CHAPTERVIII.

CHAPTERVIII.THE BATH.... Quadrante lavatum,Rex ibis.Hor.Sat.i.3.It is amusing to hear people talk of cleanliness as they would of charity or sobriety. A man can no more be clean than learned by impulse, and no more by his will understand cleanliness than solve equations. Cleanliness has the characters of virtue and of vice—it is at once beneficial and seductive. It is also a science and an art, for it has an order which has to be taught, and it requires dexterity and implements. It has its prejudices and superstitions: it abhors what is not like itself, and clings to its practices under a secret dread of punishment and fear of sin. It has its mysteries and its instincts: it regards not the eye or favour of man, and follows the bent of its nature without troubling itself with reasons for what it does; it has its charities and its franchises: the poorest is not without the reach of its aid, nor the most powerful strong enough to infringe its rights.[17]It is suited to every condition: men and women, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the hale and the sick, the sane and the insane: the savage can enjoy it no less than the refined. The most polished have prized it as the chief profit of art; the simple receive it as the luxury of Nature—a cheap solace for the cares of life, and a harmless medicament for the infirmities of man.The philosopher prized it as essential to happiness,[18]the austere to virtue, the dissolute to vice.[19]To corrupt Greece and Rome it furnished a gratification that was innocent; to the rigid sectarians of the Koran an observance that was seductive; multiplying the sensibilities and strengthening the frame, it increased to all the value of life. No sacrifice is required for its possession. Nothing has to be given up in exchange: it is pure gain to have, sheer loss to want. Like the light of heaven, those only walk not in it who are blind. Where not practised, it is not inducements that are wanting, but knowledge: “they don’t know how.”[20]Our body is a fountain of impurities, to which man is more subject than the beast.[21]The body of man, far more than that of the brutes, is exposed to be contaminated; and by an artificial mode of life and food, he has further multiplied his frailties. By casing his body in closely-fitting clothes—integuments rather than covering—he has shut out the purifying elements. Without the means of cleanliness of the brute, he is also without the guidance of its instinct; what then, if in the culture of his body, he should lose the light of reason? If reason and not instinct be his portion, it is because he is endowed with a mechanism, to keep which in order instinct would not suffice. What if that mechanism receive at his hands not such care as would be bestowed upon it, if it belonged to the beast of the field or the bird of the air!What filth is to the body, error is to the mind; and therefore if we are to use our reason in regard to the former, we must have a standard of cleanliness as well as of truth; such a rule we can owe neither to freak nor fashion. We must look for one tested by long experience and fixed from ancient days:—this standard isTHE BATH. This is no ideal one; it is at once theory and performance; he who has gone through it, knows what it is to be clean because he is cleansed. I shall use as synonymous the words, “cleanliness,” and the “bath.”I must beg the reader to dismiss from his mind every idea connected with that word: unless I thought he would and could do so, I should persist in speaking ofThermæ,BalneumorHamâm, but I trust I may venture to naturalize, in its true sense, the word in our tongue as a step to naturalise the thing in our habits.A people who know neither Latin nor Greek have preserved this great monument of antiquity on the soil of Europe, and present to us who teach our children only Latin and Greek, this institution in all its Roman grandeur, and its Grecian taste. The bath, when first seen by the Turks, was a practice of their enemies, religious and political; they were themselves the filthiest of mortals; they had even instituted filth by laws and consecrated it by maxim.[22]Yet no sooner did they see the bath than they adopted it; made it a rule of their society, a necessary adjunct to every settlement; and Princes and Sultans endowed such institutions for the honour of their name.[23]In adopting it, they purified it from immorality and excess, and carrying the art of cleanliness to the highest perfection, have made themselves thereby the most sober-minded and contented amongst the nations of the earth. This arose from no native disposition towards cleanliness, but from the simplicity of their character and the poverty of their tongue.[24]They had no fallacious term into which to convert it, and no preconceived ideas by which to explain it. Knowing they were dirty, they became clean; having common sense, they did not rush on a new device, or set up either a “water cure,” or a joint-stock washing company; but carefully considered and prudently adopted what the experience of former ages presented to their hands.I have said that the Saracens, like the Romans, have left behind them,temples,fortresses, andbaths: national security reared its battlements, public faith its domes, and cleanliness, too, required its structures, and without these no more could it exist, than defence or worship. I shall not weary the reader with ground-plans or “elevations,” and shall confine myself to the leading features, in so far as they are connected with use. They are vast and of costly materials, from their very nature. Before describing the Moorish bath, I must request the reader to accompany me through the bath as it is used by the Turks, which, as more complete and detailed, is more intelligible.The operation consists of various parts: first, theseasoning of the body; second, themanipulation of the muscles; third, thepeeling of the epidermis; fourth, thesoaping, and the patient is then conducted tothe bed of repose. These are the five acts of the drama. There are three essential apartments in the building: a great hall ormustaby, open to the outer air; a middle chamber, where the heat is moderate; the inner hall, which is properly thethermæ. The first scene is acted in the middle chamber; the next three in the inner chamber, and the last in the outer hall. The time occupied is from two to four hours, and the operation is repeated once a week.On raising the curtain which covers the entrance to the street, you find yourself in a hall circular, octagonal, or square, covered with a dome open in the centre: it may be one hundred feet in height; the Pantheon of Rome may be taken as a model. This is theapodyterium,conclaveorspoliatoriumof the Romans. In the middle, a basin of water, the “sea” of the Jews, the “piscinum” of the Romans, is raised by masonry about four feet; a fountain plays in the centre. Plants, sometimes trellises, are trained over or around the fountain, and by it is placed the stall to supply coffee, pipes, or nargelles. All round there is a platform, varying in breadth from four to twelve feet, and raised about three; here couches are placed, which I shall presently describe. You are conducted to an unoccupied couch to undress; your clothes are folded and deposited in a napkin and tied up; you are arrayed in the bathing costume, which consists of three towels about two yards long and under a yard in width, thickened in the centre with pendant loops of the thread, so as to absorb the moisture, soft and rough without being flabby or hard, with broad borders in blue or red of raw silk. This gives to this costume an air of society, and takes from it the stamp of the laundry or wash-house. One is wrapped with an easy fold round the head, so as to form a high and peculiar, but not ungraceful turban; the second is bound round the loins, and falls to the middle of the leg; this is the ordinary costume of the attendants in the bath, and appears to be the costume known in antiquity asπερίζωμα,præcinctorium, andsubligaculum, and which have been of difficult interpretation, as implying at once a belt and a clothing. The third is thrown over the shoulder like a scarf: they are calledPistumal, as are all towels, but the proper name isFuta, a word borrowed, as the stuff is, from Morocco. While you change your linen, two attendants hold a cloth before you. In these operations, which appear to dispense of necessity with clothing and concealment, the same scrupulous attention is observed. It extends to the smallest children. I have been on a bathing excursion to the sea-side, where a child under four years was disappointed of his dip because his bathing drawers had been forgotten. There is nothing which more shocks an Eastern than our want of decorum; and I have known instances of servants assigning this as a reason for refusing to remain in Europe, or to come to it.Thus attired, you step down from the platform height; wooden pattens,—nalmain Turkish,cob cobin Arabic,—are placed for your feet, to keep you off the hot floors, and the dirty water running off by the entrances and passages; two attendants take you, one by each arm above the elbow—walking behind and holding you. The slamming doors are pushed open, and you enter the region of steam.Each person is preceded by a mattress and a cushion, which are removed the moment he has done with them, that they may not get damp. The apartment he now enters is low and small; very little light is admitted; sometimes, indeed, the day is excluded, and the small flicker of a lamp enables you to perceive indistinctly its form and occupants. The temperature is moderate, the moisture slight, the marble floor on both sides is raised about eighteen inches, the lower and centre part being the passage between the two halls. This is thetepidarium. Against the wall your mattress and cushion are placed, the rest of the chamber being similarly occupied: the attendants now bring coffee, and serve pipes. The object sought in this apartment is a natural and gentle flow of perspiration; to this are adapted the subdued temperature and moisture; for this the clothing is required, and the coffee and pipe; and, in addition, a delicate manipulation is undergone, which does not amount to shampooing: the sombre air of the apartment calms the senses, and shuts out the external world.[25]During the subsequent parts of the operation, you are either too busy or too abstracted for society; the bath is essentially sociable, and this is the portion of it so appropriated—this is the time and place where a stranger makes acquaintance with a town or village. Whilst so engaged, a boy kneels at your feet and chafes them, or behind your cushion, at times touching or tapping you on the neck, arm, or shoulder, in a manner which causes the perspiration to start.2nd Act.—You now take your turn for entering the inner chamber: there is in this point no respect for persons, and rank gives no precedence,[26]but you do not move until the bathman, thetellackof the Turks, thenekaësof the Arabs, thetractatorof the Romans, has passed his hand under your bathing linen, and is satisfied that your skin is in a proper state. He then takes you by the arm as before, your feet are again pushed into the pattens, the slamming door of the inner region is pulled back, and you are ushered into theadytum,—a space such as the centre dome of a cathedral, filled—not with dull and heavy steam—but with gauzy and mottled vapour, through which the spectre-like inhabitants appear, by the light of tinted rays, which, from stars of stained glass in the vault, struggle to reach the pavement, through the curling mists. The song, the not unfrequent shout, the clapping, not of hands, but sides;[27]the splashing of water and clank of brazen bowls reveals the humour and occupation of the inmates, who, here divested of all covering save the scarf round the loins, with no distinction between bathers and attendants, and with heads as bare as bodies and legs, are seen passing to and fro through the mist, or squatted or stretched out on the slabs, exhibiting the wildest contortions, or bending over one another, and appearing to inflict and to endure torture. A stranger might be in doubt whether he beheld a foundry or Tartarus; whether the Athenian gymnasia were restored, or he had entered some undetected vault of the Inquisition. That is thesudatorium. The steam is raised by throwing water on the floor,[28]and its clearness comes from the equal temperature of the air and walls.Under the dome there is an extensive platform of marble slabs: on this you get up; the clothes are taken from your head and shoulders; one is spread for you to lie on, the other is rolled for your head; you lie down on your back; the tillak (two, if the operation is properly performed) kneels at your side, and bending over, gripes and presses your chest, arms, and legs, passing from part to part, like a bird shifting its place on a perch. He brings his whole weight on you with a jerk, follows the line of muscle with anatomical thumb,[29]draws the open hand strongly over the surface, particularly round the shoulder, turning you half up in so doing; stands with his feet on the thighs and on the chest and slips down the ribs; then up again three times; and lastly, doubling your arms one after the other on the chest, pushes with both hands down, beginning at the elbow, and then, putting an arm under the back and applying his chest to your crossed elbows, rolls on you across till you crack. You are now turned on your face, and, in addition to the operation above described, he works his elbow round the edges of your shoulder-blade, and with the heel plies hard the angle of the neck; he concludes by hauling the body half up by each arm successively, while he stands with one foot on the opposite thigh.[30]You are then raised for a moment to a sitting posture, and a contortion given to the small of the back with the knee, and a jerk to the neck by the two hands holding the temples.3rd Act.—Round the sides there are cocks for hot and cold water over marble basins, a couple of feet in diameter, where you mix to the temperature you wish. You are now seated on a board on the floor at one of these fountains, with a copper cup[31]to throw water over you when wanted. Thetellakputs on the glove—it is of camel’s hair, not the horrid things recently brought forth in England. He stands over you; you bend down to him, and he commences from the nape of the neck in long sweeps down the back till he has started the skin; he coaxes it into rolls, keeping them in and up till within his hand they gather volume and length; he then successively strikes and brushes them away, and they fall right and left as if spilt from a dish of macaroni. The dead matter which will accumulate in a week forms, when dry, a ball of the size of the fist. I once collected it, and had it dried—it is like a ball of chalk: this was the purpose for which thestrigilwas used. In our ignorance we have imagined it to be a horse-scraper to clear off the perspiration, or for other purposes equally absurd.[32]4th Act.—Hitherto soap has not touched the skin. By it, however strange it may appear to us,[33]the operation would be spoiled—the shampooing would be impossible, and the epidermis would not come off; this I know by experience. The explanation may be, that the alkali of the soap combines chemically with the oily matter, and the epidermis loses the consistency it must have to be detached by rolling. A large wooden bowl is now brought; in it is a lump of soap with a sort of powder-puff ofliff,[34]for lathering. Beginning by the head, the body is copiously soaped and washed twice, and part of the contents of the bowl is left for you to conclude and complete the operation yourself. Then approaches an acolyte, with a pile of hot foldedfutason his head, he holding a dry cloth spread out in front—you rise, having detached the cloth from your waist, and holding it before you: at that moment another attendant dashes on you a bowl of hot water. You drop your wet cloth; the dry one is passed round your waist, another over your shoulders; each arm is seized; you are led a step or two and seated; the shoulder cloth is taken off, another put on, the first over it; another is folded round the head; your feet are already in the wooden pattens. You are wished health; you return the salute, rise, and are conducted by both arms to the outer hall.I must not here omit all mention of an interlude in which Europeans take no part. The Mussulmans get rid of superfluous hair by shaving or depilation.