Certain Delightful English Towns by William Dean Howells

The American who goes to England as part of the invasion which we have / lately heard so much of must constantly be vexed at finding the Romans / have been pretty well everywhere before him. He might not mind the / Saxons, the Danes, the Normans so much, or the transitory Phœnicians, / and, of course, he could have no quarrel with the Cymri, who were there / from the beginning, and formed a sort of subsoil in which conquering / races successively rooted and flourished; but it is hard to have the / Romans always cropping up and displacing the others. He likes well / enough to meet them in southern Europe; he enjoys their ruins in Italy, / in Spain, in France; but the fact of their presence in Britain forms too / great a strain for his imagination. By dint of having been there such a / long time ago they seem to have anticipated any novelty there is in his / own coming, and by having remained four hundred years they leave him / little hope of doing anything very surprising in a stay of four months. / He is gnawed by a secret jealousy of the Romans, and when he lands in / Liverpool, as he commonly does, and discovers them in possession of the / remote antiquity of Chester, where he goes for a little comfortable / medievalism before pushing on to wreak himself on the vast modernity of / London, he can hardly govern his impatience. Their vestiges are less / intrusive at Plymouth and Exeter than at Chester, but still I think the / sort of American I have been fancying would have been incommoded by a / sense of them in the air of either place, and, if he had followed on / with us to Bath, would have found no benefit from the springs which they / frequented two thousand years earlier, so fevered must have been his / resentment.

The very beginnings of Bath were Roman, for I suppose Prince Bladud is / not to be taken as serious history, though he is poetically important as / the putative prototype of King Lear (I believe he had also the personal / advantage of being a giant), and he is interesting as one of the few / persons who have ever profited by the example of the pigs. Men are / constantly warned against that, in every way, but Prince Bladud, who / went forth from his father's house a leper, and who observed the swine / under his charge wallowing in the local waters and coming out cured from / his infection, immediately tried them himself, and recovered and lived / to be the father of an unnatural family of daughters. By inspiring / Shakespeare with the theme of his great tragedy, he was the first to / impart the literary interest to Bath which afterwards increased there / until it fairly rivalled its social and pathological interest. But the / Romans have undoubtedly a claim to the honor of building a city on the / site of the present town; under their rule it became the favorite resort / of the gayety which always goes hand in hand with infirmity at medicinal / springs, and if you dig anywhere in Bath, now, you come upon its / vestiges. A little behind and below the actual Pump Room, these are so / abundant that, if you cannot go to Herculaneum or Pompeii, you can still / have a fair notion of Roman luxury from the vast tanks for bathing, the / stone platforms, steps, and seats, the vaulted roofs and columns, the / furnaces for heating the waters, and the system of pipes for conveying / it from point to point. The plumbing, in its lavish use of material, / attests the advance of the Romans in the most actual and expensive of / the arts; and the American invader must recognize, with whatever of gall / and bitterness, that his native plumbers would have little to teach / those of the conquerors who possessed Britain two thousand years before / him.

If he had been coming with us from Exeter the morning we arrived, he / might, indeed, have triumphed over the Romans in the comfort of his / approach, for, after all, there are few trains like the English trains / to give you a sense of safety, snugness, and swiftness. I like getting / into them from the level of the platform, instead of climbing several / steps to reach them, as we do with ours, and I like being followed into / my compartment by one of those amiable porters who abound in English / stations, and save your arms from being pulled out of their sockets by / your hand-baggage. They are the kindest and carefullest of that class / whom Lord Chesterfield nobly called his unfortunate friends, and who in / England are treated with a gentle consideration almost equal to their / own, and as porters they are so grateful for the slightest recompense of / their service. I have seen people give them twopence, for some slight / office, or nothing when they were people who could not afford something; / but I never saw an English porter's face clouded by the angry resentment / which instantly darkens the French porter's brow if he thinks himself / underpaid, as he always seems to do. It did not perceptibly matter to / the English porter whether he followed me into a first-class or a / third-class carriage, and it was from a mere love of luxury and not from / the hope of gratifying any sense of superiority to the fellow-being / with my hand-baggage that I ended by travelling first-class for short / hauls in England. On the expresses, like those from London to Edinburgh, / you can make the journey third-class in perfect comfort, and with no / great risk of overcrowding, but not, I should say, in the way-trains.