It is now the weather for bathing, a refreshment too little taken in
this country, either summer or winter. We say in winter, because with
very little care in placing it near a cistern, and having a leathern
pipe for it, a bath may be easily filled once or twice a week with warm
water; and it is a vulgar error that the warm bath relaxes. An excess,
either warm or cold, will relax, and so will any other excess; but the
sole effect of the warm bath moderately taken is, that it throws off the
bad humours of the body by opening and clearing the pores. As to summer
bathing, a father may soon teach his children to swim, and thus perhaps
may be the means of saving their lives some day or other, as well as
health. Ladies also, though they cannot bathe in the open air, as they
do in some of the West Indian islands and other countries, by means of
natural basins among the rocks, might oftener make a substitute for it
at home in tepid baths. The most beautiful aspects under which Venus has
been painted or sculptured have been connected with bathing; and indeed
there is perhaps no one thing that so equally contributes to the three
graces of health, beauty, and good temper; to health, in putting the
body into its best state; to beauty, in clearing and tinting the skin;
and to good temper, in rescuing the spirits from the irritability
occasioned by those formidable personages, "the nerves," which nothing
else allays in so quick and entire a manner. See a lovely passage on the
subject of bathing in Sir Philip Sydney's "Arcadia," where "Philoclea,
blushing, and withal smiling, makeing shamefastnesse pleasant, and
pleasure shamefast, tenderly moved her feet, unwonted to feel the naked
ground, until the touch of the cold water made a pretty kind of
shrugging come over her body; like the twinkling of the fairest among
the fixed stars."--_Ibid_.