[35]The depilatory is composed of orpiment and quick lime, called in Turkishot, in Arabicdewa. The bather retires to a cell without door, but at the entrance of which he suspends his waist towel; the bath-man brings him a razor, if he prefers it, or a lump of theotabout the size of a walnut. In two or three minutes after applying it the hair is ready to come off, and a couple of bowls of water leave the skin entirely bare, not without a flush from the corrosiveness of the preparation.[36]The platform round the hall is raised and divided by low balustrades into little compartments, where the couches of repose are arranged, so that while having the uninterrupted view all round, parties or families may be by themselves. This is the time and place for meals. The bather having reached this apartment is conducted to the edge of the platform, to which there is only one high step. You drop the wooden patten, and on the matting a towel is spread anticipating your foot-fall. The couch is in the form of a letter M.[37]spread out, and as you rest on it the weight is everywhere directly supported—every tendon, every muscle is relaxed; the mattress fitting, as it were, into the skeleton: there is total inaction, and the body appears to be suspended.[38]The attendants then re-appear, and gliding like noiseless shadows, stand in a row before you. The coffee is poured out and presented: the pipe follows; or, if so disposed, you may have sherbet or fruit; the sweet or water melons are preferred, and they come in piles of lumps large enough for a mouthful; or you may send and get kebobs on a skewer; and if inclined to make a positive meal at the bath, this is the time.The hall is open to the heavens, but nevertheless a boy with a fan of feathers, or a napkin, drives the cool air upon you. The Turks have given up the cold immersion of the Romans, yet so much as this they have retained of it, and which realizes the end which the Romans had in view to prevent the after breaking out of the perspiration; but it is still a practice amongst the Turks to have cold water thrown upon the feet. The nails of hands and feet are dexterously pared with a sort of oblique chisel; any callosities that remain on the feet are rubbed down: during this time the linen is twice changed.[39]These operations do not interrupt the chafing of the soles,[40]and the gentle putting on of the outside of the folds of linen which I have mentioned in the first stage. The body has come forth shining like alabaster, fragrant as the cistus, sleek as satin, and soft as velvet. The touch of your own skin is electric. Buffon has a wonderful description of Adam’s surprise and delight at his first touch of himself. It is the description of the human sense when the body is brought back to its purity. The body thus renewed, the spirit wanders abroad, and reviewing its tenement rejoices to find it clean and tranquil. There is an intoxication or dream that lifts you out of the flesh, and yet a sense of life and consciousness that spreads through every member. Each breastful of air seems to pass, not to the heart but to the brain, and to quench, not the pulsations of the one, but the fancies of the other. That exaltation which requires the slumber of the senses—that vividness of sense that drowns the visions of the spirit—are simultaneously engaged in calm and unspeakable luxury: you condense the pleasures of many scenes, and enjoy in an hour the existence of years.But “this too will pass.”[41]The visions fade, the speed of the blood thickens, the breath of the pores is checked, the crispness of the skin returns, the fountains of strength are opened; you seek again the world and its toils; and those who experience these effects and vicissitudes for the first time exclaim, “I feel as if I could leap over the moon.” Paying your pence according to the tariff of your deserts, you walk forth a king from the gates which you had entered a beggar.This chief of luxuries is common, in a barbarous land and under a despotism, to every man, woman, and child; to the poorest as to the richest, and to the richest no otherwise and no better than to the poorest.[42]But how is it paid for? How can it be within the reach of the poor? They pay according to their means. What each person gives is put into a common stock; the box is opened once a week, and the distribution of the contents is made according to a scale: the master of the bath comes in for his share just like the rest. A person of distinction will give a pound or more; the common price that, at Constantinople, a tradesman would pay, was from tenpence to a shilling, workmen from twopence to threepence. In a village near Constantinople, where I spent some months, the charge for men was a halfpenny,[43]for women three farthings. A poor person will lay down a few parahs to show that he has not more to give, and where the poor man is so treated he will give as much as he can. He will not, like the poor Roman, have access alone, but his cup of coffee and a portion of the service like the rest.[44]Such rules are not to be established, but such habits may be destroyed by laws.This I have observed, that wherever the bath is used it is not confined to any class of the community, as if it was felt to be too good a thing to be denied to any.I must now conduct the reader into the Moorish bath. First, there was no bath linen. They go in naked. Then there is but one room, under which there is an oven, and a pot, open into the bath, is boiling on the fire below. There were no pattens—the floor burning hot—so we got boards. At once the operation commenced, which is analogous to the glove. There was a dish of gazule, for the shampooer to rub his hands in. I was seated on the board, with my legs straight out before me; the shampooer seated himself on the same board behind me, stretching out his legs. He then made me close my fingers upon the toes of his feet, by which he got a purchase against me, and rubbing his hands in the gazule, commenced upon the middle of my back, with a sharp motion up and down, between beating and rubbing, his hands working in opposite directions. After rubbing in this way the back, he pulled my arms through his own and through each other, twisting me about in the most extraordinary manner, and drawing his fingers across the region of the diaphragm, so as to make me, a practised bather, shriek. After rubbing in this way the skin, and stretching at the same time the joints of my upper body, he came and placed himself at my feet, dealing with my legs in like manner. Then thrice taking each leg and lifting it up, he placed his head under the calf, and raising himself, scraped the leg as with a rough brush, for his shaved head had the grain downwards. The operation concluded by his biting my heel.The bath becomes a second nature, and long privation so increases the zest, that I was not disposed to be critical; but, if by an effort of the imagination I could transport the Moorish bath to Constantinople, and had then to choose between the hamâm of Eshi Serai or my own at home, and this one of the Moors, I must say, I never should see the inside of a Moorish bath again. It certainly does clear off the epidermis, work the flesh, excite the skin, set at work the absorbent and exuding vessels, raise the temperature, apply moisture;—but the refinements and luxuries are wanting.A great deal of learning has been expended upon the baths of the ancients, and a melancholy exhibition it is—so much acuteness and research, and no profit. The details of these wonderful structures, the evidences of their usefulness, have prompted no prince, no people of Europe to imitate them, and so acquire honour for the one, health for the other. The writers, indeed, present not living practices, but cold and ill-assorted details, as men must do who profess to describe what they themselves do not comprehend. From what I have said, the identity of the Turkish bath, with that of the Romans, will be at once perceived, and the apparent discrepancies and differences explained. Theapodyteriumis themustabyor entrance-hall; after this comes the sweating-apartment, subdivided by difference of degrees. Then two operations are performed, shampooing, and the clearing off of the epidermis. The Romans had in thetepidariumand thesudatoriumdistinct attendants for the two operations; the first shampooer receiving the appropriate name oftractator; the others, who used the strigil, which was equivalent to the glove, being calledsuppetones. The appearance of the strigil in no way alters the character of the operation. They used sponges also for rubbing down, like the Moorish gazule. They used no soap; neither do the Moors;—the Turks use it after the operation is concluded. TheLaconicumI understood when I saw the Moorish bath, with the pot of water, heated from the fire below, boiling up into the bath. I then recollected that there is in the Turkish baths an opening, by which the steam from the boilers can be let in, although not frequently so used, nor equally placed within observation. Many of the Turkish baths have, doubtless, been originally Greek. The change in respect to the use of cold water is compensated for[45]by the cold air of the outer room, into which the Turks come, and is preserved in the partial use of cold water for the feet. The hot-water reservoirs, thelabrumandsolium, are still to be seen in the private baths; they are in those of the Alhambra. When used, the character of running water, an essential point among the Turks, is given to them, by a hole being left below, which is unplugged, and a stream kept running in above from a cock. It would appear that the Romans followed the same method. Thepiscinumof the Romans is found in the Moorish gardens. In the use of depilatories, or the shaving off the hair, the practice of the Turks is exactly that of the Romans; the parts of the bath appropriated to that purpose being the same. Theoleareaare alone wanting. The Mussulmans would consider this smearing of the body with oil or ointments not as a part of the bath, but a defilement, for which the purification of the bath was requisite.[46]The Romans used the bath to excess, taking it daily; the Mussulmans restricted its use to once a-week. The Romans entered the bath naked; the Mussulmans have introduced a bathing costume; the Romans allowed the two sexes to enter promiscuously, the Mussulmans have wholly separated them. Preserving the good, they have purified it from excesses, which, to a people of less discrimination, might have appeared to constitute its essential characters, or to be entailed as its necessary consequences. Our studies and learning have furnished us with no such results. These very excesses have been assigned as a reason for the disuse of the bath by the early Christians. If the explanation were true, the difference between the Christians and the Mussulmans would amount to this, that the first could see and reject the evil, the second perceive and select the good.There is one point connected with the bath on which I must say a few words, especially as in this case our usages do not present any obstacle to the adoption of a good habit, and I have repeatedly had the gratification of finding that the suggestions which follow were of use.Those who wash the rest of their body, often except the head;—the practice of smearing it with oil almost universally prevails. The Easterns do the reverse—they shave it. A greater comfort there cannot be than a bald pate. Washing the head is in no case prejudicial. Unless you wash the head, the washing of the body is neither complete nor satisfactory: the refreshment of washing the head may often be procured when it is impossible to wash the body. Soap and water are injurious, not to the hair, but to the hair-dressers. The men in the East have no hair to show, but if soap and water injure the hair, whence comes the luxuriant abundance of that of the women? The hair of the head, like the fur of animals, is made to bear rain and wind, and to be a protection against them. You cover it up! The fur of animals thickens and strengthens when exposed to air and wet. Your hair falls off, and you oil it. If it grows weak, change its habits. If it is not washed, and if it is oiled, begin to wash it, and leave off oiling it.Every week an Eastern lady has her hair thoroughly washed at the bath. It is first well soaped and rubbed. They are very particular about soap, and use none but that made of olive oil. The Castile soap, which in this country is sold at the apothecary’s, is the soap the least injurious to the skin. This is twice repeated. After the soap, they apply a paste of Armenian bole and rose-leaves. This is rubbed into the roots of the hair, and left to imbibe all the grease of the head; it is then, like the soap, washed off with bowls of hot water, and leaves the locks perfectly clean and silken. From time to time they dye it. On these occasions an attendant mixes up a handful of henna-dust in hot water, and thoroughly smears with it the hair, which is then turned up into a ball and bound tightly with a napkin. In this state they go through the bath. When the napkin is removed, and the henna-paste washed out, the hair, if before black, will have become of a bronze auburn, and if grey, red. The bath occupies from three to four hours, with the smoking, chatting, music, and dancing, which accompany it, in an atmosphere that excludes every unpleasant sensation. The women are not, like the men, contented with the bathing-linen and apparatus, which they find there; but are followed by female slaves, who bear bundles of towels in silk and satin wrappers, boxwood pattens, incrusted with mother of pearl, silver basins and bowls, or sometimes enamelled ones, and aloe-wood and ambergris to perfume both the apartment and their coffee. This finery is less than what they indulge in in their private baths.The Romans and Greeks, in like manner, were accompanied by their slaves, and did not trust to the service of thethermæ. Each person brought his strigil and his anointing vase (strigilis et ampulla,λήκυθος καὶ ξύστρα),[47]or sent them by his slave. The practice furnishes the familiar metaphors which express the different conditions.[48]The strigil was the sign of comfort, and also of sobriety and industry. It was, according to Cicero, necessary to the happiness of the Roman citizen; it had to do with the fortunes of the Roman state. Rome was indebted to her strigil as well as her sword for the conquest of the world.This constant washing occasions, it may be supposed, an enormous waste of water. A Turk uses less water than an English gentleman. It is true, every Turk, high and low, uses the same quantity, and washes in the same manner; but the utensils and conveniences are differently adapted. There are no wash-hand basins and ewers in bedrooms, no foot-pans, hip-baths, shower-baths, &c. They do not dabble in dirty water, defiling a great quantity. They wash under a stream of water, running from a fountain, urn, or ewer. A handful serves to moisten the soap and to rub with it, and a couple more rinse it completely off. The fountains are placed in the passages, staircases, &c. By the mosques, and in the streets, they are so arranged that, by sitting on a step, you can wash the feet and the head. When you wash in a room, one attendant brings the basin,laen, with its pierced cover and kneels before you; another the ewer,ibrik, with its long, narrow neck to pour the water.[49]In the bath, steam and perspiration cleanse, and two or three large saucerfuls suffice for rinsing;—fifty persons may be bathed with the water that serves to fill our trough for washing one.What a difference it makes in domestic comfort to be certain that every person around you, and every thing you touch and eat are absolutely clean! After this manner of life, the habits of Europe are most painful: you are constantly oppressed with the touch, or sight, or knowledge of things which, by the European, are not considered clean, and submitted to as unavoidable. It would but faintly describe my impressions to say, that I felt as if passing from a refined to a rude condition of society. Neither do we know how to cultivate or handle the body. One of the first thoughts was, “What shall I do in sickness?” All Europe’s seductions and luxuries put together will not make up for this one.The European is clean, in so far as he is so, for appearance; he has clothes and shoe-brushes, blacking, starch, smoothing-irons, &c.; in these consist hisneatness.