“Bath is a very elegant and classical-looking city,” she writes, “standing upon a steep hillside, its regular white buildings rising terrace above terrace, crescent above crescent, glittering in the sun, and charmingly varied by the green trees of its park and gardens.... Very pleasant is Bath to look at. But when contrasted with its old reputation as the favourite resort of the noble and the fair ... it is impossible not to feel that the spirit has departed; that it is a city of memories, the very Pompeii of watering-places.” [Illustration: PULTENEY BRIDGE] Again she writes: “A place full of associations is Bath. When we had fairly done with the real people there were great fictions to fall back upon, and I am not sure ... that those who never lived except in the writings of other people—the heroes and heroines of Miss Austen, for example—are not the more real of the two. Her exquisite story of _Persuasion_ absolutely haunted me. Whenever it rained I thought of Anne Elliott meeting Captain Wentworth, when driven by a shower to take refuge in a shoe-shop. Whenever I got out of breath in climbing uphill I thought of that same charming Anne Elliott, and of that ascent from the lower town to the upper, during which all her tribulations ceased. And when at last by dint of trotting up one street and down another I incurred the unromantic calamity of a blister on the heel, even that grievance became classical by the recollection of the similar catastrophe which, in consequence of her peregrinations with the Admiral, had befallen dear Mrs. Croft.” Miss Mitford writes in one of her letters of a “most agreeable jaunt to Richmond.” “God made the country and man made the town!” “I wonder,” she says, “in which of the two divisions Cowper would place Richmond. Every Londoner would laugh at the rustic who should call it town, and with foreigners it passes pretty generally for a sample (the only one they see) of the rural villages of England; and yet it is no more like the country, the real untrimmed genuine country, than a garden is like a field. Richmond is Nature in a court dress, but still Nature—aye, and very lovely nature too, gay and happy and elegant as one of Charles the Second’s beauties, and with as little to remind one of the penalty of labour, or poverty, or grief, or crime. To the casual visitor (at least) Richmond appears as a sort of fairyland, a piece of old Arcadia, a holiday spot for ladies and gentlemen, where they had a happy out-of-door life, like the gay folks in Watteau’s pictures, and have nothing to do with the workaday world....