Then the select society of fifty years before had given place to a very mixed concourse, if we are to believe the same authority: "Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself at Bath, as in the very focus of observation. Clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, negro-drivers, and hucksters, from our American plantations, enriched they know not how; agents, commissaries, and contractors, who have fattened, in two successive wars, on the blood of the nation; usurers, brokers, and jobbers of every kind; men of low birth, and no breeding, have found themselves suddenly translated into a state of affluence, unknown to former ages; and no wonder that their brains should be intoxicated with pride, vanity, and presumption. Knowing no other criterion of greatness but the ostentation of wealth, they discharge their affluence, without taste or conduct, through every channel of the most absurd extravagance; and all of them hurry to Bath, because here, without any further qualification, they can mingle with the princes and nobles of the land. Even the wives and daughters of low tradesmen, who, like shovel-nosed sharks, prey on the blubber of those uncouth whales of fortune, are infected with the same rage of displaying their importance; and the slightest indisposition serves them for a pretext to insist on being conveyed to Bath, where they may hobble country-dances and cotillons among lordlings, squires, counsellors, and clergy. These delicate creatures from Bedfordbury, Butcher-row, Crutched-friars, and Botolph-lane, cannot breathe in the gross air of the lower town, or conform to the vulgar rules of a common lodging-house: the husband, therefore, must provide an entire house or elegant apartments in the new buildings. Such is the composition of what is called fashionable company at Bath." XLIII What, however, of the literary celebrities, visitors or residents, or of the statesmen, the naval and military commanders, who were frequenting Bath at the time when that jaundiced criticism was penned. Dr. Johnson was then taking the waters, which are said by a later authority to taste of "warm smoothin'-irons;" Gainsborough alternately painted and bathed; while the Earl of Chatham and his still greater son; Nelson, Wolfe, Sheridan, and Goldsmith, Wordsworth, Southey, Jane Austin, and Landor, helped to sustain the repute of this, which Landor called the next most beautiful place in the world to Florence, well on into the next century. [Sidenote: _THE BATH OF LONG AGO_]