[50]The clean shirt is put upon the dirty body; the hands and face being alone open to the air and sun and the eyes of the neighbours, are washed. Nothing is filthy that is unseen.[51]The Eastern has no brush or blacking; no care is expended or expense incurred for neatness. He has his religious ablutions for prayer.[52]He will not tell you that he washes for his comfort or his health, but because it would be a sin not to do so.Whatever proceeds from the body is impure; to touch anything with it is sinful, were it even a beast. To spit on a dog is wicked.[53]If by act or accident the Mussulman is rendered unclean he has to wash himself. The soiling of his carpet may entail the ablution of the whole body; while it remains unperformed he isipso factoexcommunicated—can take part in no ceremony, say no prayer. He is strictly in the scriptural sense “unclean.” All injunctions of the same sort are in like manner enforced. These are the first lessons taught the child, and become a second nature; and, re-acting on the belief from which they spring, give to it that surprising hold over the mind. They pass through life, generation after generation, without probably a single instance of the infringement of rules brought into operation every hour of the day.Following the instinct of the dog, and obeying the injunction of the ceremonial law,[54]their canon law inhibits defilement of the public roads, the streets, water-tanks and courses, fruit-trees, and any places which serve for resort, shade, repose, or retreat.[55]In “Hadji Baba” is a ludicrous account of the perplexities of a Persian in one of the modern adaptations of civilization to cleanliness—his ineffectual attempts to get at the gushing water, his inability to work the machinery or comprehend the purpose. In that part of their house there is a water-cock for use. The flooring is of marble—the water falls and runs, and high wooden pattens are used. The outer cloth garments are left outside—the ample sleeves are tucked up. If there be no fixed pipe a ewer is at hand, and a servant waits outside with basin, ewer, and napkin. In consequence of the offices attached to every mosque, their cities do not present offensive smells, disgusting filth and revolting indecency. One hand is set apart for noble, the other for ignoble service. The left hand on its dying day has not so much as touched the mouth; the right is in equal ignorance of other parts of the body. This is the natural sense of the words: “Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth.”[56]I have not hesitated to allude to matters which our false refinement forbids to mention, and thus the sensibility given us to put away what is impure is diverted merely to its concealment. The reader must fill up this faint sketch from his imagination, and when he has done so, he will understand why an Eastern cannot endure Europe, and why Christians amongst Mussulmans are called “dogs.”[57]Why should the ladies of the East have enjoyments from which ours are debarred, and sensations too of which they know nothing? It may be said the Turkish ladies so make up for their “exclusion from society:”—they have no balls or operas, morning concerts or fancy fairs, and therefore they take up with these merely sensual indulgences. They would no more exchange their bath for your balls, than you would your balls for a Yankee camp-meeting. There is no necessity for exchange. Why not have both? Would it be no comfort, no pleasure, no benefit to an English lady, on returning from a ball, and before going to bed, to be able, divested of whalebone and crinoline, and robed as an Atalanta, to enter marble chambers with mosaic floors, and be refreshed and purified from the toil she has undergone, and prepared for the soft enjoyment of the rest she seeks? The hanging gardens of Babylon were devised by the love of Nature of a Median woman; the palaces and groves of the Azahra laid out by the taste of a Numidian:—why should not England owe to the delicacy of an Englishwoman[58]the restoration of thethermæ?Our intercourse with the lower orders is broken off by there being no settled occasion on which we are in contact with them, and by the want of cleanliness in their persons. Here both classes are constantly brought into the presence of each other. Contempt and distaste are removed on one side, degradation and irritation on the other: they know one another: the intercourse of various ranks requires and sustains a style and demeanour which strike all Europeans, who are astonished that the bearing of the peasant is as courtly as that of the Pasha: he is as clean as the Pasha. Think of a country where difference of rank makes no difference of cleanliness! What must Easterns think of us where the difference of condition can be traced—in speech, manner, and washing. The bath is of as great value to the society as to the individual. A political economist, glorifying his age, exclaims—“Augustus in all his splendour had neither glass for his window nor a shirt to his back.” The slave and the beggar in Rome were daily in the enjoyment of luxuries which no European monarch knows.There is an impression that the bath is weakening. We can test this in three ways; its effects on those debilitated by disease, on those exhausted by fatigue, and on those who are long exposed to it.1. In affection of the lungs and intermittent fever, the bath is invariably had recourse to against the debilitating nightly perspirations. The temperature is kept low, not to increase the action of the heart or the secretions; this danger avoided, its effect is to subdue by a healthy perspiration in a waking state the unhealthy one in sleep. No one ever heard of any injury from the bath. The moment a person is ailing he is hurried off to it.2. After long and severe fatigue—that fatigue such as we never know—successive days and nights on horseback—the bath affords the most astonishing relief. Having performed long journeys on horseback, even to the extent of ninety-four hours, without taking rest, I know by experience its effects in the extremest cases.A Tartar, having an hour to rest, prefers a bath to sleep. He enters as if drugged with opium, and leaves it, his senses cleared, and his strength restored as much as if he had slept for several hours. This is not to be attributed to the heat or moisture alone, but to the shampooing, which in such cases is of an extraordinary nature. The Tartar sits down and doubles himself up; the shampooer (and he selects the most powerful man) then springs with his feet on his shoulders, cracking his vertebræ; with all his force and weight he pummels the whole back, and then turning him on his back and face, aided by a second shampooer, tramples on his body and limbs: the Tartar then lays himself down for half an hour; and, perhaps, though that is not necessary, sleeps. Well can I recall the hamâm doors which I have entered, scarcely able to drag one limb after the other, and from which I have sprung into my saddle again, elastic as a sinew and light as a feather.You will see aHammal(porter), a man living only on rice, go out of one of those baths where he has been pouring with that perspiration which we think must prostrate and weaken, and take up his load of five hundred-weight, placing it unaided on his back.3. The shampooers spend eight hours daily in the steam; they undergo great labour there, shampooing, perhaps, a dozen persons, and are remarkably healthy. They enter the bath at eight years of age: the duties of the younger portion are light, and chiefly outside in the hall to which the bathers retire after the bath; still, there they are from that tender age exposed to the steam and heat, so as to have their strength broken, if the bath were debilitating. The best shampooer under whose hands I have ever been, was a man whose age was given me as ninety, and who, from eight years of age, had been daily eight hours in the bath. This was at the natural baths of Sophia. I might adduce in like manner the sugar-bakers in London, who in a temperature not less than that of the bath, undergo great fatigue, and are also remarkably healthy.The Romans furnish another example. Unlike the Arabs, who restrict its use to once a week, they went into it daily. The temperature was gradually raised, until in the time of Nero it came to be excessive. Their habits in other respects were not such as to be conducive to health, and must have disqualified them for enduring the bath: if it did debilitate, it served therefore as an antidote to their manner of life, and relieved the excess of the Patrician, as it does to-day the fatigue of the Tartar.Life is chemical and galvanic, but both these agencies result in, and depend upon, motion: the vessels are constructed for conveying fluids, the muscles for generating power. Thus, shampooing exerts over the human body a power analogous to that of drugs administered by the mouth. A blow which kills, a posture which benumbs;—pressure, which in long disease becomes a chief obstacle to recovery, exercise which gives health and strength—are all evidences of the influence of motion over our system.Who has not experienced in headaches and other pains, relief from the most unartful rubbing? You receive a blow, and involuntarily rub the part. Cold will kill; the remedy is brandy and friction. The resources of this process surely deserve to be developed with as much care as that which has been bestowed upon the Materia Medica. Where practised, human suffering is relieved, obstructions are removed, indigestion is cured, paralysis and diseases of the spine, &c., arising from the loss of muscular power, are within its reach, while they are not under the control of our medicines. Here is a new method to add to the old. Wherever it can be employed, how much is it to be preferred to nauseating substances taken into the stomach; how much must the common practice of it tend to preserve the vitality of the whole frame! Even if disregarded as an enjoyment of health, it offers a solace which ought to be invaluable in the eye of a medical man, as of course it must be of the patient. We have all to play that part.Where the practice is familiar, it is used not merely in the bath, but upon all occasions. It is to be found without the bath, as among the Hindoos, some Tartar tribes, the Chinese, and the Sandwich islands:—the latter presents one of the most remarkable of phenomena. The different ranks are those of different stature. The chiefs are sunk in sloth and immorality; and yet it is not they, who, like the grandees of Spain, are the diminutive and decrepit race;—they are shampooed.[59]A practice which our epicures and our stoics, our patients and our doctors, would turn up the nose at, counteracts the consequences of gluttony, intoxication, debauchery, and sloth, and supplies the place of exercise and temperance; and a people which can boast no school of philosophy, whose nostrils have never been regaled by the compounds of Beauvilliers, and whose pulse has never been stretched out to a Halden, is able to combine the health of the Brahmin with the indulgence of the Sybarite, and the frame of the gymnast with the habits of the hog.Turner in his Embassy to Thibet, (p.84), describes the gylong or class of priests, as “more athletic” than their countrymen, although they “lead a life in an extreme degree sedentary and recluse.” They perform ablutions in which their compatriots do not join. The physical superiority of the aristocracy of England may be owing to a similar cause, cleanliness being with us a mark of station.In Denmark, shampooing has recently been hit upon as a scientific process, and a college has been instituted, as I understand, with considerable success, for the practice of what they are pleased to callmedicina mechanica.What am I to say of our medical science, what of our medical practitioners, what of our philanthropy, what of our selfishness, in not having the bath as a means of curing disease?[60]Never was a people more heroically self-denying or extravagantly insensate. We must love the racking of pain, the flavour of drugs, and the totals of apothecaries’ bills; for with our classical acquirements and love of travel, we cannot be ignorant, that all maladies, with the exception of epidemical ones, were less common in Rome than in modern London, notwithstanding our many advantages from the improved state of medical knowledge; and that several painful diseases common amongst us were exceedingly rare amongst the ancients, and are almost unknown in Mahometan countries. There are those who are of opinion that contagious disorders, “dreadful scourges of the human race, might never have taken root, nor if they had, would now be spread so widely, had the hot bath been in use amongst us.”[61]The human body is formed for labour, and requires it, and this labour is accompanied by perspiration. It is the safety-valve for the heart, the sewer for the secretions; the scavenger for the skin. Those who are thrown repeatedly into perspiration, possess, however seldom washed, many advantages over those who have not to undergo severe bodily toil, however often they may use soap and water to the surface.The bath substitutes an artificial and easy perspiration, and this explains the extraordinary fact, that the people who use it do not require exercise for health, and can pass from the extreme of indolence to that of toil.The functions for carrying on life are of the nature of a steam-engine, and a chemical apparatus: lethal gases are given forth as from a furnace; poisons are produced by every organ; from every function there is residuum, and the body, while soiled by labour, is rusted by repose. This rust, this residuum deposits on the skin.The extremities of the vessels become charged with unctuous matter; the deadened cellules of the epidermis are covered with a varnish, which is partly insoluble in water, and this internal accumulation and external coating prevent the skin from performing its functions, which are not confined to those of shielding the body, but are essential to the chemical processes within. The skin has analogous duties to those of the lungs, supplying oxygen to the blood at the extremity of its course, and when most completely in need of it. It has to aid at the same time the action of the heart. In its health is their health, and its health is cleanliness. Unlike the two other organs, it is placed within man’s reach, and confided to his care; and curiously interspersed through it are glands secreting peculiar odours, that the touch and sight shall not alone warn, but a third sense be enlisted in this guardianship, crying aloud on every remissness, and charging and reciprocating every neglect.[62]The Russians come out of a bath of 120° to roll themselves in the snow. This we explained by the fervour of the circulation, which enables them to withstand the shock. If so, the strong and healthy might bear it—not the weak and suffering, the octogenarian and the child. The sudden passage from a Russian bath[63]to a glacial atmosphere, is attended by neither shock nor danger; and far from the oppression that would result from the absorption of vital action in the efforts of the heart to overcome the violent contraction of the circulation, by the cold, there is a sense of ineffable relief. You seem to take in and throw forth your breath in mere playfulness, no longer dependent upon it momentarily for life. In fact, the lungs and heart are discharged in part from the toil of that unceasing labour, which, beginning with the cradle, ends with the grave. Of what service must it not be to aid a machine, the efforts of which, in the most delicate girl, are equal to a steam-engine of fourteen horse-power?[64]Who can reflect on this, and be content with mere wonder, nor bethink himself of the means by which the purposes of Nature can be aided, and the gifts of Providence enjoyed?