BATHAMPTON MILL.
BATH
The story of Bath goes back some two thousand years, and has its origin in the myths of ages, in which Bladud figures variously as discoverer and creator of the healing springs. Serious historians are wont to exclude Bladud, and his descent from Brute the Trojan, and Lud Hudibras, the British King, from their pages, for the reason that Geoffrey of Monmouth, the monkish chronicler, who first narrates these stories in his history of Britain, was apt sometimes to confound chronicling with romancing. When, therefore, he tells how Prince Bladud was an adept in magic, and placed a cunning stone in the springs of this valley so that it made the water hot and healed the sick who resorted to them, he is looked upon with a suspicion that is deepened when he goes on to say that Bladud successfully attempted to fly with wings of his own invention from Bath to London, and only came to grief when London was reached, through the strings breaking, so that he fell and was dashed to pieces on the roof of the Temple of Apollo!
Nor is the better known legend of Prince Bladud, the leper, exiled from his father’s Court, universally accepted. According to that story, the Prince wandered to where Keynsham now stands, where he became a swineherd, and infected the pigs with his disease. Coming, however, into this valley, the porkers rolled themselves into the hot mud, which then occupied the site of Bath Abbey and the Baths, and were cured. Bladud perceiving this, applied theremedy to himself, with the like result, and returned to his home once more; building a city upon the spot in after years. This happenedB.C.863, and there is a statue of King Bladud, as he afterwards became, erected in the “Pump Room” in 1669; so that any one not subscribing to the truth of this legend had better do so at once, in view of this overwhelming evidence thus afforded.
THE SUN GOD.
ROMAN RELICS
We are on more certain ground when we come to the Romans. That great people left too many evidences of their occupation of this island for many doubts to be entertained as to where they settled, or when. Thus, when we assign the close of the first half-century of the Christian era to their discovery of the medicinal properties of these waters, we do so, not from legend, but from the evidence of the buildings they have left behind. It is singular that we do not, as a rule, lay much stress upon the Roman occupation of Britain. Yet it lasted long, and was for nearly four centuries what modern political slang terms “effectual.” An advanced civilization reigned here then, and Britain became both a populous and a flourishing colony. The dealings of England with India in the present time form a tolerably close parallel with Rome’s conquest of this island, and if we go further and liken the British who remained in the remote places of Cornwall, Devon, and Wales to the fierce Afghans and Chitralis who have troubled us on the borders of Hindostan, we shall by no means strain the similitude. Bath—or ratherAquæ Solis, the “Waters of the Sun”[6]—as well as being theone health-resort in Britain for the wealthy Roman colonists who needed such a retreat, was to the Roman officer of that era what Simla and the Hills are to our own military men in India—a place for rest and the restoration of health after the rigours of a hard campaign; with this difference, indeed, that to the Hills they go for coolness, while at Aquæ Solis is the expatriated legionary found both healing springs and a genial warmth after the bleak, inhospitable hills of the Far West or the Farther North.
Discoveries at Bath and in its immediate neighbourhood have proved that there was a sanatorium for invalided officers on Combe Down, and we can well imagine such being conveyed hither, to recover or to die, along the road.
The Baths of the Romans were discovered in 1755, fifteen feet below the surface of the ground; relics of a past magnificence; of a civilization that expired in bloodshed and conflagration. It was in the year 410 that the military forces of Rome left Britain. Theweak Romano-British soon retrograded, and, worse than all, the country split up into petty, and mutually hostile, kingdoms. The Baths were neglected, the Arts decayed, and in Britain generally there was not spirit sufficient to withstand the marauding Saxons who finally overwhelmed the country and pillaged and burntAquæ Solis, just as they had pillaged every other city. It was after the sanguinary Battle of Deorham,A.D.577, that the three cities ofGlevum(Gloucester),Corinium(Cirencester), andAquæ Solisfell, spoils to the Saxon hosts under Ceawlin. You may search for the site of that great contest at the village now called Dyreham, some fifteen miles north-east of Bath, in Gloucestershire, and from its position it will be at once evident that those three cities must immediately have fallen after that fatal day. That was the cementing of the Saxon power in the West, and a fitting end to a hundred and fifty years of incessant warfare. The British never learned that union means strength; they never had the sense to combine before a common foe, and so the fierce invaders met and defeated them in detail, aided of course by their own fitness for the fight, and by the British incapacity. The Britons were lapped in luxury, and went drunk into battle, so that there was no possible hope for them in fighting the hardy warriors from the North. The wars waged then were wars of extermination, and neither persons nor places were spared. This proud city was levelled with the ground, and the civilization of four hundred years perished by fire in a day. Evidences of that dreadful time were plainly to be seen when the Roman Bathswere excavated. They are to be seen even now, at the Museum, together with relics which prove the high degree of civilization that had been attained.
