And So to Bath

LONDON to Bath is a three hours’ run by car. Cecil Roberts took three months over the journey, and this book is the result of his pilgrimage. It is a fascinating intermingling of past and present, of high life and low life, of history and legend, which unite into that peculiar homogeneity which is England. We see those great country houses of the past, which have become engulfed in the spawning London of the present, oases of beauty in a wilderness of vulgarity and vandalism; in the midst of the revolting ugliness of the suburbs and the degradation of the Thames, at Brentford we come upon a granite pillar with an inscription that here the British tribesmen bravely opposed Julius Cæsar in B.C. 54; we meet a procession of noblemen and wealthy merchants, lovely but light ladies, soldiers and sailors and eccentrics of all classes, weaving themselves into a tapestry of character and incident and anecdote. Perhaps the strangest morsel for a reader of the moment is a report by the Duke of Wellington on a ‘steam carriage’ exhibited to him in 1826: ‘It is scarcely possible to calculate the convenience from such an invention as this in wartime. If fitted with sheets of armour, no enemy could withstand its charge.’