[65]The bath has the effect of several classes of medicines; that is to say, it removes the symptoms for which they are administered; thus, it is a cathartic, a diuretic, a tonic, a detersive, a narcotic; but the effect is produced only when there is cause. It will bring sleep to the patient suffering from insomnia, but will not, like opium, make the healthy man drowsy; and relieve constipation without bringing on the healthy—as aloes would—diarrhœa: it is thus a drug, which administers itself according to the need, and brings no after-consequences.The opium-like effect has often been remarked, and I have repeatedly experienced after the bath sensations like those it produces. If it has not the same power in relieving bodily pain, it has unquestionably that of assuaging mental suffering. It is quite as natural an impulse amongst Easterns, to seek the bath when they are labouring under affliction as when disposed to give way to gladness. And this may be considered as one part of its curative virtues, having the faculty of calming the disturbed spirit without extinguishing, and indeed while increasing, the dispositions to cheerfulness.Reader! consider that this is not a drug in a shop, to be exhibited by prescription after a visit to a patient. It would be something if I suggested a new simple, or an improved plan of administering a known remedy in any one disorder. It would be much by such a suggestion to diminish in a few cases the pains of sciatica or of rheumatism, the tortures of gout or stone; what I suggest, is ahabit, one which shall become, when adopted, that of the whole people.A bath might be had for one quarter of the price of a glass of gin; for we have water in more abundance, and at a cheaper rate than at Rome.To substantiate this estimate, I prepared some calculations, but having visited the baths and washhouses recently established, I find the case illustrated to my hand by practice, and affording an entire confirmation of all, and more than all, that I have said. It is not long since that there was not a hot bath to be got in London under two shillings; what would then have been said if any one had had the hardihood to advance, that hot baths might be got for two-pence? and that bathing establishments, charging from one penny for cold baths up to sixpence, should become profitable concerns? Such nevertheless is the fact. There is here no new idea, no new process, no new demands: it has simply been suggested to build larger establishments, and to throw them open at a smaller sum; so that we have hitherto been deprived of these advantages through the partial blindness of those who have, in as far as they do see, deplored the blindness of others, not thinking that probably other films intercepted their own sight.I will therefore take the result obtained in these baths and wash-houses, as the basis of the calculation which I wish to establish. For a thousand baths, the charge for water varies from twenty to twenty-eight shillings; the coals for fuel from fifteen to thirty shillings; the other charges from fifteen to twenty shillings. In all these cases, the lower sum is of course above what the charge will be when experience has pointed out improvements and economy. Taking the most economical of these establishments, we have baths at the rate of fifty shillings a thousand, that is, at a little more than a halfpenny a piece. The allowance of water for each bath is forty-five gallons; fuel enters for one-third into the charge: reducing these charges to what would be incurred in the Turkish bath, there would be a saving of eight-ninths for the water, and probably five-sixths for the fuel, and an entire saving for the charge of attendance for the poorer classes, (theσεαυτοὺς βαλνεύσουντες); thus we should have on the thousand baths, the charge for water and fuel reduced from thirty-five to five shillings; and the charge of attendance being withdrawn from the poorer classes, the expense incurred would amount to one penny for sixteen baths, or four baths for a farthing.Here I am going upon the data supplied by these bathing establishments, where the water is furnished to them at a very low price, namely, fifteen shillings for the one thousand barrels, of thirty gallons, and where the coals consumed are of an inferior quality, at nine shillings a ton; and these are the points in which England and its capital possess such great advantages. In these establishments they can furnish between one and two thousand baths a-day, at an outlay of 15l.or 16l.a-week; and as the experiment has so far so well succeeded, two hundred of them would supply London, at the rate of a bath to each person, weekly, for which the weekly expenditure would be 3000l.or 150,000l.per annum, which would occasion a daily use of 126,000,000 of gallons of water. In the Turkish manner, the expenditure of water would be 15,000,000; and taking the proportionate saving in fuel, there would be a saving of one half the outlay, or 75,000l.a-year; but, as the facility thus afforded, and the habits so engendered, would lead in our climate, and in our circumstances, to a much more frequent use of the bath than once a-week, and as it would constantly be had recourse to by the lower orders, without their going through the whole process, the establishments would have to be proportionately larger, and the expenditure greater. At all events, it is now no longer a theoretical matter: these baths are in use, and are extending; and the question is, whether we shall introduce a perfect instead of a defective method—an economical instead of an expensive one. But, if this new charge be incurred, we have, on the other side, to look forward to the possibility of retrenchments in consequence of the altered habits of the people. The one that first presents itself is the diminution of maladies, doctors’ and apothecaries’ fees and drugs, loss of time from sickness, and attendance;—and here, to say nothing of the different value of life, the saving for London alone will have to be reckoned by millions. Next are temperance and sobriety. At first sight the connection will not appear so immediate; it will, however, be unquestionable to those familiar with countries where the bath is in use. I know of no country, in ancient or modern times, where habits of drunkenness have co-existed with the bath. Misery and cold drive men to the gin-shop: if they had the bath—not the washing-tub, but the sociable hamâm, to repair to—this, the great cause of drunkenness, would be removed; and if this habit of cleanliness were general, restraints would be imposed on such habits by the feelings of self-respect engendered.Gibbon has indulged in speculations on the consequences for Europe that would have followed, had Charles Martel been defeated on the plains of Tours. One of these effects would have been, that to-day in London there would be no gin-palaces, and a thousand baths.In London and its suburbs there are nearly two millions of inhabitants; of these, one million and a half at least cannot afford those baths which we use.[66]Deducting a fifth for infants under forty days old, and persons confined to bed, there would remain twelve hundred thousand, so that two hundred thousand bodies, which now carry their filth from the cradle to the grave, would be daily washed. Judging by the scale of prices at Constantinople[67]or Rome, the cost of a bath might begin from one penny or twopence, and range upwards to five shillings; striking the average at sixpence, we should have 5000l.daily, or 1,500,000l.per annum. An ordinary bath will accommodate two hundred persons daily. At Constantinople, for a population of five hundred thousand (Turks) three hundred are requisite. In Cordova, there were nine hundred; in Alexandria, when taken by the Arabs, there were four hundred. One thousand baths would be required for London, and each would have for its support 1500l.a-year. The cost of erection would be provided, as for hospitals, churches, &c., by foundation, donations, bequests, subscriptions, or municipal charges.The poor of England have never had an opportunity of knowing the comfort which is derived on a cold day from the warmth imparted by such an atmosphere. How many of the wretched inhabitants of London go to their chilly homes in the winter months benumbed with cold, and with no means of recovering their animal warmth but by resorting to spirits and a public-house fire. The same sixpence which will only procure them a quartern of the stimulant, which imparts but a momentary heat, would, if so expended, obtain for them at once warmth and refreshment.Do not run away with the idea that it is Islamism that prevents the use of spirituous liquors; it is the bath. It satisfies the cravings which lead to those indulgencies, it fills the period of necessary relaxation, and it produces, with cleanliness, habits of self-respect, which are incompatible with intoxication: it keeps the families united, which prevents the squandering of money for such excesses. In Greece and Rome, in their worst times, there was neither “blue ruin” nor “double stout.”The quantity of malt consumed in former days is referred to as a test of relative well-being. This I do not deny; but there can be no question that pure water is the most wholesome drink,[68]as it is unquestionable, that if London were Mussulman, the operative, as the rest of the population, would bathe regularly, have a better-dressed dinner for his money, and prefer water to wine or brandy, gin or beer. The bath, therefore, would secure at once cleanliness and temperance.Where Christianity first appeared, cleanliness, like charity or hospitality, was a condition of life. Christ and the apostles went through the legal ablutions. When the relaxation took place at the first council of Jerusalem, in favour of the Gentiles, these points could never have been raised or called in question, for in this respect the habits of the nations were in conformity with the Jewish law. Reference is made to it in the fathers,[69]not as a practice only, but as a duty.[70]In the primitive Church of England the bath was a religious observance: the penitent was in some cases forbidden its use; but then cold bathing was enjoined. Knighthood was originally a religious institution, and the conferring of it is a church ceremony. The aspirant knightprepared himself by the bath. The second distinction which it is in the power of the Sovereign of England to bestow, is entitled “The Order of the Bath.” Now, the Sovereign who confers, and the knights who receive the title, never saw a real bath in their lives.[71]When tesselated pavements of Caldaria, or fragments of Laconicum and Hypocaust come to light in our streets or fields, the modern Goth gazes with the same stupid wonder, without the same respect[72]with which the barbarians of this land look upon their fathers’ works;—you can tell them the date of their ruins; they could explain to you the use of yours. The Romans could recall the time when their fathers only washed their hands and their feet;[73]the Turks, the time when their fathers washed neither. We have to recall the times when our fathers knew what it was thoroughly to be washed, and to be wholly clean; and, reversing the experience of these people, and combining in our progress their points of departure, we have arrived at washing hands and feet only, or washing neither.Britain received the bath from the Romans, Ireland from the Phœnicians,[74]Hungary from the Turks, Spain from the Saracens[75]—everywhere it has disappeared. In Greece it was as common as in Turkey. Greece became independent, and the bath took wing.[76]Everywhere throughout Europe the point of departure is cleanliness, the result of progress is filth. How is it that a habit so cleanly, associated with edifices so magnificent, leading to intercourse of the classes of society so useful to the state, and conferring on the poorer orders so large a measure of comforts and enjoyments, should have disappeared, wherever light, learning, taste, liberality have spread? When abstractions have got possession of the brain of a people, you can no more reckon upon its tastes, than upon its acts.“What ruler in modern times can make a comparison otherwise than degrading to himself between the government over which he presides and those of ancient Greece or Rome? Can he reflect, without taking shame to himself, that the heads of the republics of Athens and Sparta, the tribunes, ædiles, consuls, censors, and emperors of Rome, thought they had not rendered the condition of the poor tolerable, unless they had afforded them the gratuitous enjoyment of baths, theatres, and games, to make them forget for some hours of the day the hardships and privations which poverty brings with it? The boasted happiness of the English common people (if, indeed, any one can be hardy enough to vaunt it now-a-days) is infinitely lower than was that of the plebeians of Greece or Rome.”[77]The evils of our system do not spring from the violence of passion, but from fallacies. We, of course, cannot grapple with our own fallacies; therefore all that philanthropy and science can do, is to try to heal, one by one, the sores which legislation engenders wholesale. The bath is an idea which the simplest mind may grasp; it is a work which industry, not genius, is required to accomplish. We found hospitals for the sick, we open houses of refuge for the destitute; we have recently been engaged in finding nightly shelter for the homeless; wash-houses have even been established. How many are anxious to find some sort of holiday, or innocent recreation, for the classes, whose commons we have enclosed, and whose festivities we have put down;—how many seek to raise the lower orders in the moral and social scale? A war is waged against drunkenness, immorality, and filthiness in every shape. Here is the effectual weapon!—here is an easy and a certain cure! It is no speculation or theory; if it were so, it would easily find apostles and believers.The good-will and means that run to waste through our not knowing how to be clean, are enormous. A small town in the New Forest, with Roman daring, planned a bath as a work of public utility, but built it with English coin, of which it took 8000l.There are steam-apparatus, reservoirs for sea-water,[78]&c. It was a model bathing establishment. It is now selling as bricks and old iron! Close by there are large boilers for evaporating salt, over which, at the cost of a few planks, a Russian vapour-bath might have been had. The use of the vapour was not unknown. There were persons who repaired thither for cutaneous and other disorders, and were cured.Consider the heat and steam throughout the manufactories of England, which the instinct of a Russian boor, or Laplander, or Red Indian would apply for the benefit of the miserable population engaged in those works, and now allowed to run to sheer waste. The filthiest population exists, with the most extensive means of cleanliness. A nation that boasts of its steam, that is puffed up with its steam, that goes by steam, does not know how to use steam to wash its body, even when it may be had gratis.The people that has not devised the bath, cannot deserve the character of refinement, and (having the opportunity) that does not adopt it, that of sense. Servility, however, we do possess, and any person of distinction has it in his power to introduce it. That which all despise, when only a thing of use, will be by all rushed after when it becomes a matter of fashion. The sight of a bath of a new fashion, and enjoyed by another people, has impelled me to make this endeavour to regain it for my own. Is Europe ever to remain on the map the black spot of filth? Can she owe the bath only to the Roman sword or Moorish spear? Must she now await the Cossack lance? After ridicule for warning, the day may come that I shall suffer reproach for deprecating the event, and it will be said to me, “Thesebarbarians, who, Providence-like, have come to compose our troubles; Roman-like, to teach us to be clean.”[17]A bronze statue of a bather by Lysippus was removed by Tiberius from the baths of Agrippa to his own palace, and placed in his bedroom. The Roman people “infested the emperor with reproaches and hootings whenever he appeared in public, till their Apozymenos was restored to them.”—Pliny’sNat. His.b. xxxiv. c.35.

