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aware of being "the cynosure of neighbouring eyes;" for the gallery of the bath was generally the resort of young gentlemen who ogled the fair to their heart's content. There is a story told of a gentleman once looking at his wife while she was bathing in the King's Bath, and who was so charmed with her increase of beauty that he could not help complimenting her upon it, which a king of Bath hearing, he instantly took him by the heels and hurled him over the rails into the water-by way of marking, we suppose, his sense of the impropriety and mauvais ton of admiring one's own partner.

The public baths of the city are four in number-the King's Bath, the Queen's Bath, the Hot Bath, and the Cross Bath. The King's Bath is the largest and most important of them all, and royalty has on many occasions disported in its waters. A remarkable circumstance is related to have occurred in it while Queen Ann, consort of James I., was bathing here. A flame of fire, it is said, ascended to the top of the water, spread itself into a large circle of light, and then became extinct. This so frightened her Majesty that she immediately departed for the New Bath, close at hand; which ever afterwards went by the name of the Queen's Bath. Another circumstance, still more singular in connection with it, is mentioned by Stukeley in his 'Itinerarum.' 66 It is remarkable," says he, "that at the cleansing of the springs, when they set down a new pump, they constantly found great quantities of hazelnuts, as in many other places among subterraneous timber." The comment of this old author upon the circumstance is, however, a thousand times more strange than the thing itself. These," he adds, "I doubt not to be the remains of the famous and universal Deluge, which the Hebrew historian tells us was in autumn; Providence by that means securing the revival of the vegetable world.” (!)

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means of the "great unwashed." The temperature of the water is about 950. The Hot Bath is so named from the great heat of its springs, the thermometer standing in it as high as 116°: a temperature so great that it seems almost to scald the skin upon the first immersion. In addition to these public baths (which belong to the Corporation), there are a number of private bathing-establishments, fitted up with every elegance and improvement that the present day has suggested. There are also the Abbey Baths, likewise very commodious, and situated upon the site of the old Roman Thermæ. In 1833, an analysis was made, by the Oxford professor of chemistry, of the gas emitted by the waters, and he found that within the twenty-four hours 222 cubic feet was given off, which contained a variable quantity; viz., from 4 to 13 per cent. of the whole; and the rest consisted of 96 per cent. of nitrogen, and 4 per cent. of oxygen. learned professor, we are also told, drew the inference so comfortable to Bathonians, that their city owes its hot springs to the action of a volcano immediately beneath it!

The

This is a mere conjecture, however, as philosophers are still entirely in the dark as to the causes of the internal heat of the globe. The old Bathonians had an opinion of their own on the subject: they attribute the springs themselves to the Royal necromancer, Bladud; and their composition, and the origin of their heat, is set forth in rhyme, which, five centuries ago, was held to be very good reason: we quote the following lines as far as they bear upon the subject:

"Two tunne ther beth of bras,
And other two maked of glas;
Seven salts there beth inne,
And other thing maked with ginne;
Quick brimstone in them also,
With wild fire maked thereto.
Sal Gemme and Sal Petræ,
Sal Amonak then is eke;
Sal Alfrod and Sal Alkine,
Sal Gemmæ is mingled with brine;
Sal Conim and Sal Almetre bright,
That borneth both day and night.
All this is in the tonne ido,
And other things many mo,
All borneth both night and day,
That never quench it we may.

In vour well springs the tounes laggeth,
As all the philosophers us saggeth.
The hete within, the water without,
Maketh it hot all about."

This, translated into modern English, means that the redoubtable Bladud buried deeply in the earth at Bath two tons of burning brass and two of glass,the latter of which contained a composition of seven salts, brimstone and wildfire, which precious composition being set potwise over the four springs, fermented, and thus caused that great heat which now exists, and is to last for ever! Modern chemists would like to be able to produce perpetual heat on the same terms; it would be finding a motive power at a very cheap rate

-indeed it would solve the problem of perpetual | old coaching time resounded throughout the day with motion without more ado. the rattle of the stages and mails running between London and the West, gives the stranger no idea of the beauty of the modern town. The gable ends of the houses, the country-town like character of the shops, and the appearance of the inhabitants, presents another world to that which exhibits itself in Milsome Street. As we proceed along Stall Street, architectural beauties begin to unfold themselves. The Pumproom, the crescent-shaped Piazza which commences Bath Street, the King's Bath, and the Colonnade, through which the beautiful west-front of the Abbey is seen, furnish a number of effects all charming in themselves. At this spot the genius of Bath still seems to linger: the chairmen hang about, reminding one of old times, and the lounger, too, seems to love it. The Pump-room, which was built upon the site of the old one, in 1796, presents, in combination with its two wings, the King's Bath and the Colonnade, a very beautiful appearance. Its interior, which is 60 feet long by 56 wide, is noble-looking and elegant. The band, long famous for its performance of ancient music, still attracts much company on Saturday-the fashionable day of the season. (Cut, No. 3.)