MYSTERIOUS LEADEN TABLET DISCOVERED AT BATH.
Among other marks of progress is an inscribed tablet with an inscription which one authority declares to be the record of a “cure from either taking the waters or bathing, certified by three great men;” while another is equally positive that it is an “imprecation upon nine men, supposed to be guests, who had stolen a tablecloth at the conclusion of a dinner-party.” The age of this tablet is fixed “between the second and fifth centuries of the Christian era,” which in itself seems to be a wide enough margin. As if, however, this were not already sufficient, there are others, learned in these things,who declare that this relic records how a certain Quintus received 500,000 lbs. of copper coin for washing a lady named “Vilbia”! We are left to take our choice between speculations unfavourable to the personal cleanliness of that lady, or astonishment at the mode and extravagance of the payment. There is, indeed, “another way,” as the cookery books have it; but as that involves doubts about the scholarship of professed antiquaries, this third resort may only be hinted at in this place. Who shall decide where antiquaries disagree?
The Saxons were shy of the places they had burnt. Heathens that they were, they generally believed the bloodstained ruins to be haunted by evil spirits, and so built their settlements at some distance away. The site of Bath seems to have been, to some degree, an exception. After lying waste for over a hundred years, it was occupied again, for the fame of its waters had not wholly died out: and “Akemanceaster,” as the Saxons called it, entered upon a new lease of life. At that period, too, the Roman Road through Silchester, Speen, and Marlborough acquired its name of Akeman Street; the names meaning, as some would say, the “Sick Man’s Town,” and the “Sick Man’s Road,” from “aches” and the fame of the place, even then, as a spot at which to cure them. This has been characterized as absurd, and the derivation more plausibly held to be from a corruption of the Roman wordAquæaffixed to the word “maen,” or “man,” meaning “stone” or “place,” and joined to the word “cæster,” a form of the Roman “castrum,” a fortification; thecompound word thus obtained meaning “the Fortified place at the Waters.”
ROYAL VISITS
To follow the fortunes of Akemanceaster, or Bath, as it eventually became, through the Saxon period to the present time would be an exercise too prolonged for these pages. That Kings and Princes and ecclesiastics visited it then we know, and that the Normans built a great Abbey church where the present building of Bath Abbey stands is an easily ascertainable fact; but all the comings and goings of the great ones of the earth during the succeeding centuries would form but a bald catalogue. It is only when we come to the middle of the seventeenth century that we need pick up the thread of the narrative again, at the visits of the Queen of Charles the First in 1644; of Charles the Second, the Duke and Duchess of York, and Prince Rupert in 1663; the Queen of James the Second, 1687; and the Princess Anne, 1692; and as Queen Anne, 1702. Truly, a brilliant list for such a small place as Bath then was.
But these Royal visits did not greatly benefit the place, as we may judge when we read that from 1592 to 1692, Bath had increased by only seventeen houses. Why was this? I conceive it to have been owing to the extraordinary apathy of the people of Bath, who had not provided the slightest accommodation for those who then drank the waters. Of what use was it for Sir Alexander Frayser, physician to Charles the Second, sending all his patients hither instead of to Continental health-resorts like Aix, if they had to drink the waters at a pump standing on the open pavement? and imagine the delights of bathing whenthe Baths were open to the public view, the said public delighting to throw dead cats, offal, and all manner of nastinesses among the bathers!
A local doctor, named Oliver, took up these grievances in 1702, and the Corporation then set about building a Pump Room. This was opened in 1704, and the celebrated Beau Nash having been at about the same period appointed Master of the Ceremonies, the Bath visitors’ list showed a decided improvement.
Let us see what the amusements at “the Bath” had been hitherto. The place was devoid of elegant or attractive amusements, and the only promenade for the fashionables who followed Queen Anne to this then outlandish town was a grove of sycamores in which there was a bowling-green, and a band consisting of two performers, playing a fiddle and a hautboy! The courtiers who had deserted St. James’s to follow her gouty Majesty to the waters must have cursed their folly when they saw those sycamores and heard that band!