... Quadrante lavatum,Rex ibis.Hor.Sat.i.3.

It is amusing to hear people talk of cleanliness as they would of charity or sobriety. A man can no more be clean than learned by impulse, and no more by his will understand cleanliness than solve equations. Cleanliness has the characters of virtue and of vice—it is at once beneficial and seductive. It is also a science and an art, for it has an order which has to be taught, and it requires dexterity and implements. It has its prejudices and superstitions: it abhors what is not like itself, and clings to its practices under a secret dread of punishment and fear of sin. It has its mysteries and its instincts: it regards not the eye or favour of man, and follows the bent of its nature without troubling itself with reasons for what it does; it has its charities and its franchises: the poorest is not without the reach of its aid, nor the most powerful strong enough to infringe its rights.[17]It is suited to every condition: men and women, the young and the old, the rich and the poor, the hale and the sick, the sane and the insane: the savage can enjoy it no less than the refined. The most polished have prized it as the chief profit of art; the simple receive it as the luxury of Nature—a cheap solace for the cares of life, and a harmless medicament for the infirmities of man.

The philosopher prized it as essential to happiness,[18]the austere to virtue, the dissolute to vice.[19]To corrupt Greece and Rome it furnished a gratification that was innocent; to the rigid sectarians of the Koran an observance that was seductive; multiplying the sensibilities and strengthening the frame, it increased to all the value of life. No sacrifice is required for its possession. Nothing has to be given up in exchange: it is pure gain to have, sheer loss to want. Like the light of heaven, those only walk not in it who are blind. Where not practised, it is not inducements that are wanting, but knowledge: “they don’t know how.”[20]

Our body is a fountain of impurities, to which man is more subject than the beast.[21]The body of man, far more than that of the brutes, is exposed to be contaminated; and by an artificial mode of life and food, he has further multiplied his frailties. By casing his body in closely-fitting clothes—integuments rather than covering—he has shut out the purifying elements. Without the means of cleanliness of the brute, he is also without the guidance of its instinct; what then, if in the culture of his body, he should lose the light of reason? If reason and not instinct be his portion, it is because he is endowed with a mechanism, to keep which in order instinct would not suffice. What if that mechanism receive at his hands not such care as would be bestowed upon it, if it belonged to the beast of the field or the bird of the air!

What filth is to the body, error is to the mind; and therefore if we are to use our reason in regard to the former, we must have a standard of cleanliness as well as of truth; such a rule we can owe neither to freak nor fashion. We must look for one tested by long experience and fixed from ancient days:—this standard isTHE BATH. This is no ideal one; it is at once theory and performance; he who has gone through it, knows what it is to be clean because he is cleansed. I shall use as synonymous the words, “cleanliness,” and the “bath.”

I must beg the reader to dismiss from his mind every idea connected with that word: unless I thought he would and could do so, I should persist in speaking ofThermæ,BalneumorHamâm, but I trust I may venture to naturalize, in its true sense, the word in our tongue as a step to naturalise the thing in our habits.

A people who know neither Latin nor Greek have preserved this great monument of antiquity on the soil of Europe, and present to us who teach our children only Latin and Greek, this institution in all its Roman grandeur, and its Grecian taste. The bath, when first seen by the Turks, was a practice of their enemies, religious and political; they were themselves the filthiest of mortals; they had even instituted filth by laws and consecrated it by maxim.[22]Yet no sooner did they see the bath than they adopted it; made it a rule of their society, a necessary adjunct to every settlement; and Princes and Sultans endowed such institutions for the honour of their name.[23]

In adopting it, they purified it from immorality and excess, and carrying the art of cleanliness to the highest perfection, have made themselves thereby the most sober-minded and contented amongst the nations of the earth. This arose from no native disposition towards cleanliness, but from the simplicity of their character and the poverty of their tongue.[24]They had no fallacious term into which to convert it, and no preconceived ideas by which to explain it. Knowing they were dirty, they became clean; having common sense, they did not rush on a new device, or set up either a “water cure,” or a joint-stock washing company; but carefully considered and prudently adopted what the experience of former ages presented to their hands.

I have said that the Saracens, like the Romans, have left behind them,temples,fortresses, andbaths: national security reared its battlements, public faith its domes, and cleanliness, too, required its structures, and without these no more could it exist, than defence or worship. I shall not weary the reader with ground-plans or “elevations,” and shall confine myself to the leading features, in so far as they are connected with use. They are vast and of costly materials, from their very nature. Before describing the Moorish bath, I must request the reader to accompany me through the bath as it is used by the Turks, which, as more complete and detailed, is more intelligible.

The operation consists of various parts: first, theseasoning of the body; second, themanipulation of the muscles; third, thepeeling of the epidermis; fourth, thesoaping, and the patient is then conducted tothe bed of repose. These are the five acts of the drama. There are three essential apartments in the building: a great hall ormustaby, open to the outer air; a middle chamber, where the heat is moderate; the inner hall, which is properly thethermæ. The first scene is acted in the middle chamber; the next three in the inner chamber, and the last in the outer hall. The time occupied is from two to four hours, and the operation is repeated once a week.

On raising the curtain which covers the entrance to the street, you find yourself in a hall circular, octagonal, or square, covered with a dome open in the centre: it may be one hundred feet in height; the Pantheon of Rome may be taken as a model. This is theapodyterium,conclaveorspoliatoriumof the Romans. In the middle, a basin of water, the “sea” of the Jews, the “piscinum” of the Romans, is raised by masonry about four feet; a fountain plays in the centre. Plants, sometimes trellises, are trained over or around the fountain, and by it is placed the stall to supply coffee, pipes, or nargelles. All round there is a platform, varying in breadth from four to twelve feet, and raised about three; here couches are placed, which I shall presently describe. You are conducted to an unoccupied couch to undress; your clothes are folded and deposited in a napkin and tied up; you are arrayed in the bathing costume, which consists of three towels about two yards long and under a yard in width, thickened in the centre with pendant loops of the thread, so as to absorb the moisture, soft and rough without being flabby or hard, with broad borders in blue or red of raw silk. This gives to this costume an air of society, and takes from it the stamp of the laundry or wash-house. One is wrapped with an easy fold round the head, so as to form a high and peculiar, but not ungraceful turban; the second is bound round the loins, and falls to the middle of the leg; this is the ordinary costume of the attendants in the bath, and appears to be the costume known in antiquity asπερίζωμα,præcinctorium, andsubligaculum, and which have been of difficult interpretation, as implying at once a belt and a clothing. The third is thrown over the shoulder like a scarf: they are calledPistumal, as are all towels, but the proper name isFuta, a word borrowed, as the stuff is, from Morocco. While you change your linen, two attendants hold a cloth before you. In these operations, which appear to dispense of necessity with clothing and concealment, the same scrupulous attention is observed. It extends to the smallest children. I have been on a bathing excursion to the sea-side, where a child under four years was disappointed of his dip because his bathing drawers had been forgotten. There is nothing which more shocks an Eastern than our want of decorum; and I have known instances of servants assigning this as a reason for refusing to remain in Europe, or to come to it.

Thus attired, you step down from the platform height; wooden pattens,—nalmain Turkish,cob cobin Arabic,—are placed for your feet, to keep you off the hot floors, and the dirty water running off by the entrances and passages; two attendants take you, one by each arm above the elbow—walking behind and holding you. The slamming doors are pushed open, and you enter the region of steam.

Each person is preceded by a mattress and a cushion, which are removed the moment he has done with them, that they may not get damp. The apartment he now enters is low and small; very little light is admitted; sometimes, indeed, the day is excluded, and the small flicker of a lamp enables you to perceive indistinctly its form and occupants. The temperature is moderate, the moisture slight, the marble floor on both sides is raised about eighteen inches, the lower and centre part being the passage between the two halls. This is thetepidarium. Against the wall your mattress and cushion are placed, the rest of the chamber being similarly occupied: the attendants now bring coffee, and serve pipes. The object sought in this apartment is a natural and gentle flow of perspiration; to this are adapted the subdued temperature and moisture; for this the clothing is required, and the coffee and pipe; and, in addition, a delicate manipulation is undergone, which does not amount to shampooing: the sombre air of the apartment calms the senses, and shuts out the external world.[25]

During the subsequent parts of the operation, you are either too busy or too abstracted for society; the bath is essentially sociable, and this is the portion of it so appropriated—this is the time and place where a stranger makes acquaintance with a town or village. Whilst so engaged, a boy kneels at your feet and chafes them, or behind your cushion, at times touching or tapping you on the neck, arm, or shoulder, in a manner which causes the perspiration to start.

2nd Act.—You now take your turn for entering the inner chamber: there is in this point no respect for persons, and rank gives no precedence,[26]but you do not move until the bathman, thetellackof the Turks, thenekaësof the Arabs, thetractatorof the Romans, has passed his hand under your bathing linen, and is satisfied that your skin is in a proper state. He then takes you by the arm as before, your feet are again pushed into the pattens, the slamming door of the inner region is pulled back, and you are ushered into theadytum,—a space such as the centre dome of a cathedral, filled—not with dull and heavy steam—but with gauzy and mottled vapour, through which the spectre-like inhabitants appear, by the light of tinted rays, which, from stars of stained glass in the vault, struggle to reach the pavement, through the curling mists. The song, the not unfrequent shout, the clapping, not of hands, but sides;[27]the splashing of water and clank of brazen bowls reveals the humour and occupation of the inmates, who, here divested of all covering save the scarf round the loins, with no distinction between bathers and attendants, and with heads as bare as bodies and legs, are seen passing to and fro through the mist, or squatted or stretched out on the slabs, exhibiting the wildest contortions, or bending over one another, and appearing to inflict and to endure torture. A stranger might be in doubt whether he beheld a foundry or Tartarus; whether the Athenian gymnasia were restored, or he had entered some undetected vault of the Inquisition. That is thesudatorium. The steam is raised by throwing water on the floor,[28]and its clearness comes from the equal temperature of the air and walls.

Under the dome there is an extensive platform of marble slabs: on this you get up; the clothes are taken from your head and shoulders; one is spread for you to lie on, the other is rolled for your head; you lie down on your back; the tillak (two, if the operation is properly performed) kneels at your side, and bending over, gripes and presses your chest, arms, and legs, passing from part to part, like a bird shifting its place on a perch. He brings his whole weight on you with a jerk, follows the line of muscle with anatomical thumb,[29]draws the open hand strongly over the surface, particularly round the shoulder, turning you half up in so doing; stands with his feet on the thighs and on the chest and slips down the ribs; then up again three times; and lastly, doubling your arms one after the other on the chest, pushes with both hands down, beginning at the elbow, and then, putting an arm under the back and applying his chest to your crossed elbows, rolls on you across till you crack. You are now turned on your face, and, in addition to the operation above described, he works his elbow round the edges of your shoulder-blade, and with the heel plies hard the angle of the neck; he concludes by hauling the body half up by each arm successively, while he stands with one foot on the opposite thigh.[30]You are then raised for a moment to a sitting posture, and a contortion given to the small of the back with the knee, and a jerk to the neck by the two hands holding the temples.

3rd Act.—Round the sides there are cocks for hot and cold water over marble basins, a couple of feet in diameter, where you mix to the temperature you wish. You are now seated on a board on the floor at one of these fountains, with a copper cup[31]to throw water over you when wanted. Thetellakputs on the glove—it is of camel’s hair, not the horrid things recently brought forth in England. He stands over you; you bend down to him, and he commences from the nape of the neck in long sweeps down the back till he has started the skin; he coaxes it into rolls, keeping them in and up till within his hand they gather volume and length; he then successively strikes and brushes them away, and they fall right and left as if spilt from a dish of macaroni. The dead matter which will accumulate in a week forms, when dry, a ball of the size of the fist. I once collected it, and had it dried—it is like a ball of chalk: this was the purpose for which thestrigilwas used. In our ignorance we have imagined it to be a horse-scraper to clear off the perspiration, or for other purposes equally absurd.[32]

4th Act.—Hitherto soap has not touched the skin. By it, however strange it may appear to us,[33]the operation would be spoiled—the shampooing would be impossible, and the epidermis would not come off; this I know by experience. The explanation may be, that the alkali of the soap combines chemically with the oily matter, and the epidermis loses the consistency it must have to be detached by rolling. A large wooden bowl is now brought; in it is a lump of soap with a sort of powder-puff ofliff,[34]for lathering. Beginning by the head, the body is copiously soaped and washed twice, and part of the contents of the bowl is left for you to conclude and complete the operation yourself. Then approaches an acolyte, with a pile of hot foldedfutason his head, he holding a dry cloth spread out in front—you rise, having detached the cloth from your waist, and holding it before you: at that moment another attendant dashes on you a bowl of hot water. You drop your wet cloth; the dry one is passed round your waist, another over your shoulders; each arm is seized; you are led a step or two and seated; the shoulder cloth is taken off, another put on, the first over it; another is folded round the head; your feet are already in the wooden pattens. You are wished health; you return the salute, rise, and are conducted by both arms to the outer hall.

