Watering Places.—Taste for the Picturesque.—Encomiendas. The English migrate as regularly as rooks. Home-sickness is a disease which has no existence in a certain state of civilization or of luxury, and instead of it these islanders are subject to periodical fits, of what I shall beg leave to call oikophobia, a disorder with which physicians are perfectly well acquainted though it may not yet have been catalogued in the nomenclature of nosology.
In old times, that is to say, two generations ago, mineral springs were the only places of resort. Now the Nereids have as many votaries as the Naiads, and the tribes of wealth and fashion swarm down 347to the sea coast as punctually as the land crabs in the West Indies march the same way. These people, who have unquestionably the best houses of any people in Europe, and more conveniences about them to render home comfortable, crowd themselves into the narrow apartments and dark streets of a little country town, just at that time of the year when instinct seems to make us, like the lark, desirous of as much sky-room as possible. The price they pay for these lodgings is exorbitant; the more expensive the place, the more numerous are the visitors; for the pride of wealth is as ostentatious in this country as ever the pride of birth has been elsewhere. In their haunts, however, these visitors are capricious; they frequent a coast some seasons in succession, like herrings, and then desert it for some other, with as little apparent motive as the fish have for varying their track. It is fashion which influences them, not the beauty of the place, not the desirableness of the 348accommodations, not the convenience of the shore for their ostensible purpose, bathing. Wherever one of the queen-bees of fashion alights, a whole swarm follows her. They go into the country for the sake of seeing company, not for retirement; and in all this there is more reason than you perhaps have yet imagined.
The fact is, that in these heretical countries parents have but one way of disposing of their daughters, and in that way it becomes less and less easy to dispose of them every year, because the modes of living become continually more expensive, the number of adventurers in every profession yearly increases, and of course every adventurer’s chance of success is proportionately diminished. They who have daughters take them to these public places to look for husbands; and there is no indelicacy in this, because others who have no such motive for frequenting them go likewise, in consequence of the fashion,—or 349of habits which they have acquired in their younger days. This is so general, that health has almost ceased to be the pretext. Physicians, indeed, still send those who have more complaints than they can cure, or so few that they can discover none, to some of the fashionable spas, which are supposed to be medicinal because they are nauseous; they still send the paralytic to find relief at Bath or to look for it, and the consumptive to die at the Hot-wells: yet even to these places more persons go in quest of pleasure than of relief, and the parades and pump-rooms there exhibit something more like the Dance of Death than has ever perhaps been represented elsewhere in real life.
There is another way of passing the summer ............