At Bath, she was as restless, as observant, and as epigrammatic as at Tunbridge Wells. She describes Bath life, in 1740, as consisting all the morning of “How d’ye does?” and all night of “What’s Trumps?” The women, in the “Ladies’ Coffee House,” talk only of diseases. The men, “except Lord Noel Somerset, are altogether abominable. There is not one good; no, not one.” Among the lady eccentrics, was a certain dowager duchess, who, said Miss Robinson, “bathes, and, being very tall, had nearly drowned a few women in the Cross Bath; for she had ordered it to be filled till it reached her chin; and so all those who were below her stature, as well as her rank, were obliged to come out or drown.”
The glance thus obtained into the Bath itself only gives, as it were, a momentary view of the fashionable people in those fashionable waters. They who compare old accounts with what is now to be seen will agree that he who looks, at the present day, into the dull, dark, and simmering waters can have no conception of the jollity, frolic, riot, dissipation, and indecorum which once reigned there. There was a regular promenade in the waters, and the promenaders were of both sexes. They were in bathing-costumes, and walked with the water nearly up to their necks. The heads of the shorter people appeared to be floating. At the same time, they were frolicking, or flirting, or otherwise amusing themselves. Those who came for sanitary purposes were hanging on by the rings in the wall, and were sedulously parboiling themselves. The Cross Bath was the famous quality bath. Handsome japanned bowls floated before the ladies, laden with confectionery, or with oils, essences, and perfumery for their use. Now and then one of these bowls would float away from its owner, and her swain would float after it, bring it again before her, and, if he were in the humour, would turn on his back and affect to sink to the bottom, out of mere rapture at the opportunity of serving her. The spectators in the gallery looked on, laughed, or applauded till the hour for closing came. Therewith came half-tub chairs, lined with blankets, whose owners plied for fares, and carried home the steaming freight at a sharp trot and a shilling for the job.
Elizabeth Robinson’s friendship with Lord Lyttelton is well known. At a court assembly, at St. James’s, in 1740, the gentleman in question was present. He was then plain Mr. Lyttelton, son and heir of Sir Thomas, and about a year over thirty. The young lady observed him in the brilliant scene more closely and more approvingly than she did others. “The men were not fine,” she writes to her Grace; but she makes exception. “Mr. Lyttelton was, according to Polonius’ instruction, rich, not gaudy; costly, but not exprest in fancy.” In her eyes and to her mind, he was a perfect gentleman and scholar. “Mr. Lyttelton has something of an elegance in all his compositions, let the subject be ever so trifling.... Happy is the genius that can drink inspiration at every stream and gather similes with every nosegay.” Alas! the elegance of the last century embraced much that was otherwise. The present Lord Lyttelton would not dare to read aloud to a company of ladies and gentlemen the once popular and elegant poem which his ancestor addressed to Belinda!
In the days here referred to, there were two circumstances to which all maidens looked forward as their probable but not equally desirable lot, namely, marriage and the smallpox. The latter fell on Elizabeth Robinson’s sister Sarah, when the family were resident at Horton, near Hythe. The elder sister was sent to a neighbouring gentleman farmer’s, so called solely because he tilled a few acres of his own. Here, the Iphigenia aroused unwonted sympathies in the breast of the Squire Cymons. She would have nothing to do with furthering the humanising process of those dull and thirsty clods. Their scarlet waistcoats did not impress her like Mr. Lyttelton’s birthday suit at court. One heaving swain, she thought, would make an admirable Polyphemus! He stared at her just as the calves did; but the calves had instinct enough not to say anything to her. They were preferable to the squire, to whom the young girl, with her bright intellect, could not be persuaded “to lend out her liking on land security.” There is a world of meaning in what she wrote on that occasion to her correspondent: “I liked neither him nor myself any better for all the fine things he said.” She was a creature not to be wooed or won by a tippling, foxhunting clown, rich in the possession of dirt. She had finely strung sensibilities, which would not attune themselves to “the loud laugh which speaks the vacant mind.” Mrs. Pendarves, who saw much of her in the town and country mansions of the Duchess of Portland, recognised the above fact. “Fidget,” she wrote, in the year last named, “is a most interesting creature; but I shall not attempt to draw a likeness.... There are some delicate touches that would foil the skill of a much abler artist than I pretend to be.”
