hemselves, it had little
importance to the stout, healthy middle ages, and it was not till the
reign of Charles II. that it began to look up. Doctors and touters--the
two were often one in those days--thronged there, and fools were found
in plenty to follow them. At last the blessed countenance of portly Anne
smiled on the pig styes of King Bladud. In 1703 she went to Bath, and
from that time 'people of distinction' flocked there. The assemblage was
not perhaps very brilliant or very refined. The visitors danced on the
green, and played privately at hazard. A few sharpers found their way
down from London; and at last the Duke of Beaufort instituted an M.C. in
the person of Captain Webster--Nash's predecessor--whose main act of
glory was in setting up gambling as a public amusement. It remained for
Nash to make the place what it afterwards was, when Chesterfield could
lounge in the Pump-room and take snuff with the Beau; when Sarah of
Marlborough, Lord and Lady Hervey, the Duke of Wharton, Congreve, and
all the little-great of the day thronged thither rather to kill time
with less ceremony than in London, than to cure complaints more or less
imaginary.

The doctors were only less numerous than the sharpers; the place was
still uncivilized; the company smoked and lounged without etiquette, and
played without honour: the place itself lacked all comfort, all
elegance, and all cleanliness.

Upon this delightful place, the avatar of the God of Etiquette,
personified in Mr. Richard Nash, descended somewhere about the year
1705, for the purpose of regenerating the barbarians. He alighted just
at the moment that one of the doctors we have alluded to, in a fit of
disgust at some slight on the part of the town, was threatening to
destroy its reputation, or, as he politely expressed it, 'to throw a
toad into the spring.' The Bathonians were alarmed and in consternation,
when young Nash, who must have already distinguished himself as a
macaroni, stepped forward and offered to render the angry physician
impotent. 'We'll charm his toad out again with music,' quoth he. He
evidently thought very little of the watering-place, after his town
experiences, and prepared to treat it accordingly. He got up a band in
the Pump-room, brought thither in this manner the healthy as well as the
sick, and soon raised the renown of Bath as a resort for gaiety as well
as for mineral waters. In a word, he displayed a surprising talent for
setting every