Part 12

Among these records of the Bath Road must be mentioned the various essays made by C. A. Smith, of the Bath Road Club, on tricycles. He rode to Bath and back on a three-wheeler, July 16, 1891, in 16 hrs. 13 mins. 18 secs., thus establishing a record, which was beaten four years later--August 23, 1895--by F. Martin, by the narrow margin of 11 mins. 43 secs. These figures in turn were lowered, August 5, 1897, by T. J. Gibbs, Bath Road Club, who accomplished a record of 14 hrs. 18 min.

XXXVII

[Sidenote: _PICKWICK_]

And now we come, past the tree-shaded hamlet of Cross Keys, to Pickwick, ninety-seven miles from London, situated at a turning in the road which leads to Corsham Regis, half a mile distant, on the left hand. The traveller, exploring this road for the first time, looks forward with curiosity to seeing a place with so famous a name; but Pickwick, the decayed coaching hamlet, can scarcely be said to "live up to" its literary associations. Strictly speaking, it is not even decayed; but, now that the coaches are no more, flourishes on the "Pickwick Brewery," which makes a brave show down the road. It is an eminently prosperous-looking, stone-built hamlet, a comparatively modern offshoot of the hoary Saxon village of Corsham, which, once on the main road, was thrust into the background when the mail coach came in, and the great highway to Bath was cut on this route, half a mile away.

It is a curious literary puzzle--How did the title of the "Pickwick Papers" originate? It is a well-ascertained fact that, in 1835, Dickens, then a reporter for the daily press, was sent to Bath to report a speech of Lord John Russell's, that now almost-forgotten statesman being a candidate for representing that city. The future novelist was then but twenty-three years of age, a time of life when impressions of travel are vivid and lasting. Journeying by coach, he had every opportunity for observing places and people; and so it happened that when, a few months later, the now historic publishing firm of Chapman and Hall offered him the literary commission which resulted in the "Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club," the story he produced derived many of its features from his own experiences. His recollections had no time to fade, for in March, 1836, the first part of "Pickwick" was published, and others were well on the way. It must ever be a matter of doubt whether Dickens noticed the existence of Pickwick, the place. That he had noted the existence of Moses Pickwick, the coach proprietor of Bath, is obvious enough from the "Pickwick Papers," where Mr. Pickwick and Sam Weller are taking their seats for that City of the Waters.

"'I'm wery much afeerd, sir, that the properiator o' this here coach is a playin' some imperence vith us,' says Sam.

"'How is that, Sam?' said Mr. Pickwick; 'aren't the names down on the way-bill?'

"'The names is not only down on the vay-bill, sir,' replied Sam, 'but they've painted vun on 'em up, on the door o' the coach.'

"'Dear me,' exclaimed Mr. Pickwick, quite staggered by the coincidence, 'what a very extraordinary thing!'

"'Yes, but that ain't all,' said Sam, again directing his master's attention to the coach door; 'not content vith writin' up Pickwick, they puts "Moses" afore it, vich I call addin' insult to injury.'"

There were then, it will be seen, real Pickwicks living in Bath, and the "Moses" Pickwick referred to was an actual person, the great-grandson of one Eleazer Pickwick, who, many years before, had risen by degrees from the humble position of post-boy at the "Old Bear," at Bath, to be landlord of the once famous "White Hart" inn, which stood where the "Grand Pump Room" hotel now towers aloft.

Now comes the long-sought-for connection between place and persons of identical name. Eleazer Pickwick was a foundling. Discovered as an infant on the road at Pickwick, he was named by the guardians, in accordance with an old custom, after the place.

[Sidenote: _CORSHAM REGIS_]

Corsham, to which Pickwick belongs, is one of those places which it would be almost an indignity to call a "village," while to name it a "town" would be to give too great an importance to it. It is Corsham "Regis," by virtue of having been a residence of the Saxon Kings; but the Great Western has docked the kingly suffix, and if you were to ask at Paddington for a ticket to Corsham Regis, it is to be feared that the booking-clerk would not recognize the place under its full name.

