of his own affluence, he
came to Bath just at the moment when the fortunes of that ancient
centre of social pleasure were at their lowest ebb. Queen Anne had
been obliged to divert herself, in 1703, with a fiddle and a hautboy,
and with country dances on the bowling-green. The lodgings were dingy
and expensive, the pump-house had no director, the nobility had
haughtily withdrawn from such vulgar entertainments as the city now
alone afforded. The famous and choleric physician, Dr. Radcliffe, in
revenge for some slight he had endured, had threatened to "throw a
toad into King Bladud's Well," by writing a pamphlet against the
medicinal efficacy of the waters.

The moment was critical; the greatness of Bath, which had been slowly
declining since the days of Elizabeth, was threatened with extinction
when Nash came to it, wealthy, idle, patient, with a genius for
organisation, and in half a century he made it what he left it when he
died in his eighty-ninth year, the most elegant and attractive of the
smaller social resorts of Europe. Such a man, let us be certain, was
not wholly ridiculous. There must have been something more in him than
in a mere idol of the dandies, like Brummell, or a mere irresistible
buck and lady-killer, like Lauzun. In these latter men the force
is wholly destructive; they are animated by a feline vanity, a
tiger-spirit of egotism. Against the story of Nash and the Duchess of
Queensberry, so wholesome and humane, we put that frightful anecdote
that Saint-Simon tells of Lauzun's getting the hand of another duchess
under his high heel, and pirouetting on it to make the heel dig deeper
into the flesh. In all the repertory of Nash's extravagances there is
not one story of this kind, not one that reveals a wicked force. He
was fatuous, but beneficent; silly, but neither cruel nor corrupt.

Goldsmith, in this second edition at least, has taken more pains
with his life of Nash than he ever took again in a biography. His
_Parnell_, his _Bolingbroke_, his _Voltaire_, are not worthy of his
name and fame; not all the industry of annotators can ever make them
more than they were at first--potboilers, turned out with no care or
enthusiasm, and unconscientiously prepared. But this subtle figure
of a Master of Ceremonial; this queer old presentment of a pump-room
king, crowned with a white hat, waiting all day long in his best at
the bow-window of the Smyrna Coffee-House to get a bow from that
other, and alas! be