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. Richard Nash, the first real
Master of the Ceremonies; and he gives a full account of his followers
and successors. He also minutely relates the story of Sheridan's
marriage to his beautiful "St. Cecilia," Elizabeth Ann Linley. A
separate and very interesting chapter is allotted to Lady Huntingdon and
the Methodists, not without levies from the remarkable _Spiritual
Quixote_ of that Rev. Richard Graves of Claverton, of whom an excellent
account was given not long since in Mr. W. H. Hutton's suggestive
_Burford Papers_. Other chapters are occupied with Bath and its _belles
lettres_; with "Squire Allworthy" of Prior Park and his literary guests,
Pope, Warburton, Fielding and his sister, etc.; with the historic
Frascati vase of Lady Miller at Batheaston, which stirred the ridicule
of Horace Walpole, and is still, it is said, to be seen in a local park.
The dosing pages treat of Bath--musical, artistic, scientific--of its
gradual transformation as a health resort--of its eventual and
foredoomed decline and fall as the one fashionable watering-place,
supreme and single, for Great Britain and Ireland.

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