ve. Boz has given one of the most vivid
and vivacious pictures of its expiring glories in the thirties, when
there were still "M.C.s," routs, assemblies, and sedans. His own
connection with the place is a personal, and a very interesting one. He
was there in 1835 on election business hurrying after Lord John Russell,
all over the country, to report his speeches--a young fellow of three and
twenty, full of "dash," "go," and readiness of resource, of immense
energy and carelessness of fatigue, ready to go anywhere and do anything.
While thus engaged on serious business, he kept his eyes wide open, took
in all the humours of Bath, and noted them in his memory, though he made
no use of this till more than two years later, when he was well on into
"Pickwick."

The entering an old city by night always leaves a curious romantic
impression, and few old cities gain so much as Bath by this mode of
approach. The shadowy houses have a monumental air; the fine streets
which we mostly ascend show a mystery, especially as we flit by the open
square, under the great, black Abbey, which seems a beetling rock. This
old Bath mysteriousness seems haunted by the ghosts of Burney, Johnson,
Goldsmith, Wilkes, Quin, Thrale, Mr. Pickwick, and dozens more. Fashion
and gentilily hover round its stately homes. Nothing rouses such ideas
of state and dignity as the Palladian Circus. There is a tone of
mournful grandeur about it--something forlorn. Had it, in some freak of
fashion, been abandoned, and suffered, for a time at least, to go to
neglect and be somewhat overgrown with moss and foliage, it would pass
for some grand Roman ruin. There is a solemn, greyish gloom about it;
the grass in the enclosure is rank, long, and very green. Pulteney
Street, too: what a state and nobility there is about it! So wide and so
spacious; the houses with an air of grand solidity, with no carvings or
frittering work, but relying on their fine lines and proportion. To
lodge there is an education, and the impression remains with one as of a
sense of personal dignity from dwelling in such large and lofty chambers,
grandly laid out with noble stairs and the like. The builders in this
fine city would seem to have been born architects; nearly all the houses
have claims to distinction: each an expression and feeling of its own.
The fine blackened or browned tint adds to the effect. The mouldings are
full of reserve and chastened, suited exactly to the mater