Just then her fears for her sister were even stronger than her antipathies for her Kentish lovers. In order to satisfy her eagerness to be assured that the sister she loved was out of danger, the latter was allowed to walk veiled into the fields, within speaking distance of the other. Veiled, because she had cruelly suffered, and it was thought better not to shock the elder sister by a sight of the devastation which the foul disease had worked temporarily on the beauty of the younger. Thus, the sisters stood, for a brief time, speaking all that love and hope suggested, and the sound of the convalescent sister’s voice fell like delicious music on the heart of the listener.
With renewed health came uninterrupted happiness, and gay mingling in gay society, and audacity of expression when describing it. Elizabeth Robinson had felt almost as much contempt for the fops among the soldiers of her day, as disgust for the country Polyphemuses who made her wrathful with their wooing. Very severe was she on “the scarlet beaux,” who were ordered to Flanders. “I think,” she says, “they will die of a panic and save their enemies’ powder. Well! they are proper gentlemen. Heaven defend the nunneries! I will venture a wager Flanders increases in the christenings more than in the burials of the week.”
In describing changes in fashion, she makes singular application of her historical knowledge. In 1741, she wrote to her sister, from town: “I do not know what will become of your fine shape, for there is a fashionable make which is very strange. I believe they look in London as they did in Rome after the Rape of the Sabines!”
As this fair young Elizabeth remembered her history on one occasion, so did she show on another that she had not forgotten her church catechism. “As for modern marriages,” wrote the lady, just then going out of her teens, “they are great infringers of the baptismal vow; for it is commonly the pomps and vanities of this wicked world on one side, and the sinful lusts of the flesh on the other.”
There are traces throughout Miss Robinson’s early letters of how it went with her own heart and its sympathies. In her eighteenth year, she wrote to the Duchess of Portland: “I never saw one man that I loved.” She added to this assertion such an endless list of virtues, merits, qualities, etc., which she expected to find in that happy individual, as to lead to the conclusion that a monster so faultless would never be created. She even half-acknowledged as much; for she wrote, “I am like Pygmalion, in love with a picture of my own drawing; but I never saw an original like it in my life. I hope when I do, I shall, as some poet says, find the ‘statue warm.’” In her nineteenth year, she gave utterance to a pretty petulance in these words: “I wish some of our neighbours had married two and twenty years ago; we should have had a gallant young neighbourhood; but they have lost time, and we have lost lovers by that delay.” To a remark of her sister’s, that, if she were not heedful, some handsome fool would win her in spite of herself, she replied, that, to win her heart, “it must be rather fair-spoken than fair-faced.” She was not much moved when rivals in beauty passed into the married state before her. In 1741, there are the following autobiographical details in letters to the wife of the Reverend Mr. Freind, of Canterbury: “I saw some fine jewels that are to adorn my fair enemy, Mrs. S——. I beheld them without envy, and was proud to think that a woman who is thought worthy to wear jewels to adorn her person, should do me the honour to envy and hate me.... Surely, of all vanities, that of jewels is the most ridiculous; they do not even tend to the order of dress, beauty, and cleanliness; for a woman is not a jot the handsomer or cleaner for them.” And again: “I am confined again by a little feverishness. I thought, as it was a London fever, it might be polite, so I carried it to the Ridotto, court, and opera, but it grew perverse and stubborn, so I put it into a white hood and double handkerchief, and kept it by the fireside these three days, and it is better; indeed, I hope it is worn out. On Saturday, I intend to go to Goodman’s Fields, to see Garrick act ‘Richard the Third’ that I may get one cold from a regard to sense. I have sacrificed enough to folly, in catching colds at the great puppet-shows in town.”
Subsequently, she would have her friend’s husband believe that she was another fair vestal of the west, who meant to pass through the world in maiden meditation, fancy-free. She writes to the Reverend Dean of Canterbury: “I have lately studied my own foibles, and have found that I should make a very silly wife and an extremely foolish mother, and so have as far resolved as is consistent with deference to reason and advice, never to trouble any man or to spoil any children.” This was but banter. Only the year before, her sister having made a jest of her love for heroes of antiquity, Elizabeth Robinson oracularly answered, “I believe I shall do my errand before many people think; but prudence shall be my guide. A living man,” exclaims the wise virgin, “is better than a dead hero!”