The townlet is a pleasing one, and, always excepting the new and ugly stone villas recently built, it abounds with delightful specimens of domestic architecture of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and mid-eighteenth centuries; fine houses built of Corsham stone in a dignified Renaissance manner, or in the earlier Tudor convention of gables and mullioned windows. Corsham Court, the finest of all, standing in its nobly-wooded park, is Elizabethan, and exhibits the merging of the two periods of Gothic and Renaissance architecture. It was Lady Hungerford, widow of a former owner of Corsham Court, who, in 1672, built the quaint Hungerford Almshouse, close by.

For the rest, Corsham has little history. It was the scene of a mysterious murder in 1594, when a gentleman, one Henry Long, was shot dead, while sitting at dinner amid his friends, by Sir Charles and Sir Henry Danvers, two brothers, who hailed from Dauntsey. The motive was never known, and the assassins were never punished. Six years later, Charles was beheaded for taking part in Essex's rebellion; which seems to be a kind of oblique and fumbling retribution on the part of Providence for his crime. Henry, however, prospered amazingly, and was eventually created Earl Danby, flourishing all his life, as the wicked are, on good authority, supposed to do, "like the green bay tree," and dying in the odour of sanctity, "full of honours, woundes, and daies." He is commemorated in an eloquent epitaph, written by the saintly George Herbert of Bemerton, more than ten years before his (Danvers') death; a circumstance which would seem to prove Herbert a hypocrite and Danvers peculiarly solicitous for his own post-mortem reputation.

Corsham was the birthplace of Sir Richard Blackmore, physician to William the Third, and poetaster, who, says Leigh Hunt, "composed heaps of dull poetry, versified the Psalms, and, by way of extending the lesson of patience, wrote a paraphrase of the Book of Job." What sarcasm!

But Blackmore was read in his day, just as Leigh Hunt was in his, and Fate is sardonic enough (for who at this time reads Hunt's tedious stuff?) to consign critic and criticized to one common limbo of neglect.

XXXVIII

[Sidenote: _THE BOX TUNNEL_]

From Corsham the old road used to lead precipitously up to the summit of Box Hill and thence downwards by breakneck gullies, furrowed by rains, and rich in loose stones, into Box. The modern highway goes modestly round the shoulder of the hill. The village of Box has gained an adventitious fame from the celebrated tunnel on the Great Western Railway, which pierces Box Hill, and was, upon its completion, the longest tunnel in England. Compared with later works, it sinks into quite minor importance; but it is still an impressive engineering feat, whether you view it from the railway carriage windows or from the highway. Its length is 3199 yards, or nearly two miles, and the hill rises above it to a height of three hundred feet. Its cost of over £500,000 is no less impressive.

A curious story is told at Box of a platelayer, employed in the tunnel some twenty years ago, who with his gang worked there at night, and slept at Box village in the day. After a while he became engaged to a girl in the village, and the wedding-day was fixed. The vicar of Box, however, was a stickler for red tape, and it appears that he found some technical objection in the fact of the man not sleeping the night in the village. At any rate, he would not perform the ceremony until the Bishop (of Gloucester) compelled him to do so.

[Sidenote: _BOX QUARRIES_]

At Box we are well within the stone district whose quarries have rendered building-stone from the times of the Roman occupation until the present day. The oolite which comes from here and from the Corsham quarries is a fine grained stone, easily worked, and of a rich cream colour when freshly wrought. As "Bath stone" it is famous, and has made Bath exclusively a city of stone-built houses. In addition, it is sent to all parts of the country, and even exported. The quarries of Corsham and Box are, therefore, the centres of a large and important industry. Box Hill is a mass of this stone, and the tunnel is consequently pierced through it. Three of the quarries are situated in the hill, some of them of great extent. The most extensive is driven into the flank of the hill like a tunnel, and has over three miles of galleries laid with tram-lines: dark, damp places, whose roofs are supported here and there by timber struts. The coldness of these quarry tunnels is remarkably piercing, even in the height of summer.

