If it should ever arise
again,--and it is by no means a _ville morte_,--it will be in an
entirely different way. The particular Bath of the eighteenth
century--the Bath of Queen Anne and the Georges, of Nash and Fielding
and Sheridan, of Anstey and Mrs. Siddons, of Wesley and Lady Huntingdon,
of Quin and Gainsborough and Lawrence and a hundred others--is no more.
It is a case of _Fuit Ilium_. It has gone for ever; and can never be
revived in the old circumstances. To borrow an apposite expression from
M. Texte, it is an organism whose evolution has accomplished its course.
M. Barbeau's task, then, is very definitely mapped-out and
circumscribed. But he is far too good a craftsman to do no more than
give a mere panorama of that daily Bath programme which King Nash and
his dynasty ordained and established. He goes back to the origins; to
the legend of King Lear's leper-father; to the _Diary_ of the
too-much-neglected Celia Fiennes; to Pepys[55] and Grammont's Memoirs; to
the days when hapless Catherine of Braganza, with the baleful "_belle_
Stewart" in her train, made fruitless pilgrimage to Bladud's spring as a
remedy against sterility. He sketches, with due acknowledgments to
Goldsmith's unique little book, the biography of that archquack,
_poseur_, and very clever organiser, Mr.
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