with a total loss of all honour, and a great portion of that consideration with which his Bath subjects had hitherto treated him. He received this fall through entering into a confederation with the keepers of a new game, called 'E.O.,' set up on purpose to evade the law, a certain portion of the profits of which he pocketed, in consideration of the company he drew to it. Poor Nash was not a bit more corrupt than the mass of society at the time; but his position made it necessary for that society to turn its back upon him to save its own honour! The moral condition of Bath about the middle of last the century, was, we confess, at the lowest ebb, and its intellectual life was melancholy indeed. One forcible contrast will perhaps show the depravity of the period better than a thousand words. In the year 1760, subscription-rooms were opened for prayers at the Abbey, and gaming at the rooms. At the close of the first day the number of subscribers for prayers was twelve, and for gaming sixty-seven. This circumstance occasioned the following lines at the time: "The Church and Rooms the other day 'Your ladyship knows that I sent you a scrawl Out of such materials as these Nash managed to construct that social life which made Bath so famous in the last century, and which led to its material reconstruction by the genius of the architect Wood. We have before dwelt upon the insignificant appearance of the city at the beginning of the eighteenth century at that time, it contained but two houses fit to receive any personages of condition; but before its close it was one of the most splendidly-built places in Europe. In the few minutes' breathing-time which is allowed at Bath, in the rapid rush from London to the West, the traveller has, from the platform of the railwaystation, a splendid view of the city. The foreground he sees filled with spires of churches--the Abbey sitting like a mother in the midst; the back-ground closed in by the Lansdowne hills, up which terrace and crescent climb, until they appear almost to kiss the sky. Amid this splendid scene, however, he singles out one mass of buildings immediately beneath his eye, which stands with an air of great dignity, and seems to carry with it recollections of bygone glory. The North and South Parade, which we allude to, was one of the earliest works of Wood. Its broad and ample terraces,-where now but a few invalids catch the warmth of the sunny South, or breathe the bracing air of the Downs; in the time of Nash, and still later, was the resort of all the fashion of the land. What a sidling of hoops, a clopping of delicate red-heeled shoes, a glistening of sword Not only in the universal love of gambling was the vice of the period exhibited, but in the shameless intrigues which were carried on, but which Beau Nashwe must do him the justice to say-exerted all his influence to put a stop to. He was the Marplot of Bath; in fact, whenever a clandestine marriage was on the tapis, and as far as lay in his power, he acted as the conscientious guardian of those young ladies of fortune around whom the swindlers of the place constantly gathered. His manner of warning parents was sometimes brusque enough. On one occasion he highly offended a lady of fortune at the Assembly-room, by telling her she had better go home: this speech he con-hilts, a raising of cocked hats, and a display of black tinued to repeat to her; and at last, piqued and offended, solitaires, and patches à la Grecque, was there once she did go home, and there discovered the meaning here, of which a dusty death has long swallowed up of his apparently rude advice in a coach and six at all! Wood commenced these buildings about the year the door, which some sharper had provided to carry off 1730; and soon after, Queen Square, with its very her daughter. As for the manner in which the com- marked and noble style of architecture, the Circus, and pany got through the day, a description of it is melan- a crowd of other elegant buildings, which we shall choly enough. The bath occupied the morning; the notice hereafter, followed, displacing meaner erections, noon was spent (by the young) in making-believe to spreading far out into the then country, and supplying drink the waters in the Pump-room, but really in flirt- that architectural magnificence which the wealth and ing, according to the ingenuous Miss Jenny of Anstey's fashion now filling the city demanded. poem, who admits that the springs she never tastes, but that her chief delight is "Near the Pump to take my stand, And to hear the Captain say, whilst the old tabbies "Come to the Pump, as before I was saying, And talk all at once, while the music is playing: 'Your servant, Miss Fitchet :' 'Good morning, Miss Stote;' 'My dear lady Riggledam, how is your throat? Nash died in 1761, and for some time no dispute as to the succession arose; but in 1769, a civil war took place, in consequence of two Masters of the Ceremonies being elected. The partisans of the rival monarchs, among whom the ladies were most prominent, actually came to blows in the Pump-room, whose walls witnessed the most extraordinary scene that perhaps ever took place in a polite assembly. Imagine, good reader, a crowd of fashionables of the present day falling to pulling noses, and tearing caps and dresses! Yet such deeds took place among the 'mode' in Bath, rot seventy years ago: "Fair nymphs achieve illustrious feats, And it was not until the Riot Act had been read three times, that the fury of the combatants was appeased! The social condition of Bath, which we have been mainly following, continued pretty much the same as Nash left it, until the end of the last century; from that period, however, to the present time, a marked change has slowly been taking place in it. The public life of the city has gradually subsided, and is now pretty well extinct. The gambling spirit of old times has degenerated into shilling whist at the Wednesday night card-assemblies; and the public bails, those magnificent reunions which, in the old time, under Nash, always commenced with a minuet danced by the highest people of 'quality' present, although still well attended, yet shine with a diminished lustre. Bath, in fact, from a place of resort for the valetudinarian, and for the pleasure-seeker during the winter season, has become a resident city of 80,000 inhabitants, in which the domestic life has gradually encroached upon the public life that once distinguished it. Private parties have taken the place, to a considerable extent, of the subscription-balls, and friendly visits between families have emptied the Pump-room of much of that crush