Nash altered all this. He was no King Log, and accordingly soon procured a band of music for the new Pump Room; an Assembly Room for the fashionables to take “tay” or chocolate, to dance, play cards, or to gossip in; and devised a code of manners, if not of morals, for the regulation of his little world, which he ruled with a rod of iron. He regulated everything, from the greatest festivities down to the smallest details of dress and deportment, and not the late M. Worth himself was more autocratic as to what should be worn. It is a familiar story how, the “Dutchess” of Queensbury appearing at a dress ball in an apron(an article of dress which, fashionable elsewhere, he had tabooed), he told her to remove it or leave. The apron was one of point lace, and said to have been worth five hundred guineas; but the Duchess removed it humbly enough, for had not this mighty arbiter of fashions declared aprons “fit only for Abigails” (by which name he meant maidservants to be understood), and who was she that she should dispute such an authority? Then, when the Princess Amelia, daughter of George the Third, begged him to allow another dance after eleven o’clock, what did this potentate reply? Did he humbly grant the request? Not at all; he refused, adding that the laws of Bath were, like those of Lycurgus, unalterable.
BEAU NASH
They say that Nash “made” Bath. That, however, is but partly true. Bath was beginning to make its way when he appeared, and he simply exploited the place. The Moment had come and brought the Man with it, and a tight grip he retained over all fashionable functions for over fifty years. He warred with the high-class rowdies who would have made the place a resort of Mohocks, and elevated “Bath manners” into a school of conduct perfectly well known and imitated, at a distance, in other parts of the Kingdom. They were manners of the most elaborate kind, and if attempted nowadays, it is difficult to conceive how the wheels of the world’sbusiness would go round at all. When a meeting took place between a lady and a gentleman, the gentleman inquiring, with a most elaborate bow, after her health, in such terms as “I am vastly honoured to have the pleasure of seeing you; I trust the salubrious airs of the Bath are keeping you in good health;” and the lady replying, “I am much obleeged[7]by your thoughtful inquiries: I protest I am mighty well,” it took quite an appreciable time to descend from those rarefied heights of courtesy and come down to the gossip and scandals which were, we are told, among the principal pastimes of this health-resort in the days of powder and patches.
SEVERE MEASURES
But Nash not only saw to it that his fashionable clients behaved themselves. He had to contend with the camp-followers of fashion who swarmed into Bath. Mendicants infested the streets and made the gorge of those delicate eighteenth-century creatures rise with the sight of their rags and diseases. Nash knew that if he did not administer his kingdom severely, and if he allowed many of these stern realities of the world to obtrude upon the sight of the fastidious, the new-found fortunes of Bath would disappear, and his career with them. So, perhaps from an acute sense of the necessity for self-preservation, rather than from any desire to play the autocrat, he imposed his will so thoroughly that he became an unquestioned ruler. He induced the Corporation, which had entrusted him with these powers, to procure an Act in 1739 for the suppression of the beggars. It begins by reciting that“several loose, idle, and disorderly persons daily resort to the City of Bath, and remain wandering and begging about the streets and other places of the said City, and the suburbs thereof, under pretence of their being resident at The Bath for the benefit of the Mineral and Medical Waters, to the great disturbances of his Maj.’s subjects resorting to the said City. Be it enacted that the Constables, petty Constables, Tything-men, and other Peace Officers of the said City ... are hereby empowered and required to seize and apprehend all such persons who shall be so found wandering, begging, or misbehaving themselves, and them to carry before the Mayor, or some Justice, or Justices, of the Peace for the said City; who shall upon the oath of one sufficient witness, or upon his own view, commit the said person or persons so wandering or begging, to the House of Correction for any time not exceeding the space of 12 Kalendar months, and to be kept at hard labour, and receive correction as loose, idle, and disorderlie persons.”
THE BATHEASTON VASE.
So there was a reverse to the medal, and a very stringent government prevailed behind the careless, butterfly existence of the age, when literary squibs and lampoons and the gay personalities of Anstey’sNew Bath Guideformed the excitements of the Bath.