Box seems to have been a favourite country resort of the Romans, away from the crowded streets of _Aquæ Solis_; for on the land that slopes down toward the little Box Brook there have been found many Roman remains, while, only so recently as 1897, the site of a Roman villa was excavated near the south side of the church, with the result of unearthing a complete ground-plan and such interesting relics as mosaic pavements and votive altars.

It is a crowded village to-day, and rather by way of being a town. Lying in a deep hollow, its stone-built houses climb steeply up both sides, with a picturesque glimpse back from where the old village lock-up stands beside the highway to the straggling cottages that line the old road down the side of Box Hill.

Leaving Box we also, in the course of one mile, leave Wiltshire and come into Somerset, with Bath but four miles distant. The Box Brook runs on the right-hand side of the road, the Great Western Railway on the left. Soon, however, the road bends to the right at Bathford, and we come to Batheaston, once a village, but now merely a suburb of Bath, joined to the city by continuous streets.

But there are pretty scenes just off these streets. Bathampton Mill, for instance, just below, on the Avon, with views of the grand circle of hills that enclose Bath.

The picturesquely broken and wooded elevation of Combe Down rises away on the other side of the valley, with Prior Park nestled amid its hanging woods, and the village of Widcombe beneath. At an elevation of five hundred and fifty feet above the sea, it commands views not to be bettered in all the country round. Down below, in the warm steamy atmosphere of the Avon valley, one sees the railway entering Bath on its stone viaducts, and the trains winding in and out along the sharp curves amid the clustered houses. Bathampton lies below there, where the air is languorous and the hillsides hold the heat of the sun. From that sheltered spot the view backwards towards Bathampton Mill and the terraced houses of Batheaston is delightful; the houses that turn their ugly side to the road showing from here, amid their setting of green, like fairy palaces. Lower down the valley the houses cluster more thickly, where the valley widens out into the likeness of a great amphitheatre, and suburbs fade gradually into Bath.

Then, coming to Walcot, the road finally loses all its character as a highway, and tramways, omnibuses, and traffic of every description proclaim the entrance to a populous city.

XXXIX

[Sidenote: _BATH_]

The story of Bath goes back some two thousand years, and has its origin in the myths of ages, in which Bladud figures variously as discoverer and creator of the healing springs. Serious historians are wont to exclude Bladud, and his descent from Brute the Trojan, and Lud Hudibras, the British King, from their pages, for the reason that Geoffrey of Monmouth, the monkish chronicler, who first narrates these stories in his history of Britain, was apt sometimes to confound chronicling with romancing. When, therefore, he tells how Prince Bladud was an adept in magic, and placed a cunning stone in the springs of this valley so that it made the water hot and healed the sick who resorted to them, he is looked upon with a suspicion that is deepened when he goes on to say that Bladud successfully attempted to fly with wings of his own invention from Bath to London, and only came to grief when London was reached, through the strings breaking, so that he fell and was dashed to pieces on the roof of the Temple of Apollo!

Nor is the better known legend of Prince Bladud, the leper, exiled from his father's Court, universally accepted. According to that story, the Prince wandered to where Keynsham now stands, where he became a swineherd, and infected the pigs with his disease. Coming, however, into this valley, the porkers rolled themselves into the hot mud, which then occupied the site of Bath Abbey and the Baths, and were cured. Bladud perceiving this, applied the remedy to himself, with the like result, and returned to his home once more; building a city upon the spot in after years. This happened B.C. 863, and there is a statue of King Bladud, as he afterwards became, erected in the "Pump Room" in 1669; so that any one not subscribing to the truth of this legend had better do so at once, in view of this overwhelming evidence thus afforded.