I must not here omit all mention of an interlude in which Europeans take no part. The Mussulmans get rid of superfluous hair by shaving or depilation.[35]The depilatory is composed of orpiment and quick lime, called in Turkishot, in Arabicdewa. The bather retires to a cell without door, but at the entrance of which he suspends his waist towel; the bath-man brings him a razor, if he prefers it, or a lump of theotabout the size of a walnut. In two or three minutes after applying it the hair is ready to come off, and a couple of bowls of water leave the skin entirely bare, not without a flush from the corrosiveness of the preparation.[36]

The platform round the hall is raised and divided by low balustrades into little compartments, where the couches of repose are arranged, so that while having the uninterrupted view all round, parties or families may be by themselves. This is the time and place for meals. The bather having reached this apartment is conducted to the edge of the platform, to which there is only one high step. You drop the wooden patten, and on the matting a towel is spread anticipating your foot-fall. The couch is in the form of a letter M.[37]spread out, and as you rest on it the weight is everywhere directly supported—every tendon, every muscle is relaxed; the mattress fitting, as it were, into the skeleton: there is total inaction, and the body appears to be suspended.[38]The attendants then re-appear, and gliding like noiseless shadows, stand in a row before you. The coffee is poured out and presented: the pipe follows; or, if so disposed, you may have sherbet or fruit; the sweet or water melons are preferred, and they come in piles of lumps large enough for a mouthful; or you may send and get kebobs on a skewer; and if inclined to make a positive meal at the bath, this is the time.

The hall is open to the heavens, but nevertheless a boy with a fan of feathers, or a napkin, drives the cool air upon you. The Turks have given up the cold immersion of the Romans, yet so much as this they have retained of it, and which realizes the end which the Romans had in view to prevent the after breaking out of the perspiration; but it is still a practice amongst the Turks to have cold water thrown upon the feet. The nails of hands and feet are dexterously pared with a sort of oblique chisel; any callosities that remain on the feet are rubbed down: during this time the linen is twice changed.[39]These operations do not interrupt the chafing of the soles,[40]and the gentle putting on of the outside of the folds of linen which I have mentioned in the first stage. The body has come forth shining like alabaster, fragrant as the cistus, sleek as satin, and soft as velvet. The touch of your own skin is electric. Buffon has a wonderful description of Adam’s surprise and delight at his first touch of himself. It is the description of the human sense when the body is brought back to its purity. The body thus renewed, the spirit wanders abroad, and reviewing its tenement rejoices to find it clean and tranquil. There is an intoxication or dream that lifts you out of the flesh, and yet a sense of life and consciousness that spreads through every member. Each breastful of air seems to pass, not to the heart but to the brain, and to quench, not the pulsations of the one, but the fancies of the other. That exaltation which requires the slumber of the senses—that vividness of sense that drowns the visions of the spirit—are simultaneously engaged in calm and unspeakable luxury: you condense the pleasures of many scenes, and enjoy in an hour the existence of years.

But “this too will pass.”[41]The visions fade, the speed of the blood thickens, the breath of the pores is checked, the crispness of the skin returns, the fountains of strength are opened; you seek again the world and its toils; and those who experience these effects and vicissitudes for the first time exclaim, “I feel as if I could leap over the moon.” Paying your pence according to the tariff of your deserts, you walk forth a king from the gates which you had entered a beggar.

This chief of luxuries is common, in a barbarous land and under a despotism, to every man, woman, and child; to the poorest as to the richest, and to the richest no otherwise and no better than to the poorest.[42]But how is it paid for? How can it be within the reach of the poor? They pay according to their means. What each person gives is put into a common stock; the box is opened once a week, and the distribution of the contents is made according to a scale: the master of the bath comes in for his share just like the rest. A person of distinction will give a pound or more; the common price that, at Constantinople, a tradesman would pay, was from tenpence to a shilling, workmen from twopence to threepence. In a village near Constantinople, where I spent some months, the charge for men was a halfpenny,[43]for women three farthings. A poor person will lay down a few parahs to show that he has not more to give, and where the poor man is so treated he will give as much as he can. He will not, like the poor Roman, have access alone, but his cup of coffee and a portion of the service like the rest.[44]Such rules are not to be established, but such habits may be destroyed by laws.

This I have observed, that wherever the bath is used it is not confined to any class of the community, as if it was felt to be too good a thing to be denied to any.

I must now conduct the reader into the Moorish bath. First, there was no bath linen. They go in naked. Then there is but one room, under which there is an oven, and a pot, open into the bath, is boiling on the fire below. There were no pattens—the floor burning hot—so we got boards. At once the operation commenced, which is analogous to the glove. There was a dish of gazule, for the shampooer to rub his hands in. I was seated on the board, with my legs straight out before me; the shampooer seated himself on the same board behind me, stretching out his legs. He then made me close my fingers upon the toes of his feet, by which he got a purchase against me, and rubbing his hands in the gazule, commenced upon the middle of my back, with a sharp motion up and down, between beating and rubbing, his hands working in opposite directions. After rubbing in this way the back, he pulled my arms through his own and through each other, twisting me about in the most extraordinary manner, and drawing his fingers across the region of the diaphragm, so as to make me, a practised bather, shriek. After rubbing in this way the skin, and stretching at the same time the joints of my upper body, he came and placed himself at my feet, dealing with my legs in like manner. Then thrice taking each leg and lifting it up, he placed his head under the calf, and raising himself, scraped the leg as with a rough brush, for his shaved head had the grain downwards. The operation concluded by his biting my heel.

The bath becomes a second nature, and long privation so increases the zest, that I was not disposed to be critical; but, if by an effort of the imagination I could transport the Moorish bath to Constantinople, and had then to choose between the hamâm of Eshi Serai or my own at home, and this one of the Moors, I must say, I never should see the inside of a Moorish bath again. It certainly does clear off the epidermis, work the flesh, excite the skin, set at work the absorbent and exuding vessels, raise the temperature, apply moisture;—but the refinements and luxuries are wanting.

A great deal of learning has been expended upon the baths of the ancients, and a melancholy exhibition it is—so much acuteness and research, and no profit. The details of these wonderful structures, the evidences of their usefulness, have prompted no prince, no people of Europe to imitate them, and so acquire honour for the one, health for the other. The writers, indeed, present not living practices, but cold and ill-assorted details, as men must do who profess to describe what they themselves do not comprehend. From what I have said, the identity of the Turkish bath, with that of the Romans, will be at once perceived, and the apparent discrepancies and differences explained. Theapodyteriumis themustabyor entrance-hall; after this comes the sweating-apartment, subdivided by difference of degrees. Then two operations are performed, shampooing, and the clearing off of the epidermis. The Romans had in thetepidariumand thesudatoriumdistinct attendants for the two operations; the first shampooer receiving the appropriate name oftractator; the others, who used the strigil, which was equivalent to the glove, being calledsuppetones. The appearance of the strigil in no way alters the character of the operation. They used sponges also for rubbing down, like the Moorish gazule. They used no soap; neither do the Moors;—the Turks use it after the operation is concluded. TheLaconicumI understood when I saw the Moorish bath, with the pot of water, heated from the fire below, boiling up into the bath. I then recollected that there is in the Turkish baths an opening, by which the steam from the boilers can be let in, although not frequently so used, nor equally placed within observation. Many of the Turkish baths have, doubtless, been originally Greek. The change in respect to the use of cold water is compensated for[45]by the cold air of the outer room, into which the Turks come, and is preserved in the partial use of cold water for the feet. The hot-water reservoirs, thelabrumandsolium, are still to be seen in the private baths; they are in those of the Alhambra. When used, the character of running water, an essential point among the Turks, is given to them, by a hole being left below, which is unplugged, and a stream kept running in above from a cock. It would appear that the Romans followed the same method. Thepiscinumof the Romans is found in the Moorish gardens. In the use of depilatories, or the shaving off the hair, the practice of the Turks is exactly that of the Romans; the parts of the bath appropriated to that purpose being the same. Theoleareaare alone wanting. The Mussulmans would consider this smearing of the body with oil or ointments not as a part of the bath, but a defilement, for which the purification of the bath was requisite.[46]

The Romans used the bath to excess, taking it daily; the Mussulmans restricted its use to once a-week. The Romans entered the bath naked; the Mussulmans have introduced a bathing costume; the Romans allowed the two sexes to enter promiscuously, the Mussulmans have wholly separated them. Preserving the good, they have purified it from excesses, which, to a people of less discrimination, might have appeared to constitute its essential characters, or to be entailed as its necessary consequences. Our studies and learning have furnished us with no such results. These very excesses have been assigned as a reason for the disuse of the bath by the early Christians. If the explanation were true, the difference between the Christians and the Mussulmans would amount to this, that the first could see and reject the evil, the second perceive and select the good.

There is one point connected with the bath on which I must say a few words, especially as in this case our usages do not present any obstacle to the adoption of a good habit, and I have repeatedly had the gratification of finding that the suggestions which follow were of use.

Those who wash the rest of their body, often except the head;—the practice of smearing it with oil almost universally prevails. The Easterns do the reverse—they shave it. A greater comfort there cannot be than a bald pate. Washing the head is in no case prejudicial. Unless you wash the head, the washing of the body is neither complete nor satisfactory: the refreshment of washing the head may often be procured when it is impossible to wash the body. Soap and water are injurious, not to the hair, but to the hair-dressers. The men in the East have no hair to show, but if soap and water injure the hair, whence comes the luxuriant abundance of that of the women? The hair of the head, like the fur of animals, is made to bear rain and wind, and to be a protection against them. You cover it up! The fur of animals thickens and strengthens when exposed to air and wet. Your hair falls off, and you oil it. If it grows weak, change its habits. If it is not washed, and if it is oiled, begin to wash it, and leave off oiling it.

Every week an Eastern lady has her hair thoroughly washed at the bath. It is first well soaped and rubbed. They are very particular about soap, and use none but that made of olive oil. The Castile soap, which in this country is sold at the apothecary’s, is the soap the least injurious to the skin. This is twice repeated. After the soap, they apply a paste of Armenian bole and rose-leaves. This is rubbed into the roots of the hair, and left to imbibe all the grease of the head; it is then, like the soap, washed off with bowls of hot water, and leaves the locks perfectly clean and silken. From time to time they dye it. On these occasions an attendant mixes up a handful of henna-dust in hot water, and thoroughly smears with it the hair, which is then turned up into a ball and bound tightly with a napkin. In this state they go through the bath. When the napkin is removed, and the henna-paste washed out, the hair, if before black, will have become of a bronze auburn, and if grey, red. The bath occupies from three to four hours, with the smoking, chatting, music, and dancing, which accompany it, in an atmosphere that excludes every unpleasant sensation. The women are not, like the men, contented with the bathing-linen and apparatus, which they find there; but are followed by female slaves, who bear bundles of towels in silk and satin wrappers, boxwood pattens, incrusted with mother of pearl, silver basins and bowls, or sometimes enamelled ones, and aloe-wood and ambergris to perfume both the apartment and their coffee. This finery is less than what they indulge in in their private baths.

The Romans and Greeks, in like manner, were accompanied by their slaves, and did not trust to the service of thethermæ. Each person brought his strigil and his anointing vase (strigilis et ampulla,λήκυθος καὶ ξύστρα),[47]or sent them by his slave. The practice furnishes the familiar metaphors which express the different conditions.[48]The strigil was the sign of comfort, and also of sobriety and industry. It was, according to Cicero, necessary to the happiness of the Roman citizen; it had to do with the fortunes of the Roman state. Rome was indebted to her strigil as well as her sword for the conquest of the world.

This constant washing occasions, it may be supposed, an enormous waste of water. A Turk uses less water than an English gentleman. It is true, every Turk, high and low, uses the same quantity, and washes in the same manner; but the utensils and conveniences are differently adapted. There are no wash-hand basins and ewers in bedrooms, no foot-pans, hip-baths, shower-baths, &c. They do not dabble in dirty water, defiling a great quantity. They wash under a stream of water, running from a fountain, urn, or ewer. A handful serves to moisten the soap and to rub with it, and a couple more rinse it completely off. The fountains are placed in the passages, staircases, &c. By the mosques, and in the streets, they are so arranged that, by sitting on a step, you can wash the feet and the head. When you wash in a room, one attendant brings the basin,laen, with its pierced cover and kneels before you; another the ewer,ibrik, with its long, narrow neck to pour the water.[49]In the bath, steam and perspiration cleanse, and two or three large saucerfuls suffice for rinsing;—fifty persons may be bathed with the water that serves to fill our trough for washing one.

What a difference it makes in domestic comfort to be certain that every person around you, and every thing you touch and eat are absolutely clean! After this manner of life, the habits of Europe are most painful: you are constantly oppressed with the touch, or sight, or knowledge of things which, by the European, are not considered clean, and submitted to as unavoidable. It would but faintly describe my impressions to say, that I felt as if passing from a refined to a rude condition of society. Neither do we know how to cultivate or handle the body. One of the first thoughts was, “What shall I do in sickness?” All Europe’s seductions and luxuries put together will not make up for this one.