of fashion and galaxy of beauty which once trod its floors, when the city was a nest of lodging-houses, and the inhabitants a set of loungers, or a flock of incurables, who only visited it to air themselves in the eyes of the genteel world, or to wash themselves out with the mineral waters before making their final exit. Another reason why the public amusements of the place have fallen off so of late years is to be found in the religious spirit which has developed itself. The modern history of Bath is but an amplification of the life of many of its fine ladies of old: beginning their career with all kinds of dissipation, progressing amid scenes of scandal and intrigue, and ending by becoming a devotee what changes the individual underwent within the human pan society has repeated during the flight of a century and a half. As one passes along the streets and looks into the booksellers' windows, the ascendancy of the evangelical church-party in the city is manifest by the portraits of young clergymen everywhere meeting the eye, and the multitudes of religious books, with third,' or 'fourth,' edition of the ' tenth,'' twentieth,' or thirtieth' thousand inscribed upon their title-pages. Many of the publications issued in Bath, when in the heyday of its fame, were lewd and gross in the extreme we ourselves have seen many volumes which any Holywell Street publisher of the present time would be prosecuted for attempting to vend, so grossly indecent were they : yet in those days they were perused openly by maid, wife, and widow,-and doubtless without raising a blush upon the hardened cuticle of the eighteenth century. Without being too pharisaical, the city might compare her present with her past moral condition with much complacency. The tone of manners is immeasurably purer, and the life more moral; than it was in times of old. THE HOT BATHS. The Medicinal Baths of this city, so famous in the time of the Romans, appear to have lost all their attractions about the middle of the sixteenth century, mainly owing to the breaking-up of the monastery, in the prior and monks of which they were vested. So little were these baths known throughout the kingdom, and so few did they attract to their healing waters, that Dr. Turner, who wrote a treatise upon the 'Properties of the Baths of England,' in 1562, and which he dedicated to the Duke of Somerset, says, that it was only after visiting the baths of Italy and Germany, “that I hard tel that there was a natural bathe within your father's dukedome:" and farther on, he denounces the "nigardishe illiberallite" of the rich men of England, for not bettering and amending them. "I have not hearde," he tells us, "that anye rich man hath spente upon these noble bathes, one grote these twenty years." The Doctor's reproaches do not seem to have had much effect, for we find that during the reigns of Elizabeth and James the most extraordinary disorder existed in them. The baths, we are told, were like so many bear-gardens, and as for modesty, it was a thing which had no existence in them. The custom of both sexes bathing together in a perfect state of nature existed even a century before. Bishop Beckyngton having endeavoured, in 1449, to remedy the evil by issuing a mandate forbidding men and women to bathe together without "decent clothing;" his efforts, however, did not prove of much effect, for in 1646 we find the scandal grown so great, that the corporation was obliged to interfere and enforce the wearing of bathing-clothes. The filthy condition of the bath was almost as bad as the morals of the bathers: "dogs, cats, pigs, and even human creatures, were hurled over the rails into the water, while people were bathing in it." By the rigid enforcement of by-laws the corporation amended the nuisance, and the good effect of their interference was seen in the crowds of people who flocked to the city from different parts of England, both for the purpose of bathing and drinking the waters. Pepys, who visited the city in 1668, and of course pried into the baths, did not think them particularly clean, in consequence of the great resort to them. His gossiping sketch is full of interest: "13th (June) Saturday, up at four o'clock, being, by appointment, called up to the Cross Bath, where we were carried one after another, myself, and wife, and Betty Turner, Willet, and W. Hewer. And by-and-by, though we designed to have done before company came, much company came; very | the same bath continued down to the present century. fine ladies; and the manners pretty enough, only Anstey has a fling at the custom in his satirical poem : methinks it cannot be clean to go so many bodies together in the same water. Good conversation among them that are acquainted here and stay together. Strange to see how hot the water is; and in some places, though this is the most temperate bath, the springs are so hot as the feet not able to endure. But strange to see, when women and men here, that live all the season in these waters, cannot but be parboiled, and look like the creatures of the bath! Carried away, wrapped in a sheet, and in a chair, home; and then one after another thus carried, I staying above two hours in the water, home to bed, sweating for an hour; and by-and-by comes music to play to me, extraordinary good as ever I heard at London almost, or anywhere: 5s." "Oh! 't was pretty to see them all put on their flannels, The bath for a long time was a fashionable amusement for the ladies. A foreign traveller, who visited England towards the end of the last century, speaking of those in this city, says, "In the morning the young lady is brought in a close-chair, dressed in her bathingclothes, to the Cross Bath. Then the music plays her in the water, and the women who attend her present her with a little floating-dish like a basin, into which the lady puts a handkerchief and a nosegay, and of late a snuff-box is added. She then traverses the bath, if a novice, with a guide; if otherwise, by herself; and having amused herself nearly an hour, calls for her chair and returns home." The while the lady thus The fashion of ladies and gentlemen appearing in amused herself with her little floating-dish, she was well What an amiable picture this! the Clerk of the Acts (an officer filling the post of a modern Secretary to the Admiralty), his wife, and male and female servants, all dipping into one bath together! Somehow or other, the social liberty of those days of despotism was greater than that which exists at present, notwithstanding our free institutions. Fancy a fine lady of 1848 treating her waiting-maid on the like equal terms. 2.-VOL. III. |