There is, among the hills of Somersetshire, a huge basin formed by the river Avon, and conveniently supplied with a natural gush of hot water, which can be turned on at any time for the cleansing of diseased bodies.  This hollow presents many curious anomalies; though sought for centuries for the sake of health, it is one of the most unhealthily-situated places in the kingdom; here the body and the pocket are alike cleaned out, but the spot itself has been noted for its dirtiness since the days of King Bladud’s wise pigs; here, again, the diseased flesh used to be healed, but the healthy soul within it speedily besickened:  you came to cure gout and rheumatism, and caught in exchange dice-fever.

The mention of those pigs reminds me that it would be a shameful omission to speak of this city without giving the story of that apocryphal British monarch, King Bladud.  But let me be the one exception; let me respect the good sense of the reader, and not insult him by supposing him capable of believing a mythic jumble of kings and pigs and dirty marshes, which he will, if he cares to, find at full length in any ’Bath Guide’—­price sixpence.

But whatever be the case with respect to the Celtic sovereign, there is, I presume, no doubt, that the Romans were here, and probably the centurians and tribunes cast the alea in some pristine assembly-room, or wagged their plumes in some well-built Pump-room, with as much spirit of fashion as the full-bottomed-wig exquisites in the reign of King Nash.  At any rate Bath has been in almost every age a common centre for health-seekers and gamesters—­two antipodal races who always flock together—­and if it has from time to time declined, it has only been for a period.  Saxon churls and Norman lords were too sturdy to catch much rheumatic gout; crusaders had better things to think of than their imaginary ailments; good-health was in fashion under Plantagenets and Tudors; doctors were not believed in; even empirics had to praise their wares with much wit, and Morrison himself must have mounted a bank and dressed in Astleyian costume in order to find a customer; sack and small-beer were harmless, when homes were not comfortable enough to keep earl or churl by the fireside, and ‘out-of-doors’ was the proper drawing-room for a man:  in short, sickness came in with civilization, indisposition with immoral habits, fevers with fine gentlemanliness, gout with greediness, and valetudinarianism—­there is no Anglo-Saxon word for that—­with what we falsely call refinement.  So, whatever Bath may have been to pampered Romans, who over-ate themselves, 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