near the fountain. The wives and
daughters of the Kentish farmers came from the neighbouring villages
with cream, cherries, wheatears, and quails. To chaffer with them,
to flirt with them, to praise their straw hats and tight heels, was a
refreshing pastime to voluptuaries sick of the airs of actresses and
maids of honour. Milliners, toymen, and jewellers came down from London,
and opened a bazaar under the trees. In one booth the politician might
find his coffee and the London Gazette; in another were gamblers playing
deep at basset; and, on fine evenings, the fiddles were in attendance
and there were morris dances on the elastic turf of the bowling green.
In 1685 a subscription had just been raised among those who frequented
the wells for building a church, which the Tories, who then domineered
everywhere, insisted on dedicating to Saint Charles the Martyr. [101]

But at the head of the English watering places, without a rival. was
Bath. The springs of that city had been renowned from the days of the
Romans. It had been, during many centuries, the seat of a Bishop. The
sick repaired thither from every part of the realm. The King sometimes
held his court there. Nevertheless, Bath was then a maze of only four or
five hundred houses, crowded within an old wall in the vicinity of the
Avon. Pictures of what were considered as the finest of those houses are
still extant, and greatly resemble the lowest rag shops and pothouses of
Ratcliffe Highway. Travellers indeed complained loudly of the narrowness
and meanness of the streets. That beautiful city which charms even eyes
familiar with the masterpieces of Bramante and Palladio, and which the
genius of Anstey and of Smollett, of Frances Burney and of Jane Austen,
has made classic ground, had not begun to exist. Milsom Street itself
was an open field lying far beyond the walls; and hedgerows intersected
the space which is now covered by the Crescent and the Circus. The poor
patients to whom the waters had been recommended lay on straw in a place
which, to use the language of a contemporary physician, was a covert
rather than a lodging. As to the comforts and luxuries which were to be
found in the interior of the houses of Bath by the fashionable visitors
who resorted thither in search of health or amusement, we possess
information more complete and minute than can generally be obtained
on such subjects. A writer who published an account of that city about
sixty years after the