A curious relic of this artificial life is to be seen in the Victoria Park in the “Batheaston Vase.” This is the name given to a handsome antique placed in a kind of classic temple. The vase was discovered at Tusculum, Cicero’s villa, near Frascati, and brought to England during the last century by Sir John and Lady Miller, who then owned a beautiful villa atBatheaston, one of the favourite resorts of the society of that day. Decorated with garlands of bays, the vase was used at Lady Miller’s receptions as a depository for verses written by her guests. It was presided over by one of the ladies of the party, posing as the Muse of Poetry, who drew the poetic offerings from its recesses, and, reciting them, crowned the authors of the best effort with bays. The opportunity proved too tempting for some of the wilder spirits, who wrote verses of a ribald and satirical character, better calculated to bring a blush to the cheek of the Poetic Muse than to add to either the morals or the harmony of those gatherings.
RALPH ALLEN
Among this careless throng there were a few men of will and purpose. Ralph Allen; the two Woods, father and son, architects; and, somewhat later than them, John Palmer, were bold spirits who changed the aspect of Bath and helped to revolutionize the communications of the country.
One of the greatest historical figures of Bath—perhaps even the greatest figure of all—before whom Bladud, Prince of Britain, at one end of the historic period, and Beau Nash at the other, sink into something like insignificance, is that of Ralph Allen. And yet—so arbitrary is fame—that for every ten who could recite you, off-hand, something of the history and achievements of Allen, a hundred could recount the story of Bladud or of Nash. This is not to say that Bath has forgotten her great man. On the contrary, the citizens show you his “Town House” in Lilliput Alley with no little pride, while his great mansion of Prior Park, to the south of the city, and looking down upon it, remains to this day the most princely edifice for miles around. But however mindful Bath may be of him, and although his classic house on the hillside inevitably recalls him to the memory of Bath people, the fact remains that Allen’s is a name comparatively unknown to Bath’s visitors.
That he deserves a record in these pages must be conceded, for he it was who first established a regular postal service between one provincial town and another, and carried letters along the cross-roads, which, until his time, had been utterly neglected by the Post-office.
It is a singular thing that to Bath should have belonged both Ralph Allen and John Palmer; the men who respectively developed the postal service and founded mail-coaches. It is true that Allen was not a native of Bath. His father was an innkeeper at St. Blazey, in Cornwall, and in that far western county he first learned the routine of a post-office, in the earlyyears of last century. He was eleven years of age when he was placed with his grandmother, the post-mistress of St. Columb, and his industry in keeping the accounts secured him the good word of the district surveyor, who procured the lad an appointment as assistant to the post-master at Bath. Fortune favoured him, and when the post-master died, Allen was appointed in his stead. He had not long become post-master before he matured a scheme for developing the “bye” and cross-road posts, which should bring profit to himself and convenience the community. He proposed to “farm” these posts and pay the Government an annual sum for the privilege, leaving the direct posts between London and the provinces in the hands of the Post-office. A “bye” post was one between provincial towns; a cross-road post was one that lay off the half-dozen post routes then existing.
It was in 1719 that Allen, then but twenty-six years of age, made his proposal to the Government. The postage on those descriptions of letters had hitherto amounted to £400 per annum. He was prepared to give £6000 yearly, and to work the posts for a period of seven years, in consideration of receiving the whole of the revenue during that term. His offer was accepted, and the contract took effect from June 21, 1720. How Allen procured the funds for his enterprise is not known, but he must have had substantial financial support, since his first quarter’s expenditure in establishing his system amounted to no less a sum than £1500, while the salaries of the staff he got together totalled a further £3000 per annum.
Allen was a man of a modest and retiring habit, but with the greatest confidence in himself. He needed all his confidence, and all the untiring industry and vigilance that were his, for when three years of the seven had expired he found himself a loser by a small amount, and when the contract lapsed, his gain was quite inappreciable. Yet he renewed it for another seven years, convinced that the better facilities he had provided for the carriage of letters must needs lead to great developments. He was right: the correspondence of the country grew, and in 1741 we find him bidding £17,500 per annum for another term of seven years. He continued thus until his death in 1764, in receipt, for many years, of an income of not less than £12,000 a year on his post-office enterprise alone.
