The doctors were only less numerous than the sharpers; the place was
still uncivilized; the company smoked and lounged without etiquette, and
played without honour: the place itself lacked all comfort, all
elegance, and all cleanliness.
Upon this delightful place, the avatar of the God of Etiquette,
personified in Mr. Richard Nash, descended somewhere about the year
1705, for the purpose of regenerating the barbarians. He alighted just
at the moment that one of the doctors we have alluded to, in a fit of
disgust at some slight on the part of the town, was threatening to
destroy its reputation, or, as he politely expressed it, 'to throw a
toad into the spring.' The Bathonians were alarmed and in consternation,
when young Nash, who must have already distinguished himself as a
macaroni, stepped forward and offered to render the angry physician
impotent. 'We'll charm his toad out again with music,' quoth he. He
evidently thought very little of the watering-place, after his town
experiences, and prepared to treat it accordingly. He got up a band in
the Pump-room, brought thither in this manner the healthy as well as the
sick, and soon raised the renown of Bath as a resort for gaiety as well
as for mineral waters.
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