Texte, it is an organism whose evolution has accomplished its course. 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. Note: [55] Oddly enough--if M. Barbeau's index is to be trusted, and it is an unusually good one,--he makes no reference to Evelyn's visit to Bath. But Evelyn went there in June, 1654, bathed in the Cross Bath, criticised the "_facciata_" of the Abbey Church, complained of the "narrow, uneven and unpleasant streets," and inter-visited with the company frequenting the place for health. "Among the rest of the idle diversions of the town," he says, "one musician was famous for acting a changeling [idiot or half-wit], which indeed he personated strangely." (_Diary_, Globe edn., 1908, p. 174.)