But, I believe, you will not deny, that this place,
which Nature and Providence seem to have intended as a resource
from distemper and disquiet, is become the very centre of racket
and dissipation. Instead of that peace, tranquillity, and case,
so necessary to those who labour under bad health, weak nerves,
and irregular spirits; here we have nothing but noise, tumult,
and hurry; with the fatigue and slavery of maintaining a
ceremonial, more stiff, formal, and oppressive, than the
etiquette of a German elector. A national hospital it may be, but
one would imagine that none but lunatics are admitted; and truly,
I will give you leave to call me so, if I stay much longer at
Bath. -- But I shall take another opportunity to explain my
sentiments at greater length on this subject -- I was impatient
to see the boasted improvements in architecture, for which the
upper parts of the town have been so much celebrated and t'other
day I made a circuit of all the new buildings. The Square, though
irregular, is, on the whole, pretty well laid out, spacious,
open, and airy; and, in my opinion, by far the most wholesome and
agreeable situation in Bath, especially the upper side of it; but
the avenues to it are mean, dirty, dangerous, and indirect. Its
communication with the Baths, is through the yard of an inn,
where the poor trembling valetudinarian is carried in a chair,
betwixt the heels of a double row of horses, wincing under the
curry-combs of grooms and postilions, over and above the hazard
of being obstructed, or overturned by the carriages which are
continually making their exit or their entrance -- I suppose
after some chairmen shall have been maimed, and a few lives lost
by those accidents, the corporation will think, in earnest, about
providing a more safe and commodious passage. The Circus is a
pretty bauble, contrived for shew, and looks like Vespasian's