The waters are reported to be beneficial in all chronic distempers, with the exception of those arising from diseased lungs, or from hæmorrhage and inflammation. Gout, stone, rheumatism, indigestion, palsy, and bilious obstruction (this accounts, we suppose, for the multitudes of liverless old Indians to be found in Bath ;) and cutaneous discases are said to be benefited by the use of these springs, whether administered externally or internally. A collection of all the treatises which have been written upon the efficacy of the Bath waters would make a very decent-sized library, as in former times such works were the means by which young physicians introduced themselves to practice. It is not a little amusing to look over the more antique of these productions, published in the days of Brobdignagian type, oceans of margin and rude initial letters, and observe how the old practitioners managed to hide their real ignorance of internal complaints by generalizing them under such appellations as "the grosser humours of the body," or "the vapours which arise to the brain," and which these waters were to drive forth, We do not wonder at Dr. Radcliffe's threat "to cast a toad into the spring," when we consider the outrageous manner in which their waters were quacked by the physicians of a past generation.

A WALK THROUGH BATH.

The high level at which the Great Western Railway passes through the suburbs enables the traveller to take in a very comprehensive view of the city. It lies before him almost like an Ordnance map, a very dirty corner of which he crosses; for however handsome the allprevalent free-stone is in appearance in buildings of any pretension to architectural effect, yet when employed in the meaner buildings of the artisans it has a very grim and mean appearance, quite melancholy to witness. Across a perfect nest of courts and alleys, the traveller, as we have before said, is hurried, and he cannot witness the wretched poverty at his feet without bitterly contrasting it with the palace-like erections of the Lansdowne Hill-side.

If we approach Bath by way of the old bridge which crosses the Avon, we shall gain a juster knowledge of the city than by any other entrance. This bridge, in old times, was quite sufficient for all the traffic which passed over it; but with railroads a new epoch has commenced, and its ancient piers are now made to carry a wooden roadway overhanging on either side. A little higher up the stream, the railroad crosses the river by a skew-bridge, in which Brunel seems to have courted a difficulty merely to vanquish it. As the eye wanders over the complication of iron girders and ponderous beams of which it is composed, it assumes an aspect of daring power, that seems to typify the dauntless spirit of the present age as contrasted with the old bridge which slowly creeps across the river on five cumbersome arches. (Cut, No. 2.) Southgate Street, which in the

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The modern rooms have few associations. Old Queen Charlotte, when she visited Bath, in 1817, held her morning levees here, at which the chief company of the city and neighbourhood were presented to her. Madame D'Arblay, in her interesting Diary,' gives us an affecting picture of the presentation of her husband to her Majesty, and of the exhaustion of the sufferer, who was in the last stage of disease, when the interview was over. The old king was to have accompanied the queen on this visit, and three houses had been taken for them in the Royal Crescent; but just as he had arranged for the excursion he was afflicted with blindness, and then, as Madame D'Arblay says, he would not come; "for what," said he, was a beautiful city to him who could not look at it."

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It was whilst her Majesty was sojourning in this city that the melancholy news arrived of the death of the Princess Charlotte, which event hurried her off to Windsor; but she did not much love her Royal grandchild, and three weeks saw her again drinking the Bath waters.

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The waters issue from the mouth of a marble serpent, and amid the bustle of Stall Street, this poetical idea situated on one side of the room, where the poor vale- of the ascent and descent of angels upon the ladder, tudinarians gather to quaff out of glasses tinctured, by sculptured in enduring stone on each side of the great the medicinal qualities of the water, a deep yellow west window, seems to realize some Scripture dream colour. During the season a fee is demanded of of one's youth, and to lead one back to those days strangers who visit the room while the band is playing, when the white-robed angels, with the brightness of but at all other times it is open as a public promenade. the celestial mansions still surrounding them, descended As we leave the Pump-room, our footsteps are upon earth and formed a link between the Eternal naturally led towards the Abbey Church, the richly- and his earthly creatures. We fear all our praise embellished west-front of which the eye wanders over must be confined to the effect of the west front, as the with delight. There was a monastery situated here at a general design of the building is not beautiful, neither very early date, and a church dedicated to St. Peter and are the details particularly elegant. It was the last St. Paul, which was elevated into a bishopric in 1090, and abbey built in England, and with it Gothic ecclegranted to John de Villola, bishop of Wells, for the pur- siastical architecture, as a really living style, might be pose of enlarging that see; and the two Abbey Churches said to have died. Like the religion with which it and dioceses have ever since remained united under grew up, it had become so debased that its destruction the same episcopal head. This building having fallen was inevitable. Upon the dissolution of the religious into decay, the present church was commenced in 1495, houses, the Abbey was entirely stripped, by Henry's by Oliver King, bishop of the diocese, who, it is as- Commissioners, of the lead, glass, iron, and timber that serted, was prompted to the good work by a vision he it contained, and reduced, in fact, to its naked walls; beheld in his sleep, wherein he saw the Holy Trinity in which condition it remained until 1606, when it was with angels ascending and descending by a ladder, to restored by Bishop Montague, and converted into a which was a fair olive-tree supporting a crown. This parochial church. The Bathonians, with a singular dream the prelate construed into a command from notion of the beauties of Gothic ecclesiastical archiHeaven to restore the Cathedral Church; which he tecture, pride themselves upon the lightness of the immediately set about, but did not live to see it interior of its edifice, which, from its being lit by the completed. (Cut, No. 4.) enormous number of fifty-two windows, is styled 'The Viewed from beneath the Pump-room Colonnade, Lantern of England.' The mid-day glare that meets

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