and offensive abundance. I do not know whether it is the tradition of the Bath bun which has inspired the pastry-shops to profuse efforts in unwholesome-looking cakes and tarts, but it seemed to me that at every third or fourth window I was invited by the crude display to make way entirely with the digestion which the Bath waters were doing so little to repair. When one saw everywhere those beautiful West of England complexions, the wonder what became of thatbilious superfluity of pastry was a mystery from which the mind still recoils.

But this is taking me from the social conditions of Bath, of which I know so little. I heard it said, indeed, that the wheels of life were uncommonly well-oiled there for ladies who had to direct them unaided, and it seemed to me that the widowed or the unwedded could not be more easily placed in circumstances of refinement which might be almost indefinitely simplified without ceasing to be refined. There are in fact large numbers of single ladies living at Bath in the enjoyment of that self-respectful civic independence which the just laws of Great Britain give them; for they vote at all elections which concern the municipal spending of their money, and are consequently not taxed without their consent, as our women are. Such is their control in matters which concern their comfort that it is said the consensus of feminine feeling has had force with the imperial government to prevent the placing of a garrison in Bath, on the ground that the presence of the soldiers distracted the maids, and enhanced the difficulties of the domestic situation.

The glimpse of the Bath world, which a happy and most unimagined chance afforded, revealed a charm which brought to life a Boston world now so largely of the past, and I like to think it was this rather than the possession of untold real estate which made me wish to live there always; and advise others to do so. Just what this charm was I should be slower to attempt saying than I have been to boom Bath; but perhaps I can suggest it as a feminine grace such as comes to perfection only in civilizations where the brightness and alertness of the feminine spirit is peculiarly valued. Bath could not have been so long a centre of fashion and infirmity,of pleasure and pain, without evolving in the finest sort the supremacy of woman, who is first in either. The lingering tradition of intellectual brilliancy, which spreads a soft afterglow over the literary decline of Boston, is of the same effect in the gentle city where the mere spectacle of life became penetrated with the quality of so many spritely witnesses. If the grace of their humor, the gayety of their spirit, the sweetness of their intelligence have remained to this time, when the spectacle of life has so dwindled that the observed are less than the observers, it would not be wonderful, for the essential part of what has been anywhere seems always to haunt the scene, and to become the immortal genius of the place. In a more literal sense Bath is haunted by the past, for it is the favorite resort of numbers of interesting ghosts, whose characters are well ascertained and whose stories are recounted to you, if you have so much merit, by people who have known the spectres almost from childhood. Some of them have the habit of preferably appearing to strangers; but perhaps they drew the line at Americans.

I forget whether the almond-trees were in bloom or not when we came to Bath, but I am sure they continued so throughout our stay, and I found them steadily blossoming away elsewhere for a month afterwards. There is no reason why they should not, for they have no work to do in the way of ripening their nuts, and they lead a life as idle and unfinal as the vines and fig-trees of Great Britain, which also blossom as cheerfully and set their fruit, and carry it through the seasons in a lasting immaturity. I never thought the almond in bloom as rare a sight as the peach, whose pale elder sister it is; but in the absence of the peach, I was always glad of it, in a dooryard or over a garden wall. Wherethe walls were low enough to lean upon, as they sometimes were round the vegetable gardens, it was pleasant to pause and contemplate the infinite variety of cabbage held in a green arrest by the mild winter air, but destined to an ultimation beyond the powers of the almond, the grape and the fig. There seemed to be a good many of these gardened spaces in the town, as well as in the outskirts where more new houses were going up, in something of the long leisure of the vegetation. The famous Bath building-stone is in fact so much employed elsewhere that there may not be enough of it for home use, and that may account for the slow growth of the place; but if I lived there I should not wish it to grow, and if I were King of Bath, in due succession from Beau Nash, I would not suffer one Bath-stone to be set upon the other within its limits. The place is large enough as it is, and I should hate to have it restored to its former greatness. There was indeed only too little decay in it, but there was at least one gratifying instance in the stately mansion at the end of our street,—falling or fallen to ruin, with its Italian style rapidly antedating the rough classic of the Roman baths, in the effect of a sorrowful superannuation,—which I could not have rescued from dilapidation without serious loss. The hollow windows and broken doors and toppled chimneys, the weather-stained walls and pillars painted green with mould, were half concealed, half betrayed, by the neglected growth of trees, and a wilding thicket had sprung up over the lawn, penetrated by wanton paths in spite of warnings against trespassing by severely worded sign-boards. Whose the house was, or why it was abandoned I never learned, and I do not know that I wished to learn; it was so satisfying as it was and for what it was. It stood on the borders ofSydney Gardens, which the authorities were slowly, too slowly for our pleasure, putting in order for some sort of phantasmal season.