POSTAL SERVICES
Those were the times of the real post-boys. All letters were carried by mounted messengers, since the stage-coaches then running (where they existed at all!) were not fast enough, frequent enough, or sufficiently safe for the purpose. A side-light is thrown upon the average “speed” of these stage-coaches, not then considered speedy enough, by the onerous condition in Allen’s contract that the mails were to be carried by his post-boys “at not less than five miles an hour.”
Allen was in the forefront of Bath enterprise, and was associated with John Wood, the elder of the two architects of that name, in rebuilding the city. Before their time it had been a place of mean streets and winding alleys, the out-at-elbows remains of Gothic times. As a result of their labours, and the laboursof their immediate successors, Bath renewed her youth in a revived Classicism. Among the monuments of that time, Prior Park is conspicuous. It was built by John Wood in 1743 for Allen, whose great object in erecting this veritable palace was to demonstrate the qualities of the building-stone on his Combe Down property. Here he entertained some of the foremost literary men of his time: Pope, Fielding, Warburton; and is enshrined by Fielding as “Squire Allworthy” in “Tom Jones,” and by Pope in the lines—
“Let low-born Allen, with ingenuous shame,Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”
The situation, and the front elevation of Prior Park, form together, perhaps, the noblest grouping of classic architecture and romantic scenery to be found in England. It was a time tinged with romanticism of an artificial kind which generally showed itself in affected and objectionable ways. But this artificiality was a matter of deportment merely. Literature was practised then, and Architecture flourished in the land.
PRIOR PARK.
“SHAM CASTLE”
There is another work of Allen’s crowning the hill at Bathwick, which serves to show at once the romantic and the artificial signs of the times. Allen looked out from the windows of his Town House upon the bare hilltop, and thought how the view would have been improved had there been a ruined castle showing against the sky-line. Accordingly he built such an one, and there it is to-day; and if you don’t know it to be a ruin built to order, it isvery impressive indeed—at a distance. If, however, you know it to be a Sham Castle (which, by the way, is the name of it), romance immediately flies, abashed. There it stands, on its wind-swept heights, naked and unashamed; a frontage with nothing behind it; an empty mask, with crossbow slits from which arrows never were discharged, and battlements scarce more substantial than the pasteboard turrets that furnish the stage in romantic drama. If hypocrisy be indeed the homage that Vice pays to Virtue; then, by parallel reasoning, here is homage of the most flattering kind paid to Gothicism by an age that above all things prided itself on the way it fulfilled its classic ideals. It was a common failing of the time; and possibly, if attention had beencalled to it, a ready answer might have been found in the retort that “consistency is the bugbear of little minds.”
“SHAM CASTLE.”
But to return to the Beau, who seems to represent Bath more fully than any other person connected with its history. In his old age Nash fell upon evil times. Ruined by his own folly and extravagance, he had no opportunities of retrieving the position, for he had lived to see the friends of his more fortunate era pass away, and to witness the arrival of a younger generation which regarded his laws with indifference, if not with open contempt. His last years were eked out with the aid of a pittance of £10 a month given him by the Corporation of the city for which he had done so much, and a new Master of the Ceremonies presently reigned in his stead.
In his declining days, Bath had altogether changed from the place it had been when in the zenith of his power. It had, for one thing, grown out of all knowledge, architecturally. The Grand Circus, parades, terraces, squares, all manner of finely designed houses, had sprung up. Smollett, in “Humphrey Clinker,” makes Squire Bramble peevishly recount those changes, and say, “The same artist who planned the Circus has likewise projected a crescent: when that is finished, we shall probably have a star; and those who are living thirty years hence mayperhaps see all the signs of the zodiac exhibited in architecture at Bath.”
BATH SOCIETY
Then the select society of fifty years before had given place to a very mixed concourse, if we are to believe the same authority: “Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself at Bath, as in the very focus of observation. Clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, negro-drivers, and hucksters, from our American plantations, enriched they know not how; agents, commissaries, and contractors, who have fattened, in two successive wars, on the blood of the nation; usurers, brokers, and jobbers of every kind; men of low birth, and no breeding, have found themselves suddenly translated into a state of affluence, unknown to former ages; and no wonder that their brains should be intoxicated with pride, vanity, and presumption. Knowing no other criterion of greatness but the ostentation of wealth, they discharge their affluence, without taste or conduct, through every channel of the most absurd extravagance; and all of them hurry to Bath, because here, without any further qualification, they can mingle with the princes and nobles of the land. Even the wives and daughters of low tradesmen, who, like shovel-nosed sharks, prey on the blubber of those uncouth whales of fortune, are infected with the same rage of displaying their importance; and the slightest indisposition serves them for a pretext to insist on being conveyed to Bath, where they may hobble country-dances and cotillons among lordlings, squires,counsellors, and clergy. These delicate creatures from Bedfordbury, Butcher-row, Crutched-friars, and Botolph-lane, cannot breathe in the gross air of the lower town, or conform to the vulgar rules of a common lodging-house: the husband, therefore, must provide an entire house or elegant apartments in the new buildings. Such is the composition of what is called fashionable company at Bath.”