[Sidenote: _ROMAN RELICS_]

We are on more certain ground when we come to the Romans. That great people left too many evidences of their occupation of this island for many doubts to be entertained as to where they settled, or when. Thus, when we assign the close of the first half-century of the Christian era to their discovery of the medicinal properties of these waters, we do so, not from legend, but from the evidence of the buildings they have left behind. It is singular that we do not, as a rule, lay much stress upon the Roman occupation of Britain. Yet it lasted long, and was for nearly four centuries what modern political slang terms "effectual." An advanced civilization reigned here then, and Britain became both a populous and a flourishing colony. The dealings of England with India in the present time form a tolerably close parallel with Rome's conquest of this island, and if we go further and liken the British who remained in the remote places of Cornwall, Devon, and Wales to the fierce Afghans and Chitralis who have troubled us on the borders of Hindostan, we shall by no means strain the similitude. Bath--or rather _Aquæ Solis_, the "Waters of the Sun"[6]--as well as being the one health-resort in Britain for the wealthy Roman colonists who needed such a retreat, was to the Roman officer of that era what Simla and the Hills are to our own military men in India--a place for rest and the restoration of health after the rigours of a hard campaign; with this difference, indeed, that to the Hills they go for coolness, while at Aquæ Solis is the expatriated legionary found both healing springs and a genial warmth after the bleak, inhospitable hills of the Far West or the Farther North.

Discoveries at Bath and in its immediate neighbourhood have proved that there was a sanatorium for invalided officers on Combe Down, and we can well imagine such being conveyed hither, to recover or to die, along the road.

The Baths of the Romans were discovered in 1755, fifteen feet below the surface of the ground; relics of a past magnificence; of a civilization that expired in bloodshed and conflagration. It was in the year 410 that the military forces of Rome left Britain. The weak Romano-British soon retrograded, and, worse than all, the country split up into petty, and mutually hostile, kingdoms. The Baths were neglected, the Arts decayed, and in Britain generally there was not spirit sufficient to withstand the marauding Saxons who finally overwhelmed the country and pillaged and burnt _Aquæ Solis_, just as they had pillaged every other city. It was after the sanguinary Battle of Deorham, A.D. 577, that the three cities of _Glevum_ (Gloucester), _Corinium_ (Cirencester), and _Aquæ Solis_ fell, spoils to the Saxon hosts under Ceawlin. You may search for the site of that great contest at the village now called Dyreham, some fifteen miles north-east of Bath, in Gloucestershire, and from its position it will be at once evident that those three cities must immediately have fallen after that fatal day. That was the cementing of the Saxon power in the West, and a fitting end to a hundred and fifty years of incessant warfare. The British never learned that union means strength; they never had the sense to combine before a common foe, and so the fierce invaders met and defeated them in detail, aided of course by their own fitness for the fight, and by the British incapacity. The Britons were lapped in luxury, and went drunk into battle, so that there was no possible hope for them in fighting the hardy warriors from the North. The wars waged then were wars of extermination, and neither persons nor places were spared. This proud city was levelled with the ground, and the civilization of four hundred years perished by fire in a day. Evidences of that dreadful time were plainly to be seen when the Roman Baths were excavated. They are to be seen even now, at the Museum, together with relics which prove the high degree of civilization that had been attained.

Among other marks of progress is an inscribed tablet with an inscription which one authority declares to be the record of a "cure from either taking the waters or bathing, certified by three great men;" while another is equally positive that it is an "imprecation upon nine men, supposed to be guests, who had stolen a tablecloth at the conclusion of a dinner-party." The age of this tablet is fixed "between the second and fifth centuries of the Christian era," which in itself seems to be a wide enough margin. As if, however, this were not already sufficient, there are others, learned in these things, who declare that this relic records how a certain Quintus received 500,000 lbs. of copper coin for washing a lady named "Vilbia"! We are left to take our choice between speculations unfavourable to the personal cleanliness of that lady, or astonishment at the mode and extravagance of the payment. There is, indeed, "another way," as the cookery books have it; but as that involves doubts about the scholarship of professed antiquaries, this third resort may only be hinted at in this place. Who shall decide where antiquaries disagree?