We never got into them, though we longed to make out where it was that Jane Austen need not hear the music when she went to the concerts. But it was richly consoling, in these failures to come unexpectedly upon the house in which she had lived two years with her mother, and to find it fronting the ruining mansion and the tangled shrubbery that took our souls with so sorrowful a rapture. At the moment we discovered it, there was a young girl visible through the dining-room window feeding a quiet gray cat on the floor, and a gray parrot in a cage. She looked kind and good, and as if she would not turn two pilgrims away if they asked to look in over the threshold that Jane Austen’s feet had lightly pressed, but we could not find just the words to petition her in, and we had to leave the shrine unvisited. It occurs to me now that we might have pretended to mistake the tablet in the wall for a sign of apartments, but we had not then even this cheap inspiration; and we could only note with a longing, lingering look, that the house was very simple and plain, like the other houses near.

The literary tradition of the neighborhood is supported in one of these by the presence of a famous nautical novelist, who has often shipwrecked and marooned me to my great satisfaction, on reefs and desolate islands, or water-logged me in lonely seas. He lived even nearer the corner of Pulteney Street where we were in our hotel, and where we much imagined taking one of the many lodgings to let there, but never did. We looked into some, and found them probably not very different from what they were when the Allens wentinto theirs with Catherine Morland. We decided that this was just across the way from our hotel, and that Mrs. Allen saw us from her window whenever we went or came. We were sure also that we met Lady Russell and Anne Elliot driving out ofPersuasionthrough Pulteney Street, when Anne noticed Captain Wentworth coming towards them, and supposed from Lady Russell’s stare, that she was equally moved by the vision, but found she was “looking after some window curtains, which Lady Alicia and Mrs. Frankland were telling” her of as “being the handsomest and best hung of any in Bath.”

Our hotel fronted not only on Pulteney Street, but also on Laura Place, a most genteel locality indeed where we knew as soon as Sir Walter Elliot that his cousin “Lady Dalrymple had taken a house for three months and would be living in style.” I do not think we ever made out the house, and we were more engaged in observing the behavior of the wicked John Thorpe driving poor Catherine Morland through Laura Place after he had deceived her into thinking Henry Tilney, whom she had promised to walk with, had gone out of town, and whom she now saw passing with his sister. On a happier day, as the reader will remember, Catherine really went her walk with the Tilneys, and in sympathy and emulation we too climbed the steep slopes of “Beechen Cliff, that noble hill whose beautiful verdure and hanging coppice render it so striking an object from almost every opening in Bath.” You now cross the railroad to reach it, and pass through neighborhoods that were probably pleasanter a hundred years ago; but the view of the town in the bottom of its bowl must be as fine as ever, though we found no hanging coppice from which to commend it. Still, as our wontwas, we bought several pieces of property that pleased us, and I still have a few suburban houses in that quarter which I could offer the reader at a sacrifice. The truth is that in spite of having the Tilneys and Catherine for company we did not like the Beechen Cliff as well as its rival acclivity, Sion Hill, which forms the opposite rim of Bath, and is not so arduous of approach. A lady who lived not quite at the top, but above the Bath chair line, declared it the third-best air in England, without indicating the first or second. The air was at least more active than we were in our climb, but with a driver who got down and helped his horses walk up with us, we could enjoy there one of the loveliest prospects in the world. The fineness of the air was attested probably by the growth of ivy, which was the richest I saw in England, where the ivy grows so richly in every place. It not only climbed all the trees on that down, and clothed their wintry nakedness with a foliage perpetually green, but it flung its shining mantles over the walls that shut in the mansions on the varying slopes, and densely aproned the laps of the little hollows of the lawns and woods. It had the air of feeling its life in every leaf, and of lustily reaching out for other conquests, like the true weed it is in Old England, and not the coddled exotic which people make it believe it is in New England. I do not know that I ever lost the surprise of it in its real character; I only know that this surprise was greatest for me on those happy heights.