What, however, of the literary celebrities, visitors or residents, or of the statesmen, the naval and military commanders, who were frequenting Bath at the time when that jaundiced criticism was penned. Dr. Johnson was then taking the waters, which are said by a later authority to taste of “warm smoothin’-irons;” Gainsborough alternately painted and bathed; while the Earl of Chatham and his still greater son; Nelson, Wolfe, Sheridan, and Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Southey, Jane Austin, and Landor, helped to sustain the repute of this, which Landor called the next most beautiful place in the world to Florence, well on into the next century.
THE BATH OF LONG AGO
A diarist of over a century ago tells us how he went to Bath, and what he saw and did there. This was the Reverend Thomas Campbell, a lively Irishman (notwithstanding his Scottish name), who journeyed to England in 1775, and visited Johnson and other literary bigwigs in London, coming to Bath on April 28, to take the waters. The coach set out from theNew Church in the Strand (by which, no doubt, Saint Mary-le-Strand is indicated) at six o’clock in the morning, and came to Speenhamland (“Spinomland,” says the clergyman in his diary), where they lay. The country, he remarks, was very rich from London to this place, yet it was so level that there was scarce a good prospect the whole way, unless Clieveden, near Maidenhead Bridge could be so called.
OLD PULTENEY BRIDGE.
When the coach resumed its journey the next day—the passengers, doubtless, lightened in pocket by that “long bill” of the “Pelican” at Speenhamland—the bleakness of Marlborough Downs communicated itself to the air, and from Newbury to Cottenham,[8]a distance of nearly thirty miles, the countryside was very bare of trees and herbage, in addition to being theworst land this Irishman had seen in England, and certainly swarming with beggars. For miles together the coach was pursued by them, from two to nine at a time, almost all of them children. They were more importunate than those of Ireland, oreventhose in Wales. Poor Taffy!
When our traveller reached Bath he rejoiced greatly, and, the next day being Sunday, went to the Abbey Church with other fashionables, and heard a sorry discourse, wretchedly delivered. Afterwards, in the Pump Room, where the yawning visitors were assembled, he met Lady Molyneux, who asked him to dinner, where he spent the pleasantest day since he came to England, for there were five or six lively Irish girls who sang and danced, and did everything but agree among themselves. “Women,” remarks our diarist, “are certainly more envious than men, or at least they discover it upon more trifling occasions, and they cannot bear with patience that one of their party should obtain a preference of attention; this was thoroughly exemplified this day. One of these, who was a pretty little coquet, went home after dinner to dress for the Rooms, and her colour was certainly altered on returning for tea; they all fell into a titter, and one of them (who was herself painted, as I conceived) cried out, ‘Heavens, look at her cheeks!’” This, truly, was unkind, and more certainly indiscreet. The young lady with the startling cheeks subsequently sang a song, which somewhat surprised the clergyman, from its breadth of idea, but the other ladies, and matrons too, “were kicking with laughter.” Presently they all went home, the ladies mostaffectionate toward one another, and, says Mr. Campbell, “it is amazing what pleasure women find in kissing each other, for they do smack amazingly.”
A TORY PROPHECY
The worthy clergyman seems to have been introduced to the less dignified circles of fashion. The general tone of the more exclusive sets was by no means so lively, for it was about this time that the Indian nabobs, the Civil servants, the retired officers of the Army and Navy and the East India Company began to discover Bath and to settle there, filling the place with Toryism and grumblings about “the services going to the dogs, sir.” Here is a Tory prophecy, not yet verified: “There is one comfort I cannot have at Bath,” said the Duke of Northumberland in 1779. “I like to read the newspapers at breakfast, and at Bath the post does not come in till one o’clock; that is a drawback to my pleasure.” “So,” said Lord Mansfield, “your grace likes thecomfortof reading the newspapers—thecomfortof reading the newspapers! Mark my words. A little sooner or later those newspapers will most assuredly write the Dukes of Northumberland out of their titles and possessions, and the country out of its king. Mark my words, for this will happen.”
