Leamington Spa - Page 2

sometimes bestrode for a morning ride, or by the red-coated postman who
went his rounds twice a day to deliver letters, and again in the evening,
ringing a hand-bell, to take letters for the mail. In merely mentioning
these slight interruptions of its sluggish stillness, I seem to myself to
disturb too much the atmosphere of quiet that brooded over the spot;
whereas its impression upon me was, that the world had never found the
way hither, or had forgotten it, and that the fortunate inhabitants were
the only ones who possessed the spell-word of admittance. Nothing could
have suited me better, at the time; for I had been holding a position of
public servitude, which imposed upon me (among a great many lighter
duties) the ponderous necessity of being universally civil and sociable.

Nevertheless, if a man were seeking the bustle of society, he might find
it more readily in Leamington than in most other English towns. It is a
permanent watering-place, a sort of institution to which I do not know
any close parallel in American life: for such places as Saratoga bloom
only for the summer-season, and offer a thousand dissimilitudes even
then; while Leamington seems to be always in flower, and serves as a home
to the homeless all the year round. Its original nucleus, the plausible
excuse for the town's coming into prosperous existence, lies in the
fiction of a chalybeate well, which, indeed, is so far a reality that out
of its magical depths have gushed streets, groves, gardens, mansions,
shops, and churches, and spread themselves along the banks of the little
river Leam. This miracle accomplished, the beneficent fountain has
retired beneath a pump-room, and appears to have given up all pretensions
to the remedial virtues formerly attributed to it. I know not whether
its waters are ever tasted nowadays; but not the less does Leamington--in
pleasant Warwickshire, at the very midmost point of England, in a good
hunting neighborhood, and surrounded by country-seats and castles--
continue to be a resort of transient visitors, and the more permanent
abode of a class of genteel, unoccupied, well-to-do, but not very wealthy
people, such as are hardly known among ourselves. Persons who have no
country-houses, and whose fortunes are inadequate to a London
expenditure, find here, I suppose, a sort of town and country life in
one.

In its present aspect the town is of no great age. In contrast with the
antiquity of many places in its neighborhood, it has a bright, new face,
and seems almost to smile even amid the sombreness of an English autumn.
Nevertheless, it is hundreds upon hundreds of years old, if we reckon up
that sleepy lapse of time during which it existed as a small village of
thatched houses, clustered round