The modern hand-book which was guiding our steps about Bath advised us that if we would frequent Milsom Street about four o’clock we should find the tide of fashion flowing through it; but the torrent must havebeen very rapid indeed, for we always missed it, and were obliged to fill the rather empty channel with the gayety of the past. There are delightful shops everywhere in Bath, and so many places to buy old family silver that it seems as if all the old families must have poured all their old silver into them, till you visit other parts of England, and find the same superabundance of second-hand plate everywhere. But it is in Milsom Street that most of the fine shops are, and I do not deny that you will see some drops of the tide of fashion clustered about their windows. Other drops have percolated to the tea-rooms, where at five o’clock there is a scene of dissipation around the innocent cups. But there was no reason why we should practise the generous self-deceit of our hand-book regarding the actual Milsom Street, when we had its former brilliancy to draw upon. Even in the time of Jane Austen’s people it was no longer “residential,” though it was not so wholly gone to shops as now. The most eligible lodgings were in it, and here General Tilney sojourned till he insisted on carrying Catherine off to Northanger Abbey with his children. “His lodgings were taken the very day after he left them, Catherine,” said Mrs. Allen, afterwards. “But no wonder; Milsom Street, you know.” Still, the finest shops prevailed there, then, and when Isabella Thorpe wished to punish the two young men who had been so impertinently admiring her, by following them, she persuaded Catherine that she was taking her to a shop-window in Milsom Street to see “the prettiest hat you can imagine ... very like yours, with coquelicot ribbons instead of green.” In Milsom Street, sweet Anne Elliot first meets Captain Wentworth after he comes to Bath, and he is much confused. But it is no wonder that so many things happen in or throughMilsom Street in Bath fiction, for it leads directly, or as directly as a street in Bath can, from the New Assembly to the Old Assembly which were called, puzzlingly enough for the after-comer, the Upper Rooms and the Lower Rooms, as if they were on different floors of the same building, instead of separated a quarter of a mile by a rise of ground. The street therefore led also to the Pump Room and to the divers parades and walks and gardens, and was of prime topographical importance, as well as literary interest.

We could not visit the Lower Rooms because they were burned down a great while ago, but for the sake of certain famous heroines, and many more dear girls unknown to fame, we went to the Upper Rooms, and found them most characteristically getting ready for the Easter Ball which the County Club was to give, and which promised to relume for one night at least the vanished splendors of Bath. The Ballroom was really noble, and there were sympathetic tea-rooms and cloakrooms, and the celebrated octagonal room in the centre, where workmen were hustling the pretty and gallant ghosts of former dances with their sawing and hammering, and painting and puttying, and measuring the walls for decorations. I do not know that I should have minded all that, though I hate to have the present disturbing the past so much as it must in England; but something very tragical happened to me at the Upper Rooms which branded that visit in my mind. A young fellow civilly detached himself from the other artisans and showed us through the place, and though we could have easily found the way ourselves, it seemed fit to return his civility in silver. Sixpence would have been almost too much, but in my pocket there was a sole coin that enlarged itself to my dismay to the measure of a full moon. I appealed to my companion, but when did ever a woman have money unless she had just got it from a husband or father? The thought struck me that for once I might behave as shabbily as I should always like to do; but I had not the courage. Slowly, with inward sighs, I drew forth my hand and bestowed upon that most superfluous youth, for five minutes’ disservice, a whole undivided half-crown, received his brief “Thankyesir,” rendered as if he took half-crowns every day for that sort of thing, and tottered forth so bewildered that I quite forgot the emotion proper to the place where Catherine Morland went to her first ball, and Anne Elliot first met Captain Wentworth after coming to Bath. It was there that Catherine had to sit the whole evening through without dancing or speaking with a soul, and was only saved by overhearing two gentlemen speak of her as “a pretty girl.” Such words had their due effect; she immediately thought the evening pleasanter than she had found it before, her humble vanity was contented; she ... went to her chair in good humor with everybody, and perfectly satisfied with her share of public attention.

I should have liked immensely to look on at the County Ball which was to assemble all the quality of the neighborhood on something like the old terms, and I heard with joy the story of ten gay youths who returned from one of the last balls in Bath chairs, drawn through the gray dawn in Milsom Street by as many mettlesome chairmen. Only when one has studied the Bath chair on its own ground, and seen the sort of gloomy veteran who pulls it, commonly with a yet gloomier old lady darkling under its low buggy-top, can one realize the wild fun of such an adventure. It might not always be safe, for the chairman sometimesbalks, and in case of sharp acclivities altogether refuses to go on, as I have already told.

In paying our duty to the literary memories of the town we did not fail to visit the church of St. Swithin, in the shadow of which Fanny Burney lies buried with the gentle exile who made her Madame d’Arblay, and a very happy wife after the glory ofEvelinaandCeciliabegan to be lost a little in the less merited success ofCamillaandThe Wanderer. The gate was locked and we were obliged to come away without getting into the church-yard, but we saw “about where” one of the great mothers of English fiction lay; and the pew-opener, found for us with some difficulty and delay by an interested neighbor, let us into the church, and there we revered the tablets of the kindly pair. They were on the wall of the gallery, and I thought they might have been nearer together, but hers was very fitly inscribed; and one could stand before it, and indulge a pensive mood in thoughts of the brilliant girl’s first novel, which set the London world wild and kept Dr. Johnson up all night, mixed with fit reflections on her father’s ambition in urging her into the service of the “sweet Queen” Charlotte, where she was summoned with a bell like a waiting-maid, and the fire of her young genius was quenched.