As a prophecy, it may readily be conceded that this is an extremely bad shot, and that Lord Mansfield by no means, either figuratively or literally, inherited the mantle of Elijah. A hundred and twenty years have passed since then, and there are still dukes who have not been reduced to sweep crossings or keep chandlers’ shops. True, if they have not come down so far in the world, it is in somecases owing to American dollars; but that is not the doing of the newspapers, one way or the other. As I have just remarked, that was a Tory prophecy, and though my Toryism is, I trust, of the most mediæval and crusted kind, and wholly beyond cavil, it may frankly be admitted here that the Party never has shone in prophecy. Nor, for that matter, has any party. The only seers are the leader-writers, and they never see beyond their noses.
So Principalities and Powers and Titles are at least as powerful as ever they were, and—cynical fact—certain newspaper proprietors have been raised to the House of Peers; a thing, we may be sure, that Lord Mansfield never contemplated.
Many other things, however, have happened in the meanwhile. Agitation does not pay so well as it did. The newspapers which were to do such dreadful things have greatly increased in number, if not in power, and the contents of them have changed radically; other times, other manners, as a glance at even the advertisements of that date will prove.
OLD ADVERTISEMENTS
The advertisement columns of a paper just over a century old often afford amusement to those who come upon them. The manners and customs of those times and these are so different that the very quaintness of our forefathers’ attitude of mind brings a smile upon our faces, although those eighteenth-century forbears of ours were really very serious people indeed,and took life, for the most part, like a dose of medicine, while we are apt to go to the other extreme and take it like champagne. No doubt our great-great-grandfathers would think the most sedate of us not a little wild could they witness how we live to-day, while, in our turn, we look back upon their times, and think times and people alike brutal. We wonder what sort of people they were who could, in this England of ours, offer a “Black boy for sale—docile and obedient. Answers to the name of Peter.” Yet such advertisements were common on the front page of our newspapers once upon a time. Slavery was then a matter of course, and to have a black page for her very own was my lady’s hall-mark of “quality.” Sometimes such advertisements were embellished with little figures supposed to represent nigger-boys.
The race of African negroes has either improved in good looks since then, or else the engravers of that day were not very careful in portraiture. But, indeed, black pages were almost as common as pet dogs, and were advertised in very much the same way, and these blocks were not portraits at all, but just printers’ stock illustrations. The printer of a hundred years ago kept a curious little assortment of advertisement blocks. If a ship was about to sail for the colonies, it was advertised for weeks beforehand, and in a corner of the announcement was placed something that purported to be an illustration of the vessel. It generally looked like a Spanish galleon strayed from the Armada of two hundred years previously, and passengers would have been quite justified in not booking berths on so antiquated an affair.
But perhaps the most amusing advertisements are the “Run away from his Home” and the “Stolen” varieties, also adorned with illustrations. It speaks very little for the morality of that age when we say that the ordinary newspaper printer also kept these blocks in stock.
And, indeed, they seem to have frequently been required. Here is one example out of many in the newspapers of that age:—
“StolenOut of the Stable ofRobert Colgate,The 24th instant August, 1780A black horse, rising five years old, thirteen Hands and a Half High, Star in his forehead, small Ears, Mane stands up rough, being lately rubbed off, long Tail, hangs his Tongue out often on the Road, good Carriage; also a good Saddle, marked Barnard, with Spring Stumps.“Whoever gives Information, so that the Said Horse may be had again, shall receiveTwo Guineas Reward.”
“StolenOut of the Stable ofRobert Colgate,The 24th instant August, 1780
A black horse, rising five years old, thirteen Hands and a Half High, Star in his forehead, small Ears, Mane stands up rough, being lately rubbed off, long Tail, hangs his Tongue out often on the Road, good Carriage; also a good Saddle, marked Barnard, with Spring Stumps.
“Whoever gives Information, so that the Said Horse may be had again, shall receiveTwo Guineas Reward.”