The European is clean, in so far as he is so, for appearance; he has clothes and shoe-brushes, blacking, starch, smoothing-irons, &c.; in these consist hisneatness.[50]The clean shirt is put upon the dirty body; the hands and face being alone open to the air and sun and the eyes of the neighbours, are washed. Nothing is filthy that is unseen.[51]The Eastern has no brush or blacking; no care is expended or expense incurred for neatness. He has his religious ablutions for prayer.[52]He will not tell you that he washes for his comfort or his health, but because it would be a sin not to do so.

Whatever proceeds from the body is impure; to touch anything with it is sinful, were it even a beast. To spit on a dog is wicked.[53]If by act or accident the Mussulman is rendered unclean he has to wash himself. The soiling of his carpet may entail the ablution of the whole body; while it remains unperformed he isipso factoexcommunicated—can take part in no ceremony, say no prayer. He is strictly in the scriptural sense “unclean.” All injunctions of the same sort are in like manner enforced. These are the first lessons taught the child, and become a second nature; and, re-acting on the belief from which they spring, give to it that surprising hold over the mind. They pass through life, generation after generation, without probably a single instance of the infringement of rules brought into operation every hour of the day.

Following the instinct of the dog, and obeying the injunction of the ceremonial law,[54]their canon law inhibits defilement of the public roads, the streets, water-tanks and courses, fruit-trees, and any places which serve for resort, shade, repose, or retreat.[55]In “Hadji Baba” is a ludicrous account of the perplexities of a Persian in one of the modern adaptations of civilization to cleanliness—his ineffectual attempts to get at the gushing water, his inability to work the machinery or comprehend the purpose. In that part of their house there is a water-cock for use. The flooring is of marble—the water falls and runs, and high wooden pattens are used. The outer cloth garments are left outside—the ample sleeves are tucked up. If there be no fixed pipe a ewer is at hand, and a servant waits outside with basin, ewer, and napkin. In consequence of the offices attached to every mosque, their cities do not present offensive smells, disgusting filth and revolting indecency. One hand is set apart for noble, the other for ignoble service. The left hand on its dying day has not so much as touched the mouth; the right is in equal ignorance of other parts of the body. This is the natural sense of the words: “Let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth.”[56]

I have not hesitated to allude to matters which our false refinement forbids to mention, and thus the sensibility given us to put away what is impure is diverted merely to its concealment. The reader must fill up this faint sketch from his imagination, and when he has done so, he will understand why an Eastern cannot endure Europe, and why Christians amongst Mussulmans are called “dogs.”[57]

Why should the ladies of the East have enjoyments from which ours are debarred, and sensations too of which they know nothing? It may be said the Turkish ladies so make up for their “exclusion from society:”—they have no balls or operas, morning concerts or fancy fairs, and therefore they take up with these merely sensual indulgences. They would no more exchange their bath for your balls, than you would your balls for a Yankee camp-meeting. There is no necessity for exchange. Why not have both? Would it be no comfort, no pleasure, no benefit to an English lady, on returning from a ball, and before going to bed, to be able, divested of whalebone and crinoline, and robed as an Atalanta, to enter marble chambers with mosaic floors, and be refreshed and purified from the toil she has undergone, and prepared for the soft enjoyment of the rest she seeks? The hanging gardens of Babylon were devised by the love of Nature of a Median woman; the palaces and groves of the Azahra laid out by the taste of a Numidian:—why should not England owe to the delicacy of an Englishwoman[58]the restoration of thethermæ?

Our intercourse with the lower orders is broken off by there being no settled occasion on which we are in contact with them, and by the want of cleanliness in their persons. Here both classes are constantly brought into the presence of each other. Contempt and distaste are removed on one side, degradation and irritation on the other: they know one another: the intercourse of various ranks requires and sustains a style and demeanour which strike all Europeans, who are astonished that the bearing of the peasant is as courtly as that of the Pasha: he is as clean as the Pasha. Think of a country where difference of rank makes no difference of cleanliness! What must Easterns think of us where the difference of condition can be traced—in speech, manner, and washing. The bath is of as great value to the society as to the individual. A political economist, glorifying his age, exclaims—“Augustus in all his splendour had neither glass for his window nor a shirt to his back.” The slave and the beggar in Rome were daily in the enjoyment of luxuries which no European monarch knows.

There is an impression that the bath is weakening. We can test this in three ways; its effects on those debilitated by disease, on those exhausted by fatigue, and on those who are long exposed to it.

1. In affection of the lungs and intermittent fever, the bath is invariably had recourse to against the debilitating nightly perspirations. The temperature is kept low, not to increase the action of the heart or the secretions; this danger avoided, its effect is to subdue by a healthy perspiration in a waking state the unhealthy one in sleep. No one ever heard of any injury from the bath. The moment a person is ailing he is hurried off to it.

2. After long and severe fatigue—that fatigue such as we never know—successive days and nights on horseback—the bath affords the most astonishing relief. Having performed long journeys on horseback, even to the extent of ninety-four hours, without taking rest, I know by experience its effects in the extremest cases.

A Tartar, having an hour to rest, prefers a bath to sleep. He enters as if drugged with opium, and leaves it, his senses cleared, and his strength restored as much as if he had slept for several hours. This is not to be attributed to the heat or moisture alone, but to the shampooing, which in such cases is of an extraordinary nature. The Tartar sits down and doubles himself up; the shampooer (and he selects the most powerful man) then springs with his feet on his shoulders, cracking his vertebræ; with all his force and weight he pummels the whole back, and then turning him on his back and face, aided by a second shampooer, tramples on his body and limbs: the Tartar then lays himself down for half an hour; and, perhaps, though that is not necessary, sleeps. Well can I recall the hamâm doors which I have entered, scarcely able to drag one limb after the other, and from which I have sprung into my saddle again, elastic as a sinew and light as a feather.

You will see aHammal(porter), a man living only on rice, go out of one of those baths where he has been pouring with that perspiration which we think must prostrate and weaken, and take up his load of five hundred-weight, placing it unaided on his back.

3. The shampooers spend eight hours daily in the steam; they undergo great labour there, shampooing, perhaps, a dozen persons, and are remarkably healthy. They enter the bath at eight years of age: the duties of the younger portion are light, and chiefly outside in the hall to which the bathers retire after the bath; still, there they are from that tender age exposed to the steam and heat, so as to have their strength broken, if the bath were debilitating. The best shampooer under whose hands I have ever been, was a man whose age was given me as ninety, and who, from eight years of age, had been daily eight hours in the bath. This was at the natural baths of Sophia. I might adduce in like manner the sugar-bakers in London, who in a temperature not less than that of the bath, undergo great fatigue, and are also remarkably healthy.

The Romans furnish another example. Unlike the Arabs, who restrict its use to once a week, they went into it daily. The temperature was gradually raised, until in the time of Nero it came to be excessive. Their habits in other respects were not such as to be conducive to health, and must have disqualified them for enduring the bath: if it did debilitate, it served therefore as an antidote to their manner of life, and relieved the excess of the Patrician, as it does to-day the fatigue of the Tartar.

Life is chemical and galvanic, but both these agencies result in, and depend upon, motion: the vessels are constructed for conveying fluids, the muscles for generating power. Thus, shampooing exerts over the human body a power analogous to that of drugs administered by the mouth. A blow which kills, a posture which benumbs;—pressure, which in long disease becomes a chief obstacle to recovery, exercise which gives health and strength—are all evidences of the influence of motion over our system.

Who has not experienced in headaches and other pains, relief from the most unartful rubbing? You receive a blow, and involuntarily rub the part. Cold will kill; the remedy is brandy and friction. The resources of this process surely deserve to be developed with as much care as that which has been bestowed upon the Materia Medica. Where practised, human suffering is relieved, obstructions are removed, indigestion is cured, paralysis and diseases of the spine, &c., arising from the loss of muscular power, are within its reach, while they are not under the control of our medicines. Here is a new method to add to the old. Wherever it can be employed, how much is it to be preferred to nauseating substances taken into the stomach; how much must the common practice of it tend to preserve the vitality of the whole frame! Even if disregarded as an enjoyment of health, it offers a solace which ought to be invaluable in the eye of a medical man, as of course it must be of the patient. We have all to play that part.

Where the practice is familiar, it is used not merely in the bath, but upon all occasions. It is to be found without the bath, as among the Hindoos, some Tartar tribes, the Chinese, and the Sandwich islands:—the latter presents one of the most remarkable of phenomena. The different ranks are those of different stature. The chiefs are sunk in sloth and immorality; and yet it is not they, who, like the grandees of Spain, are the diminutive and decrepit race;—they are shampooed.[59]A practice which our epicures and our stoics, our patients and our doctors, would turn up the nose at, counteracts the consequences of gluttony, intoxication, debauchery, and sloth, and supplies the place of exercise and temperance; and a people which can boast no school of philosophy, whose nostrils have never been regaled by the compounds of Beauvilliers, and whose pulse has never been stretched out to a Halden, is able to combine the health of the Brahmin with the indulgence of the Sybarite, and the frame of the gymnast with the habits of the hog.

Turner in his Embassy to Thibet, (p.84), describes the gylong or class of priests, as “more athletic” than their countrymen, although they “lead a life in an extreme degree sedentary and recluse.” They perform ablutions in which their compatriots do not join. The physical superiority of the aristocracy of England may be owing to a similar cause, cleanliness being with us a mark of station.

In Denmark, shampooing has recently been hit upon as a scientific process, and a college has been instituted, as I understand, with considerable success, for the practice of what they are pleased to callmedicina mechanica.

What am I to say of our medical science, what of our medical practitioners, what of our philanthropy, what of our selfishness, in not having the bath as a means of curing disease?[60]Never was a people more heroically self-denying or extravagantly insensate. We must love the racking of pain, the flavour of drugs, and the totals of apothecaries’ bills; for with our classical acquirements and love of travel, we cannot be ignorant, that all maladies, with the exception of epidemical ones, were less common in Rome than in modern London, notwithstanding our many advantages from the improved state of medical knowledge; and that several painful diseases common amongst us were exceedingly rare amongst the ancients, and are almost unknown in Mahometan countries. There are those who are of opinion that contagious disorders, “dreadful scourges of the human race, might never have taken root, nor if they had, would now be spread so widely, had the hot bath been in use amongst us.”[61]

The human body is formed for labour, and requires it, and this labour is accompanied by perspiration. It is the safety-valve for the heart, the sewer for the secretions; the scavenger for the skin. Those who are thrown repeatedly into perspiration, possess, however seldom washed, many advantages over those who have not to undergo severe bodily toil, however often they may use soap and water to the surface.

The bath substitutes an artificial and easy perspiration, and this explains the extraordinary fact, that the people who use it do not require exercise for health, and can pass from the extreme of indolence to that of toil.

The functions for carrying on life are of the nature of a steam-engine, and a chemical apparatus: lethal gases are given forth as from a furnace; poisons are produced by every organ; from every function there is residuum, and the body, while soiled by labour, is rusted by repose. This rust, this residuum deposits on the skin.

The extremities of the vessels become charged with unctuous matter; the deadened cellules of the epidermis are covered with a varnish, which is partly insoluble in water, and this internal accumulation and external coating prevent the skin from performing its functions, which are not confined to those of shielding the body, but are essential to the chemical processes within. The skin has analogous duties to those of the lungs, supplying oxygen to the blood at the extremity of its course, and when most completely in need of it. It has to aid at the same time the action of the heart. In its health is their health, and its health is cleanliness. Unlike the two other organs, it is placed within man’s reach, and confided to his care; and curiously interspersed through it are glands secreting peculiar odours, that the touch and sight shall not alone warn, but a third sense be enlisted in this guardianship, crying aloud on every remissness, and charging and reciprocating every neglect.[62]

The Russians come out of a bath of 120° to roll themselves in the snow. This we explained by the fervour of the circulation, which enables them to withstand the shock. If so, the strong and healthy might bear it—not the weak and suffering, the octogenarian and the child. The sudden passage from a Russian bath[63]to a glacial atmosphere, is attended by neither shock nor danger; and far from the oppression that would result from the absorption of vital action in the efforts of the heart to overcome the violent contraction of the circulation, by the cold, there is a sense of ineffable relief. You seem to take in and throw forth your breath in mere playfulness, no longer dependent upon it momentarily for life. In fact, the lungs and heart are discharged in part from the toil of that unceasing labour, which, beginning with the cradle, ends with the grave. Of what service must it not be to aid a machine, the efforts of which, in the most delicate girl, are equal to a steam-engine of fourteen horse-power?[64]

Who can reflect on this, and be content with mere wonder, nor bethink himself of the means by which the purposes of Nature can be aided, and the gifts of Providence enjoyed?[65]

The bath has the effect of several classes of medicines; that is to say, it removes the symptoms for which they are administered; thus, it is a cathartic, a diuretic, a tonic, a detersive, a narcotic; but the effect is produced only when there is cause. It will bring sleep to the patient suffering from insomnia, but will not, like opium, make the healthy man drowsy; and relieve constipation without bringing on the healthy—as aloes would—diarrhœa: it is thus a drug, which administers itself according to the need, and brings no after-consequences.

