Grammont's
agents; they lunched there and drove on to Bath in the afternoon. They
came into the town through unattractive and unworthy outskirts, and only
realized the charm of the place after they had garaged their car at the
Pulteney Hotel and walked back over the Pulteney Bridge to see the Avon
with the Pump Room and the Roman Baths. The Pulteney they found hung
with pictures and adorned with sculpture to an astonishing extent; some
former proprietor must have had a mania for replicas and the place is
eventful with white marble fauns and sylphs and lions and Caesars and
Queen Victorias and packed like an exhibition with memories of Rome,
Florence, Milan, Paris, the National Gallery and the Royal Academy,
amidst which splendours a competent staff administers modern comforts
with an old-fashioned civility. But round and about the Pulteney one
has still the scenery of Georgian England, the white, faintly classical
terraces and houses of the days of Fielding, Smollett, Fanny Burney and
Jane Austen, the graceful bridge with the bright little shops full of
"presents from Bath"; the Pump Room with its water drinkers and a fine
array of the original Bath chairs.
Down below the Pump Room our travellers explored the memories of
the days when the world was Latin from York to the Tigris, and the
Corinthian capital flourished like a weed from Bath to Baalbek.
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