"Upon the top of those high rocks by the Hot Well, which I have described to you, there runs on one side a large down of fine turf for about three miles. It looks too frightful to approach the brink and look down upon the river; but in many parts of this down the valleys descend gently, and you see all along the windings of the stream and the opening of the rocks, which turns close in upon you from space to space for several miles in toward the sea. There is first, near Bristol, a little village upon this down called Clifton, where are very pretty lodging-houses, overlooking all the woody hills, and steep cliffs and very green valleys within half a mile of the Wells, where in the summer it must be delicious walking and riding, for the plain extends, one way, many miles: particularly, there is a tower that stands close at the edge of the highest rock, and sees the stream turn quite round it; and all the banks, one way, are wooded in a gentle slope for near a mile high, quite green; the other bank all inaccessible rock, of an hundred colors and odd shapes, some hundred feet perpendicular." [Illustration: SUSPENSION BRIDGE AT CLIFTON.] The reputation of the Hot Well, whose waters Pope was sent to drink, has utterly collapsed. The Hot Well house was long ago removed to admit a widening of the river, and the well itself is now inaccessible. There is no spa, once of great reputation, that has sunk into such complete oblivion as the Clifton Hot Well: this may be due, in part, to the exaggerated estimate that was formed of the virtue of the water, and to the blamable practice which prevailed of sending patients here at their last gasp as a forlorn hope. Of too many it might be said as in these lines from the epitaph on his wife by the poet Mason in Bristol cathedral: To Bristol's fount I bore with trembling care Her faded form: she bowed to taste the wave, And died.