'Tis so easy to get from London to Bath, by merely stepping into a
railway carriage which takes you smoothly without a stop in two short
hours from Paddington, that I was amazed at myself in having allowed
five full years to pass since my previous visit. The question was
much in my mind as I strolled about noting the old-remembered names of
streets and squares and crescents. Quiet Street was the name inscribed
on one; it was, to me, the secret name of them all. The old impressions
were renewed, an old feeling partially recovered. The wide, clean ways;
the solid, stone-built houses with their dignified aspect; the large
distances, terrace beyond terrace; mansions and vast green lawns and
parks and gardens; avenues and groups of stately trees, especially that
unmatched clump of old planes in the Circus; the whole town, the design
in the classic style of one master mind, set by the Avon, amid green
hills, produced a sense of harmony and repose which cannot be equalled
by any other town in the kingdom.
This idle time was delightful so long as I gave my attention exclusively
to houses from the outside, and to hills, rocks, trees, waters, and all
visible nature, which here harmonizes with man's works. To sit on some
high hill and look down on Bath, sun-flushed or half veiled in mist; to
lounge on Camden Crescent, or climb Sion Hill, or take my ease with the
water-drinkers in the spacious, comfortable Pump Room; or, better still,
to rest at noon in the ancient abbey--all this was pleasure pure and
simple, a quiet drifting back until I found myself younger by five years
than I had taken myself to be.
I haunted the abbey, and the more I saw of it the more I loved it. The
impression it had made on me during my former visits had faded, or else
I had never properly seen it, or had not seen it in the right emotional
mood. Now I began to think it the best of all the great abbey churches
of England and the equal of the cathedrals in its effect on the mind.
How rich the interior is in its atmosphere of tempered light or tender
gloom! How tall and graceful the columns holding up the high roof of
white stone with its marvellous palm-leaf sculpture! What a vast expanse
of beautifully stained glass! I certainly gave myself plenty of time to
appreciate it on this occasion, as I visited it every day, sometimes
two or three times, and not infrequently I sat there for an hour at a
stretch.
Sitting there one day, thinking of nothing, I was gradually awakened
to a feeling almost of astonishment at the sight of the extraordinary
number of memorial tablets of every imaginable shape and size which
crowd the walls. So numerous are they and so closely placed that you
could not find space anywhere to put your hand against the wall. We are
accustomed to think that in cathedrals and other great ecclesiastical
buildings the illustrious dead receive burial, and their names and
claims on our gratitude and reverence are recorded, but in no fane in
the land is there so numerous a gathering of the dead as in this place.
The inscription-covered walls were like the pages of an old black-letter
volume without margins. Yet when I came to think of it I could not
recall any Bath celebrity or great person associated with Bath except
Beau Nash, who was not perhaps a very great person. Probably Carlyle
would have described him as a "meeserable creature."
Leaving my seat I began to examine the inscriptions, and found that they
had not been placed there in memory of men belonging to Bath or even
Somerset. These monuments were erected to persons from all counties in
the three kingdoms, and from all the big towns, those to Londoners being
most numerous. Nor were they of persons distinguished in any way. Here
you find John or Henry or Thomas Smith, or Brown, or Jones, or Robinson,
provision dealer, or merchant, of Clerkenwell, or Bermondsey, or
Bishopsgate Street Within or Without; also many retired captains,
majors, and colonels. There were hundreds more whose professions
or occupations in life were not stated. There were also hundreds of
memorials to ladies--widows and spinsters. They were all, in fact,
to persons who had come to die in Bath after "taking the waters," and
dying, they or their friends had purchased immortality on the walls
of the abbey with a handful or two of gold. Here is one of several
inscriptions of the kind I took the trouble to copy: "His early virtues,
his cultivated talents, his serious piety, inexpressibly endeared him to
his friends and opened to them many bright prospects of excellence and
happiness. These prospects have all faded," and so on for several long
lines in very big letters, occupying a good deal of space on the wall.
But what and who was he, and what connection had he with Bath? He was
a young man born in the West Indies who died in Scotland, and later his
mother, coming to Bath for her health, "caused this inscription to
be placed on the abbey walls"! If this policy or tradition is still
followed by the abbey authorities, it will be necessary for them to
build an annexe; if it be no longer followed, would it be going too far
to suggest that these mural tablets to a thousand obscurities, which
ought never to have been placed there, should now be removed and
placed in some vault where the relations or descendants of the persons
described could find, and if they wished it, have them removed?
But it must be said that the abbey is not without a fair number of
memorials with which no one can quarrel; the one I admire most, to Quin,
the actor, has, I think, the best or the most appropriate epitaph ever
written. No, one, however familiar with the words, will find fault with
me for quoting them here:
That tongue which set the table on a roar
And charmed the public ear is heard no more.
Closed are those eyes, the harbingers of wit,
Which spake before the tongue what Shakespeare writ.
Cold is that hand which living was stretched forth
At friendship's call to succor modest worth.
Here lies James Quin, deign readers to be taught
Whate'er thy strength of body, force of thought,
In Nature's happiest mood however cast,
To this complexion thou must come at last.
Quin's monument strikes one as the greatest there because of Garrick's
living words, but there is another very much more beautiful.
I first noticed this memorial on the wall at a distance of about three
yards, too far to read anything in the inscription except the name of
Sibthorpe, which was strange to me, but instead of going nearer to read
it I remained standing to admire it at that distance. The tablet was of
white marble, and on it was sculptured the figure of a young man with
curly head and classic profile. He was wearing sandals and a loose
mantle held to his breast with one hand, while in the other hand
he carried a bunch of leaves and flowers. He appeared in the act of
stepping ashore from a boat of antique shape, and the artist had been
singularly successful in producing the idea of free and vigorous motion
in the figure as well as of some absorbing object in his mind. The
figure was undoubtedly symbolical, and I began to amuse myself by trying
to guess its meaning. Then a curious thing happened. A person who had
been moving slowly along near me, apparently looking with no great
interest at the memorials, came past me and glanced first at the tablet
I was looking at, then at me. As our eyes met I remarked that I was
admiring the best memorial I had found in the abbey, and then added,
"I've been trying to make out its meaning. You see the man is a
traveller and is stepping ashore with a flowering spray in his hand. It
strikes me that it may have been erected to the memory of a person who
introduced some valuable plant into England."
"Yes, perhaps," he said. "But who was he?"
"I don't know yet," I returned. "I can only see that his name was
Sibthorpe."
"Sibthorpe!" he exclaimed excitedly. "Why, this is the very memorial
I've been looking for all over the abbey and had pretty well given up
all hopes of finding it." With that he went to it and began studying
the inscription, which was in Latin. John Sibthorpe, I found, was a
distinguished botanist, author of the Flora Graeca, who died over a
century ago.