If one would have a merrier memory of literary Bath, let him go visit the house, if he can find it, of the Reverend Dr. Wilson, in Alfred Street, where the famous Mrs. Macaulay, the first English historian of her name, presided as a species of tenth muse, and received the homage of whatever was academic in the rheumatic culture of Bath. She was apparently the idol of the heart as well as the head (it was thought to have been partially turned) of the good man whose permanentguest she was. He put up a marble statue to her as History in his London parish church, and had a vault made near it to receive her remains when she should have done with them. But before this happened, History fell in love with Romance in the person of a young man many years her junior, and on their marriage the reverend doctor irately removed her statue from the chancel of St. Stephen’s, and sold her vault for the use of some less lively body. Her new husband was the brother of a Dr. Graham who had formerly travelled with Lord Nelson’s beautiful Lady Hamilton and exhibited her “reclining on a celestial bed” as the Goddess of Health and Beauty. On the night of Mrs. Macaulay’s birthday the physician presented her with an address in which he claimed, by virtue of his mud baths, “the supreme blessedness of removing under God, the complicated and obstinate maladies your fair and very delicate frame was afflicted with.” The company danced, played, and talked, and went out to a supper of “syllabubs, jellies, creams, ices, wine-cakes, and a variety of dry and fresh fruits, particularly grapes and pineapples.”

The literary celebrities who visited Bath, or sojourned, or lived there were not to be outnumbered except in London alone, if in fact the political capital exceeded in them. Mr. Tyte mentions among others De Foe, who stopped at Bath in collecting materials for hisTour of Great Britain; and who met Alexander Selkirk there, and probably imagined Robinson Crusoe from him on the spot. Richard Steele came and wrote about Bath in theSpectator. Gay, Pope and Congreve, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, Fielding and Mrs. Radcliffe came and went; and Sheridan dwelt there in his father’s house, and met the beautiful Miss Linley, woed, won, went off to Paris with her and wedded her, and returnedto fight two duels in defence of her honor. Goldsmith and Johnson and Boswell resorted to the waters; Lord Chesterfield wrote some of his letters from a place where worldly politeness might be so well studied; Walpole some of his where gossip so abounded. De Quincey was a school-boy in Bath; Southey spent his childhood there, and Coleridge preached there, as he did in many other Unitarian pulpits in England; Cowper wrote his “Verses on finding the Heel of a Shoe at Bath” after coming to see his cousin, Lady Hesketh, there; Burke met his wife there, and so did Beckford, who wroteVathek, meet his. Christopher Anstey, the author of that humorous, that scandalous, that amusing satire, theNew Bath Guide, lived most of his life in the city he delighted to laugh at.

The list might be indefinitely prolonged, but the name which most attracts, after the names of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, is the name of Charles Dickens. He must have come to Bath when he was very young, and very probably on some newspaper errand; for when he wroteThe Pickwick Papershe was still a reporter. His genius for boisterous drollery was not just the qualification for dealing with the pathetic absurdities of a centre of fashion which was no longer quite what it had been. The earlier decades of the nineteenth century found Bath in a social decline which all her miraculous waters could not medicine. But the members of the Pickwick Club went to a ball at the Upper Rooms where some noble ladies won a good deal of Mr. Pickwick’s money; and he had already visited the Pump Room. Dickens derides the company at both places with the full force of his high spirits and riots in the description of Mr. Pickwick’s introduction to the Master of the Ceremonies, Angelo Cyrus Bantam, Esq. The exaggerated caricature preserves some traits of the M.C.’s, his illustrious predecessors; and perhaps some such bold handling as Dickens could best render the personal effect of a beau of the period. He “was a charming young man of not more than fifty, dressed in a very bright-blue coat with resplendent buttons, black trousers, and the thinnest possible pair of highly polished boots. A gold eyeglass was suspended from his neck by a short, broad black ribbon, a gold snuff-box was lightly clasped in his left hand ... and he carried a pliant ebony cane with a heavy gold top. His linen was of the very whitest, finest and stiffest; his wig of the glossiest, blackest and curliest.... His features were contracted into a perpetual smile. ‘Welcome to Ba-ath, sir. This is indeed an acquisition. Most welcome to Ba-ath.... Never been in Ba-ath, Mr. Pickwick?... Never in Ba-ath! He! he! Mr. Pickwick, you are a wag. Not bad, not bad. Good, good. He! he! he! Re-mark-able!’”

This might have happened, but it does not seem as if it had happened, and one sighs amid the horse-play for “the touch of a vanished hand,” like Jane Austen’s, to give delicacy and precision to the picture. The Pickwick Club first put up at the White Hart, just opposite the Pump Room, but it was while living in “the upper portion of the Royal Crescent,” that Mr. Winkle had his amusing adventure with Mrs. Dowler, whose husband had fallen asleep after promising to sit up for her return from a ball. The elderly reader will probably remember better than the younger how Mr. Winkle went down-stairs in his bed-gown and slippers to let the lady in, and then had the door blown to behind him, and was obliged to plunge into her sedan-chair to hide himself from the mockeries of a party coming into the

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