It would scarcely be possible to identify the stolen horse from the accompanying cut. He has no long tail, as described in the advertisement, and his tonguedoesn’thang out. Moreover, he is burdened with a quite imaginary thief, who has a property devil whipping him on. The “awful example” hanging from the gibbet appears to be made of bolsters, and to have had, not a drop too much, but scarcely enough.
The party with hands bigger than his head, who is here seen striking a dramatic attitude, is not a Howling Swell, although he wears his hair parted in the middle. Appearances here (as usually was the case in the old advertisements) are deceptive, and so far from being a Swell, Howling or otherwise, he is really a Heartless Villain, for he is one of two labourers who have—
“Run Away.And left their families chargeable to the Parish ofClaverton,Thomas Garner, Labourer, about five feet seven or eight Inches high; wears his own Hair, of a light Brown Complexion; hath lately, or is now belonging to the Militia.“AndEdward Browning, Labourer, about five Feet four or five Inches high, wears his own Hair, of a dark complexion; was one of Lord North’s Soldiers in the last War.“Whoever will apprehend either, or both of them, and conduct them to the Parish Officers of Claverton aforesaid, shall receiveHalf a Guineafor each or either of them, andThreepenceper Mile for every Mile they shall travel with them.”
“Run Away.
And left their families chargeable to the Parish ofClaverton,
Thomas Garner, Labourer, about five feet seven or eight Inches high; wears his own Hair, of a light Brown Complexion; hath lately, or is now belonging to the Militia.
“AndEdward Browning, Labourer, about five Feet four or five Inches high, wears his own Hair, of a dark complexion; was one of Lord North’s Soldiers in the last War.
“Whoever will apprehend either, or both of them, and conduct them to the Parish Officers of Claverton aforesaid, shall receiveHalf a Guineafor each or either of them, andThreepenceper Mile for every Mile they shall travel with them.”
History does not relate whether or no these gay deceivers were ever captured. If those who sought them relied upon the illustration, it would seem quite likely that they never were!
THE ABBEY
The Abbey is the very centre of Bath. Round it cluster the Municipal Offices, the Baths, and the Pump Room, and along the broad pavements invalidsare drawn in Bath chairs—one of the five articles with which the name of the City is indissolubly linked. When Bath chairs, Bath chaps, Bath stone, and Bath buns are no longer so distinguished, then will come the final crash. One need not insist so greatly upon Bath Olivers, because they are not in every one’s mouth, either literally or figuratively; although, to be sure, they are much more exclusively a local product than “Bath” buns; while “Bath” bricks are not made at Bath, but at Bridgewater.
The surroundings of Bath Abbey are strikingly Continental in appearance, for that great church stands in a flaggedplace, instead of being set in a green and shady close, as usually is the case in England. Its surroundings have always been thronged, from the time when the Flying Machines crawled, to when the last of the mail coaches drew up in front of the “White Lion,” in the Market Place hard by, or at the “White Hart,” which stood until 1866, where the “Grand Pump Room” Hotel now rises. The story of the Abbey is too long for these pages; but it is remarkable at once for being one of the very latest Gothic buildings in the country; for its possessing windows so large and so many that it has been called the “Lantern of England;” for its central tower, which is not square, being eleven feet narrower on its north and south sides than those to the east and west; and for the prodigious number of small marble and stone memorial tablets on its interior walls—tablets so many that they gave rise to the famous epigram by Quin:—
“These walls, so full of monument and bust,Shew how Bath waters serve to lay the dust.”
BATH ABBEY: THE WEST FRONT.
Quite distinguished dust it is, too. Noblemen and dames of high degree; Admirals of the Blue, the White, the Red; legal, and military, and clerical dignitaries, and all manner of Civil servants, mostly of the mid-eighteenth century, and chiefly hailing from India and the Colonies, as described with much pomp and circumstance on their cenotaphs which so thickly cover the walls, and spoil the architectural effect. “The Bath,” was the solace of their kind, returning from the Tropics with nutmeg livers, gout, and autocratic ways. At “the Bath” they resided on half-pay, drank the waters, supported the local doctors, quarrelled with their neighbours, and consistently damned all “new-fangled notions,” until death laid them by the heels.
There must have been—if we are capable of believing their epitaphs—some paragons of all the virtues in those times, and Bath seems to have claimed them all. Here, for instance, is Alicia, Countess of Erroll, “in whom was combined every virtue that could adorn human nature.” She died young; the world is too wicked for such.