e return to Pope's letter to Mrs. Martha Blount for his description of
Clifton: "Passing still along by the river, you come to a rocky way on
one side, overlooking green hills on the other: on that rocky way rise
several white houses, and over them red rocks; and as you go farther
more rocks above rocks, mixed with green bushes, and of different
colored stone. This, at a mile's end, terminates in the house of the Hot
Well, whereabouts lie several pretty lodging-houses, open to the river
with walks of trees. When you have seen the hills seem to shut upon you
and to stop any farther way, you go into the house, and looking out at
the back door, a vast rock of an hundred feet high, of red, white,
green, blue and yellowish marbles, all blotched and variegated, strikes
you quite in the face; and, turning on the left, there opens the river
at a vast depth below, winding in and out, and accompanied on both sides
with a continued range of rocks up to the clouds, of an hundred colors,
one behind another, and so to the end of the prospect, quite to the sea.
But the sea nor the Severn you do not see: the rocks and river fill the
eye, and terminate the view much like the broken scenes behind one
another in a play-house.

"Upon the top of those high rocks by the Hot Well, which I have
described to you, there runs on one side a large down of fine turf for
about three miles. It looks too frightful to approach the brink and look
down upon the river; but in many parts of this down the valleys descend
gently, and you see all along the windings of the stream and the opening
of the rocks, which turns close in upon you from space to space for
several miles in toward the sea. There is first, near Bristol, a little
village upon this down called Clifton, where are very pretty
lodging-houses, overlooking all the woody hills, and steep cliffs and
very green valleys within half a mile of the Wells, where in the summer
it must be delicious walking and riding, for the plain extends, one way,
many miles: particularly, there is a tower that stands close at the edge
of the highest rock, and sees the stream turn quite round it; and all
the banks, one way, are wooded in a gentle slope for near a mile high,
quite green; the other bank all inaccessible rock, of an hundred colors
and odd shapes, some hundred feet perpendicular."

[Illustration: SUSPENSION BRIDGE AT CLIFTON.]

The reputation of the Hot Well, whose waters Pope was sent to drink, has
utterly