The opium-like effect has often been remarked, and I have repeatedly experienced after the bath sensations like those it produces. If it has not the same power in relieving bodily pain, it has unquestionably that of assuaging mental suffering. It is quite as natural an impulse amongst Easterns, to seek the bath when they are labouring under affliction as when disposed to give way to gladness. And this may be considered as one part of its curative virtues, having the faculty of calming the disturbed spirit without extinguishing, and indeed while increasing, the dispositions to cheerfulness.

Reader! consider that this is not a drug in a shop, to be exhibited by prescription after a visit to a patient. It would be something if I suggested a new simple, or an improved plan of administering a known remedy in any one disorder. It would be much by such a suggestion to diminish in a few cases the pains of sciatica or of rheumatism, the tortures of gout or stone; what I suggest, is ahabit, one which shall become, when adopted, that of the whole people.

A bath might be had for one quarter of the price of a glass of gin; for we have water in more abundance, and at a cheaper rate than at Rome.

To substantiate this estimate, I prepared some calculations, but having visited the baths and washhouses recently established, I find the case illustrated to my hand by practice, and affording an entire confirmation of all, and more than all, that I have said. It is not long since that there was not a hot bath to be got in London under two shillings; what would then have been said if any one had had the hardihood to advance, that hot baths might be got for two-pence? and that bathing establishments, charging from one penny for cold baths up to sixpence, should become profitable concerns? Such nevertheless is the fact. There is here no new idea, no new process, no new demands: it has simply been suggested to build larger establishments, and to throw them open at a smaller sum; so that we have hitherto been deprived of these advantages through the partial blindness of those who have, in as far as they do see, deplored the blindness of others, not thinking that probably other films intercepted their own sight.

I will therefore take the result obtained in these baths and wash-houses, as the basis of the calculation which I wish to establish. For a thousand baths, the charge for water varies from twenty to twenty-eight shillings; the coals for fuel from fifteen to thirty shillings; the other charges from fifteen to twenty shillings. In all these cases, the lower sum is of course above what the charge will be when experience has pointed out improvements and economy. Taking the most economical of these establishments, we have baths at the rate of fifty shillings a thousand, that is, at a little more than a halfpenny a piece. The allowance of water for each bath is forty-five gallons; fuel enters for one-third into the charge: reducing these charges to what would be incurred in the Turkish bath, there would be a saving of eight-ninths for the water, and probably five-sixths for the fuel, and an entire saving for the charge of attendance for the poorer classes, (theσεαυτοὺς βαλνεύσουντες); thus we should have on the thousand baths, the charge for water and fuel reduced from thirty-five to five shillings; and the charge of attendance being withdrawn from the poorer classes, the expense incurred would amount to one penny for sixteen baths, or four baths for a farthing.

Here I am going upon the data supplied by these bathing establishments, where the water is furnished to them at a very low price, namely, fifteen shillings for the one thousand barrels, of thirty gallons, and where the coals consumed are of an inferior quality, at nine shillings a ton; and these are the points in which England and its capital possess such great advantages. In these establishments they can furnish between one and two thousand baths a-day, at an outlay of 15l.or 16l.a-week; and as the experiment has so far so well succeeded, two hundred of them would supply London, at the rate of a bath to each person, weekly, for which the weekly expenditure would be 3000l.or 150,000l.per annum, which would occasion a daily use of 126,000,000 of gallons of water. In the Turkish manner, the expenditure of water would be 15,000,000; and taking the proportionate saving in fuel, there would be a saving of one half the outlay, or 75,000l.a-year; but, as the facility thus afforded, and the habits so engendered, would lead in our climate, and in our circumstances, to a much more frequent use of the bath than once a-week, and as it would constantly be had recourse to by the lower orders, without their going through the whole process, the establishments would have to be proportionately larger, and the expenditure greater. At all events, it is now no longer a theoretical matter: these baths are in use, and are extending; and the question is, whether we shall introduce a perfect instead of a defective method—an economical instead of an expensive one. But, if this new charge be incurred, we have, on the other side, to look forward to the possibility of retrenchments in consequence of the altered habits of the people. The one that first presents itself is the diminution of maladies, doctors’ and apothecaries’ fees and drugs, loss of time from sickness, and attendance;—and here, to say nothing of the different value of life, the saving for London alone will have to be reckoned by millions. Next are temperance and sobriety. At first sight the connection will not appear so immediate; it will, however, be unquestionable to those familiar with countries where the bath is in use. I know of no country, in ancient or modern times, where habits of drunkenness have co-existed with the bath. Misery and cold drive men to the gin-shop: if they had the bath—not the washing-tub, but the sociable hamâm, to repair to—this, the great cause of drunkenness, would be removed; and if this habit of cleanliness were general, restraints would be imposed on such habits by the feelings of self-respect engendered.

Gibbon has indulged in speculations on the consequences for Europe that would have followed, had Charles Martel been defeated on the plains of Tours. One of these effects would have been, that to-day in London there would be no gin-palaces, and a thousand baths.

In London and its suburbs there are nearly two millions of inhabitants; of these, one million and a half at least cannot afford those baths which we use.[66]Deducting a fifth for infants under forty days old, and persons confined to bed, there would remain twelve hundred thousand, so that two hundred thousand bodies, which now carry their filth from the cradle to the grave, would be daily washed. Judging by the scale of prices at Constantinople[67]or Rome, the cost of a bath might begin from one penny or twopence, and range upwards to five shillings; striking the average at sixpence, we should have 5000l.daily, or 1,500,000l.per annum. An ordinary bath will accommodate two hundred persons daily. At Constantinople, for a population of five hundred thousand (Turks) three hundred are requisite. In Cordova, there were nine hundred; in Alexandria, when taken by the Arabs, there were four hundred. One thousand baths would be required for London, and each would have for its support 1500l.a-year. The cost of erection would be provided, as for hospitals, churches, &c., by foundation, donations, bequests, subscriptions, or municipal charges.

The poor of England have never had an opportunity of knowing the comfort which is derived on a cold day from the warmth imparted by such an atmosphere. How many of the wretched inhabitants of London go to their chilly homes in the winter months benumbed with cold, and with no means of recovering their animal warmth but by resorting to spirits and a public-house fire. The same sixpence which will only procure them a quartern of the stimulant, which imparts but a momentary heat, would, if so expended, obtain for them at once warmth and refreshment.

Do not run away with the idea that it is Islamism that prevents the use of spirituous liquors; it is the bath. It satisfies the cravings which lead to those indulgencies, it fills the period of necessary relaxation, and it produces, with cleanliness, habits of self-respect, which are incompatible with intoxication: it keeps the families united, which prevents the squandering of money for such excesses. In Greece and Rome, in their worst times, there was neither “blue ruin” nor “double stout.”

The quantity of malt consumed in former days is referred to as a test of relative well-being. This I do not deny; but there can be no question that pure water is the most wholesome drink,[68]as it is unquestionable, that if London were Mussulman, the operative, as the rest of the population, would bathe regularly, have a better-dressed dinner for his money, and prefer water to wine or brandy, gin or beer. The bath, therefore, would secure at once cleanliness and temperance.

Where Christianity first appeared, cleanliness, like charity or hospitality, was a condition of life. Christ and the apostles went through the legal ablutions. When the relaxation took place at the first council of Jerusalem, in favour of the Gentiles, these points could never have been raised or called in question, for in this respect the habits of the nations were in conformity with the Jewish law. Reference is made to it in the fathers,[69]not as a practice only, but as a duty.[70]In the primitive Church of England the bath was a religious observance: the penitent was in some cases forbidden its use; but then cold bathing was enjoined. Knighthood was originally a religious institution, and the conferring of it is a church ceremony. The aspirant knightprepared himself by the bath. The second distinction which it is in the power of the Sovereign of England to bestow, is entitled “The Order of the Bath.” Now, the Sovereign who confers, and the knights who receive the title, never saw a real bath in their lives.[71]

When tesselated pavements of Caldaria, or fragments of Laconicum and Hypocaust come to light in our streets or fields, the modern Goth gazes with the same stupid wonder, without the same respect[72]with which the barbarians of this land look upon their fathers’ works;—you can tell them the date of their ruins; they could explain to you the use of yours. The Romans could recall the time when their fathers only washed their hands and their feet;[73]the Turks, the time when their fathers washed neither. We have to recall the times when our fathers knew what it was thoroughly to be washed, and to be wholly clean; and, reversing the experience of these people, and combining in our progress their points of departure, we have arrived at washing hands and feet only, or washing neither.

Britain received the bath from the Romans, Ireland from the Phœnicians,[74]Hungary from the Turks, Spain from the Saracens[75]—everywhere it has disappeared. In Greece it was as common as in Turkey. Greece became independent, and the bath took wing.[76]Everywhere throughout Europe the point of departure is cleanliness, the result of progress is filth. How is it that a habit so cleanly, associated with edifices so magnificent, leading to intercourse of the classes of society so useful to the state, and conferring on the poorer orders so large a measure of comforts and enjoyments, should have disappeared, wherever light, learning, taste, liberality have spread? When abstractions have got possession of the brain of a people, you can no more reckon upon its tastes, than upon its acts.

“What ruler in modern times can make a comparison otherwise than degrading to himself between the government over which he presides and those of ancient Greece or Rome? Can he reflect, without taking shame to himself, that the heads of the republics of Athens and Sparta, the tribunes, ædiles, consuls, censors, and emperors of Rome, thought they had not rendered the condition of the poor tolerable, unless they had afforded them the gratuitous enjoyment of baths, theatres, and games, to make them forget for some hours of the day the hardships and privations which poverty brings with it? The boasted happiness of the English common people (if, indeed, any one can be hardy enough to vaunt it now-a-days) is infinitely lower than was that of the plebeians of Greece or Rome.”[77]

The evils of our system do not spring from the violence of passion, but from fallacies. We, of course, cannot grapple with our own fallacies; therefore all that philanthropy and science can do, is to try to heal, one by one, the sores which legislation engenders wholesale. The bath is an idea which the simplest mind may grasp; it is a work which industry, not genius, is required to accomplish. We found hospitals for the sick, we open houses of refuge for the destitute; we have recently been engaged in finding nightly shelter for the homeless; wash-houses have even been established. How many are anxious to find some sort of holiday, or innocent recreation, for the classes, whose commons we have enclosed, and whose festivities we have put down;—how many seek to raise the lower orders in the moral and social scale? A war is waged against drunkenness, immorality, and filthiness in every shape. Here is the effectual weapon!—here is an easy and a certain cure! It is no speculation or theory; if it were so, it would easily find apostles and believers.

The good-will and means that run to waste through our not knowing how to be clean, are enormous. A small town in the New Forest, with Roman daring, planned a bath as a work of public utility, but built it with English coin, of which it took 8000l.There are steam-apparatus, reservoirs for sea-water,[78]&c. It was a model bathing establishment. It is now selling as bricks and old iron! Close by there are large boilers for evaporating salt, over which, at the cost of a few planks, a Russian vapour-bath might have been had. The use of the vapour was not unknown. There were persons who repaired thither for cutaneous and other disorders, and were cured.

Consider the heat and steam throughout the manufactories of England, which the instinct of a Russian boor, or Laplander, or Red Indian would apply for the benefit of the miserable population engaged in those works, and now allowed to run to sheer waste. The filthiest population exists, with the most extensive means of cleanliness. A nation that boasts of its steam, that is puffed up with its steam, that goes by steam, does not know how to use steam to wash its body, even when it may be had gratis.

The people that has not devised the bath, cannot deserve the character of refinement, and (having the opportunity) that does not adopt it, that of sense. Servility, however, we do possess, and any person of distinction has it in his power to introduce it. That which all despise, when only a thing of use, will be by all rushed after when it becomes a matter of fashion. The sight of a bath of a new fashion, and enjoyed by another people, has impelled me to make this endeavour to regain it for my own. Is Europe ever to remain on the map the black spot of filth? Can she owe the bath only to the Roman sword or Moorish spear? Must she now await the Cossack lance? After ridicule for warning, the day may come that I shall suffer reproach for deprecating the event, and it will be said to me, “Thesebarbarians, who, Providence-like, have come to compose our troubles; Roman-like, to teach us to be clean.”

[17]A bronze statue of a bather by Lysippus was removed by Tiberius from the baths of Agrippa to his own palace, and placed in his bedroom. The Roman people “infested the emperor with reproaches and hootings whenever he appeared in public, till their Apozymenos was restored to them.”—Pliny’sNat. His.b. xxxiv. c.35.

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