The Old, the Young, the Black, the Brown, the Fair, Our peaceful Warriour with his Muff behold, All Hands to Bus'ness, tho' a Tradesman's Bill No wonder that people flocked to Bath. The names selected at random by Mr Melville form a goodly 'Visitors' List' during the reign of Beau Nash-Fielding, Smollett, Pope, Mary Lepel, Henrietta Howard, Lord Chesterfield, Warburton, Tickell, Shenstone, Gainsborough, Pitt, Bolingbroke, Arbuthnot, Cowper, Bishop Butler, Young, Mrs Catherine Macaulay, Defoe, Princess Mary (who was burnt out at her lodgings and accepted Nash's hospitality for the rest of her second visit), Congreve, Steele, Bishop Berkeley, and others. Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, tolerated Bath so long as she thought the water did the Duke good. Thus she wrote to Lady Cowper on September 3, 1716: 'Her Grace of Shrewsbury is here and of a much happier Temper. She plays at Ombre upon the Walks, that she may be sure to have Company enough, and is as well pleased in a great Crowd of Strangers as the common People are with a Bull-baiting or a Mountebank. I have been upon the Walk but twice, and I never saw any Place abroad that had more Stinks and Dirt in it than Bath; with this difference only. that we are not starved, for here is a great Plenty of Meat, and very good; and as to the Noise, that keeps One almost always awake.' (Melville, p. 160.) The Duchess became very friendly with Nash and corre sponded with him afterwards, consulting him as to houses, the building of bridges, the digging of canals, and the granting of leases. A visitor less pleasing to Nash was Lord Peterborough the eccentric, who lost all his luggage on the way to Bath in 1731, and, rather than refurnish his wardrobe, had recourse to his friends even for clean linen. 'It is $ comical sight,' notes Lady Harvey, to see him with his blue ribbon and star and a cabbage under each arm, or a chicken in his hand, which, after he himself has purchased at market, he carries home for dinner.' Here, too, came Mrs Howard, who was made Countess of Suffolk; the beautiful Miss Chudleigh, whom Thackeray describes as slipping away from one husband and on the look-out for another'; and the highly respectable Mrs Pendarvis,' whom we know better as Mrs Delany, who writes to Swift on April 22, 1736, 'I left the Bath last Sunday se'night very full and gay.' She thinks Bath a more comfortable place to live in than London. All the entertainments of the place' (she says) 'lie in a small compass; and you are at your liberty to partake of them, or let them alone, just as it suits your humour. This town London] is grown to such an enormous size that above half the day must be spent in the streets, going from one place to another. I like it every year less and less.' In 1754 Nash seems to have fallen upon evil days; and, under the pretext of a subscription for a 'History of Bath and Tunbridge,' a sum of money was raised for him, which tided him over several years. On February 17, 1760, the Corporation tardily recognised his services to Bath by granting him a pension of ten guineas a month. Nash had no great liking for doctors in their professional capacity. Physicians,' he said, 'are excellent companions over a bottle, but odious under a phial.' A well-known story, fathered upon many, is told of him. Dr Cheney pointed out the advantage of having followed his prescription. Followed your prescription!' exclaimed Nash ungratefully. If I had, I should have broken my neck, for I flung it out of the two pair of stairs window.' Nash was for curing all disease by the waters. On Cheney advocating a vegetable diet, 'You old fool,' said the Beau. Do you think the Almighty sent Nebuchadnezzar to grass for his health?' Nash was very fond of his supper. Cheney told him jestingly that he behaved like other brutes, and lay down as soon as he had filled his belly. Very true,' retorted Nash; 'and this prescription I had from your neighbour's cow, who is a better physician than you and a superior judge of plants, notwithstanding you have written so learnedly on the vegetable diet.' As a rule, he was moderate both in eating and drinking. His usual fare was a couple of glasses of wine, and a plain dish or two with plenty of potatoes, which he called the English pine-apple. He was so fond of them that he used to eat them as food after dinner. But, with all his abstemiousness, he was a martyr to gout. The moment he found a foot attacked with it,' says Thicknesse, he sat with both feet in buckets of hot Bath water, and by that means put off the violence of the pain and often the disorder itself.' He lived, however, to be over eighty-six years of age, and died in his house in Saw Close on February 12, 1761, as a memorial on the house testifies to this day. The Corporation accorded him a public funeral. After lying in state four days, he was buried, the procession being headed by charity girls walking two and two, followed by the boys. As they marched they sang a hymn. Then came the city band and Nash's own musicians playing the Dead March in 'Saul.' Three clergymen preceded the coffin, its black velvet pall supported by the six senior Aldermen of the City. The Masters of the Assembly Rooms were the chief mourners, followed by members of the Corporation, the beadles of the Hospital, and the poor patients who had always found in him a benefactor. Even the tops of houses were covered with spectators. Sorrow sat upon every face, and even children lisped-we quote the Corporation Minutebook-that their sovereign was no more. Art. 3.