The Saxons were shy of the places they had burnt. Heathens that they were, they generally believed the bloodstained ruins to be haunted by evil spirits, and so built their settlements at some distance away. The site of Bath seems to have been, to some degree, an exception. After lying waste for over a hundred years, it was occupied again, for the fame of its waters had not wholly died out: and "Akemanceaster," as the Saxons called it, entered upon a new lease of life. At that period, too, the Roman Road through Silchester, Speen, and Marlborough acquired its name of Akeman Street; the names meaning, as some would say, the "Sick Man's Town," and the "Sick Man's Road," from "aches" and the fame of the place, even then, as a spot at which to cure them. This has been characterized as absurd, and the derivation more plausibly held to be from a corruption of the Roman word _Aquæ_ affixed to the word "maen," or "man," meaning "stone" or "place," and joined to the word "cæster," a form of the Roman "castrum," a fortification; the compound word thus obtained meaning "the Fortified place at the Waters."

[Sidenote: _ROYAL VISITS_]

To follow the fortunes of Akemanceaster, or Bath, as it eventually became, through the Saxon period to the present time would be an exercise too prolonged for these pages. That Kings and Princes and ecclesiastics visited it then we know, and that the Normans built a great Abbey church where the present building of Bath Abbey stands is an easily ascertainable fact; but all the comings and goings of the great ones of the earth during the succeeding centuries would form but a bald catalogue. It is only when we come to the middle of the seventeenth century that we need pick up the thread of the narrative again, at the visits of the Queen of Charles the First in 1644; of Charles the Second, the Duke and Duchess of York, and Prince Rupert in 1663; the Queen of James the Second, 1687; and the Princess Anne, 1692; and as Queen Anne, 1702. Truly, a brilliant list for such a small place as Bath then was.

But these Royal visits did not greatly benefit the place, as we may judge when we read that from 1592 to 1692, Bath had increased by only seventeen houses. Why was this? I conceive it to have been owing to the extraordinary apathy of the people of Bath, who had not provided the slightest accommodation for those who then drank the waters. Of what use was it for Sir Alexander Frayser, physician to Charles the Second, sending all his patients hither instead of to Continental health-resorts like Aix, if they had to drink the waters at a pump standing on the open pavement? and imagine the delights of bathing when the Baths were open to the public view, the said public delighting to throw dead cats, offal, and all manner of nastinesses among the bathers!

A local doctor, named Oliver, took up these grievances in 1702, and the Corporation then set about building a Pump Room. This was opened in 1704, and the celebrated Beau Nash having been at about the same period appointed Master of the Ceremonies, the Bath visitors' list showed a decided improvement.

Let us see what the amusements at "the Bath" had been hitherto. The place was devoid of elegant or attractive amusements, and the only promenade for the fashionables who followed Queen Anne to this then outlandish town was a grove of sycamores in which there was a bowling-green, and a band consisting of two performers, playing a fiddle and a hautboy! The courtiers who had deserted St. James's to follow her gouty Majesty to the waters must have cursed their folly when they saw those sycamores and heard that band!

Nash altered all this. He was no King Log, and accordingly soon procured a band of music for the new Pump Room; an Assembly Room for the fashionables to take "tay" or chocolate, to dance, play cards, or to gossip in; and devised a code of manners, if not of morals, for the regulation of his little world, which he ruled with a rod of iron. He regulated everything, from the greatest festivities down to the smallest details of dress and deportment, and not the late M. Worth himself was more autocratic as to what should be worn. It is a familiar story how, the "Dutchess" of Queensbury appearing at a dress ball in an apron (an article of dress which, fashionable elsewhere, he had tabooed), he told her to remove it or leave. The apron was one of point lace, and said to have been worth five hundred guineas; but the Duchess removed it humbly enough, for had not this mighty arbiter of fashions declared aprons "fit only for Abigails" (by which name he meant maidservants to be understood), and who was she that she should dispute such an authority? Then, when the Princess Amelia, daughter of George the Third, begged him to allow another dance after eleven o'clock, what did this potentate reply? Did he humbly grant the request? Not at all; he refused, adding that the laws of Bath were, like those of Lycurgus, unalterable.

XL

[Sidenote: _BEAU NASH_]