But although the fairest women in the land flocked to Bath, by common consent not one of them all was so beautiful and bewitching as Elizabeth Ann Linley, the girl-nightingale, whose voice entranced the ear daily at the Assembly Rooms concerts as her loveliness feasted the eye. She was, as all the world knew, only the daughter of Thomas Linley, singing-master and organiser of the concerts, a man who had plied chisel and saw at the carpenter's bench before he found the music that was in him; but, obscure as was her birth, she reigned supreme by virtue of a loveliness and a gift of song which none of her sex could rival. It is thus little wonder that Elizabeth Linley's fame had travelled far beyond the West Country town in which she was cradled. George III. had summoned her to sing to him in his London palace, and had been so overcome by her gifts of beauty and melody that, with tears streaming down his cheeks, he had stroked her hair and caressed her hands, and declared to the blushing girl that he had never seen any one so beautiful or heard a voice so divinely sweet. Charles Dibdin tried to enshrine her in fitting verse, but abandoned the effort in despair, vowing that she was indeed of that company described by Milton: "Who, as they sang, would take the prisoned soul And lap it in Elysium." The Bishop of Meath, in his unepiscopal enthusiasm, declared that she was "the link between an angel and a woman"; while Dr Charles Burney, supreme musician and father of the more famous Madame d'Arblay, wrote more soberly of her: "The tone of her voice and expression were as enchanting as her countenance and conversation. With a mellifluous-toned voice, a perfect shake and intonation, she was possessed of the double power of delighting an audience equally in pathetic strains and songs of brilliant execution, which is allowed to very few singers." To her Horace Walpole also paid this curious tribute: "Miss Linley's beauty is in the superlative degree. The king admires and ogles her as much as he dares to do in so holy a place as oratorio." Such are a few of the tributes, of which contemporary records are full, paid to the fair "Nightingale of Bath," whom Gainsborough and Reynolds immortalised in two of their inspired canvases--the latter as Cecilia--her face almost superhuman in its beauty and the divine rapture of its expression--seated at a harpsichord and pouring out her soul in song.