FRONTINELLA’S INVITATION TO THE ASSEMBLY.

    Come, one and all,
    To Hoyden Hall,
  For there’s th’ Assembly to-night. 
    None but prude fools
    Mind manners and rules,
  We Hoydens do decency slight.
  Come, Trollops and Slatterns,
    Cocked hats and white aprons,
  This best our modesty suits;
    For why should not we
    In dress be as free
  As Hogs-Norton squires in boots?

Why, indeed?  But the Hogs-Norton squires, as is their wont, were not so easily pierced to the heart as the noble slatterns.  Nash turned Aristophanes, and depicted on a little stage a play in which Mr. Punch, tinder very disgraceful circumstances, excused himself for wearing boots by quoting the practice of the pump-room beaux.  This seems to have gone to the conscience of Hogs-Norton at last; but what really gave the death-blow to top-boots, as a part of evening dress, was the incident of Nash’s going up to a gentleman, who had made his appearance in the ball-room in this unpardonable costume, and remarking, “bowing in an arch manner,” that he appeared to have “forgotten his horse.”

It had not been without labour and a long struggle that Nash had risen to this position of unquestioned authority at Bath.  His majestic rule was the result of more than half a century of painstaking.  He had been born far back in the seventeenth century, so far back that, incredible as it sounds, a love adventure of his early youth had supplied Vanbrugh, in 1695, with an episode for his comedy of Aesop.  But after trying many forms of life, and weary of his own affluence, he came to Bath just at the moment when the fortunes of that ancient centre of social pleasure were at their lowest ebb.  Queen Anne had been obliged to divert herself, in 1703, with a fiddle and a hautboy, and with country dances on the bowling-green.  The lodgings were dingy and expensive, the pump-house had no director, the nobility had haughtily withdrawn from such vulgar entertainments as the city now alone afforded.  The famous and choleric physician, Dr. Radcliffe, in revenge for some slight he had endured, had threatened to “throw a toad into King Bladud’s Well,” by writing a pamphlet against the medicinal efficacy of the waters.

The moment was critical; the greatness of Bath, which had been slowly declining since the days of Elizabeth, was threatened with extinction when Nash came to it, wealthy, idle, patient, with a genius for organisation, and in half a century he made it what he left it when he died in his eighty-ninth year, the most elegant and attractive of the smaller social resorts of Europe.  Such a man, let us be certain, was not wholly ridiculous.  There must have been something more in him than in a mere idol of the dandies, like Brummell, or a mere irresistible buck and lady-killer, like Lauzun.  In these latter men the force is wholly destructive; they are animated by a feline vanity, a tiger-spirit