ABSTRACT
Bath, like powdered hair and the minuet, seems peculiarly the bequest of the eighteenth century to those for whom memorials must be glamorous. Though it antedates the Roman conquest of Britain and may still be looked upon virtually intact, the real Bath belongs — as any one with a historical sense is aware — to the days of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. Among the countless extravagances that cropped up at Bath, perhaps historically the most interesting concern the doings of Selina, Countess of Huntingdon. And Bath enclosed, perhaps, something else than culture: it was the guardian of a dream, an eighteenth-century dream of elegance and style. It was for the kind of life that the upper and middle classes of eighteenth-century England flocked to Bath. The drowsy watering-place of 1700 had become by 1750 a capital of fashion, never rivalled in England and scarcely rivalled abroad.
