from that time ‘people of distinction’ flocked there.  The assemblage was not perhaps very brilliant or very refined.  The visitors danced on the green, and played privately at hazard.  A few sharpers found their way down from London; and at last the Duke of Beaufort instituted an M.C. in the person of Captain Webster—­Nash’s predecessor—­whose main act of glory was in setting up gambling as a public amusement.  It remained for Nash to make the place what it afterwards was, when Chesterfield could lounge in the Pump-room and take snuff with the Beau; when Sarah of Marlborough, Lord and Lady Hervey, the Duke of Wharton, Congreve, and all the little-great of the day thronged thither rather to kill time with less ceremony than in London, than to cure complaints more or less imaginary.

The doctors were only less numerous than the sharpers; the place was still uncivilized; the company smoked and lounged without etiquette, and played without honour:  the place itself lacked all comfort, all elegance, and all cleanliness.

Upon this delightful place, the avatar of the God of Etiquette, personified in Mr. Richard Nash, descended somewhere about the year 1705, for the purpose of regenerating the barbarians.  He alighted just at the moment that one of the doctors we have alluded to, in a fit of disgust at some slight on the part of the town, was threatening to destroy its reputation, or, as he politely expressed it, ’to throw a toad into the spring.’  The Bathonians were alarmed and in consternation, when young Nash, who must have already distinguished himself as a macaroni, stepped forward and offered to render the angry physician impotent.  ‘We’ll charm his toad out again with music,’ quoth he.  He evidently thought very little of the watering-place, after his town experiences, and prepared to treat it accordingly.  He got up a band in the Pump-room, brought thither in this manner the healthy as well as the sick, and soon raised the renown of Bath as a resort for gaiety as well as for mineral waters.  In a word, he displayed a surprising talent for setting everything and everybody to rights, and was, therefore, soon elected, by tacit voting, the King of Bath.

He rapidly proved his qualifications for the position.  First he secured his Orphean harmony by collecting a band-subscription, which gave two guineas a-piece to six performers; then he engaged an official pumper for the Pump-room; and lastly, finding that the bathers still gathered under a booth to drink their tea and talk their scandal, he induced one Harrison to build assembly-rooms, guaranteeing him three guineas a week to be raised by subscription.

All this demanded a vast amount of impudence on Mr. Nash’s part, and this he possessed to a liberal extent.  The subscriptions flowed in regularly, and Nash felt his power increase with his responsibility.  So, then, our minor monarch resolved to be despotic, and in a short time laid down laws for the guests, which they obeyed most obsequiously.  Nash had not much wit, though a great deal of assurance, but these laws were his chef-d’oeuvre.  Witness some of them:—­