-THE ELIZABETHAN AGE IN RECENT LITERARY HISTORY. 1. L'Histoire Littéraire du Peuple Anglais. Par J. J. Jusserand. Two vols. Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1894, 1904. English translation. Three vols. London: Fisher Unwin, 1906-9. 1. The French Renaissance in England. By Sidney Lee. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1910. Geschichte der englischen Literatur. By Richard Wülker. Two vols. Leipzig: Meyer, 1906–7. . The Cambridge History of English Literature. Edited by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller. Vols V-VII. Cambridge University Press, 1910-11. ATERARY History is a relatively late-born scion of the reat family of historical studies. In spite of many rilliant achievements it has hardly, even now, attained 1 England either the esteem or the fixity of method hich political history, after many stormy struggles, njoys. This is partly due to the rarity of that fine blend f the scientific and the poetic temper without which the istory of literature in any true sense cannot be written, nd partly to the abundance of cheap substitutes for ne or both. Three distinct tasks, at least, confront the terary historian; and their execution calls for widely ifferent tools. He has, first, to be a literary critic, to valuate the individual literary work. Secondly, he has o be a biographer, to appreciate and define the personality f the writer. And these indispensable studies are only ncillary to the third and most exacting task, that of letecting the interrelations and affinities among the indiidual authors and books, of exhibiting the intricate web f influences and filiation which makes it possible to iscern common character in the literature of an epoch nd continuity in the literature of a people. The history of literary history is in great part the record of the levelopment of new methods, instruments of research, nd points of view, bearing upon this last class of roblem. It was a series of brilliant and immensely uggestive, if specious, solutions of them which launched t, as a serious study, upon its course. At the close of the great generation which witnessed the gradual wakening of the historical temper in Western Europe, the generation which opened with Montesquieu and ended with Gibbon, literary history was still a nascent, nay, an embryonic, growth. Bacon, in his memorable survey of the varieties, actual and possible, of human learning, had put his finger on the place where literary history should have been, and found it vacant. For a century afterwards no attempt was made to fill it. Poets and wits mingled with soldiers and statesmen in the motley multitude of Fuller's Worthies; gossiping anecdotes of the literary world, brief lives of dramatists and notices of plays, were strung together by Aubrey and Langhorne. But the project of an English literary history seems first to have been entertained by the severest critic, among his contemporaries, of the English literary past-by Pope. The brilliant and incisive critical epigrams of his Epistle to Augustus, and the audacities of chronology which he there permitted himself for the better 'imitation' of Horace, may serve to indicate where the strength and weakness of his History, had it been carried out, would have lain. Immeasurably more to be regretted is the abandonment of a similar project,& generation later, by Gray. Crescimbeni had some years earlier produced his 'Istoria della volgare Poesia (1698): and Tiraboschi was already planning his vast History of the entire Italian Literature. If any Englishman of the eighteenth century was qualified for similar achievements, it was Gray. But his friend Thomas Warton had conceived a similar plan; and, indolence doubtless assisting generosity, Gray resigned the enterprise. His notes, put at Warton's disposal, thus became the nucleus of the huge unorganised mass of antiquarian erudition which its author called the 'History of English Poetry.' Warton's notions of literary history were indeed crude enough. But he had, together with an ardour of explora tion not too common in that age of easy-going scholarship, a sense, vague and incomplete no doubt, of the worth, for his own time and for the future, of the buried literary past which he did so much to make accessible. He was the doughtiest if not the most gifted of the early English Romantics, one who, comfortable eighteenth-century Oxford professor as he was, had heard the elfin-horns of Romance faintly afar, and lustily challenged the citadel |