minuet or a country dance at the Upper or Lower Assembly Rooms; you even may lose a few pieces at the green tables; and, should you return home late enough, may watch a couple of stout chairmen at the door of the "Three Tuns" in Stall Street, hoisting the seasoned bon vivant Mr. James Quin into a sedan after his evening's quantum of claret. What you do to-day you will do to-morrow, if the bad air of the Pump Room have not given you a headache, or the waters a touch of vertigo; and you will continue to do it for a month or six weeks, when the lumbering vehicle with the leathern straps and crane-necked springs will carry you back again over the deplorable roads ("so sidelum and jumblum" -one traveller styles them) to your town-house, or your country-box, or your city-shop or chambers, as the case may be. Here, in due course, you will begin to meditate upon your next excursion to The Bath, provided always that you have not dipped your estate at "E. O." or been ruined by milliners' bills; that your son has not gone off with a sham Scotch heiress or your daughter been married (by private licence) to a pinchbeck Irish peer. For all these things-however painful the admission-were, according to the most credible historians, the not infrequent accompaniments or sequels of an unguarded sojourn at the old jigging, card-playing, scandal-loving, pleasure-seeking city in the loop of "the soft-flowing Avon." And all these things-save and except a few vagrant variations of our own-are duly recorded in M. Barbeau's conscientious chronicles,-chronicles which, let us hasten to add, comprise much more than a mere picture of that quotidian Bath programme which King Nash and his successors had ordained and established. The author goes back to the origins; to the too-much-neglected Celia Fiennes; to Pepys, and Grammont's "Memoirs"; to the days when hapless Catherine of Braganza, with the "belle Stewart" in her train, made fruitless pilgrimage to Bladud's spring as a remedy against sterility. He sketches the biography of that archquack and poseur, the first Master of the Ceremonies; he gives a minute account of the marriage of Sheridan to his beautiful "St. Cecilia," Elizabeth Ann Linley. A special chapter is allotted to Lady Huntingdon and the Methodists, not without levies from the clever "Spiritual Quixote" of the Rev. Richard Graves of Claverton. Other chapters are occupied with Bath and its belles lettres; with Squire Allworthy" and his literary guests; with the historical Frascati vase of Lady Miller at Batheaston, which stirred the ridicule of Walpole. The closing pages treat of Bath musical, artistic, scientific ;-of its gradual transformation as a health resort; of its ultimate and foredoomed decline and fall as the watering-place par excellence of Great Britain and Ireland. 66 But we must dispense with further introductory intrusion. In the words of OLIVER GOLDSMITHwhom M. Barbeau may be proud to have for a predecessor-it is impolitic to tire the reader with a long preface, when his unfatigued attention is wanted to a serious performance. Let us content ourselves with adding here that M. Barbeau's skilful and scholarly book is fully furnished with all the requisite references to authorities; that it has an exhaustive Bibliography, and a copious Index. These attractions its present publisher has endeavoured to enhance by a series of portraits ་ and views of localities. Nothing remains, therefore, but to quote that latter-day and somewhat Alexandrine Bathonian, Mr. Cyrus Angelo Bantam of "Pickwick," and bid the reader-who, on this occasion, may fitly be apostrophised as "gentle" "Welcome to Ba-ath!" EALING, September 1904 AUSTIN DOBSON. I. BATH TO The Last Years of the Seventeenth CentuRY IX. AUTHORS AT BATH: PRIOR PARK; ITS LITERARY GUESTS 280 |