In the last century it behoved everybody who desired to be accounted 'a personage,' or to be ranked amongst 'people of quality,' to quit London at a certain season of the year, and repair to the city of Bath, or 'the Bath,' as it was frequently called. Now a journey to Bath in those days was no trifling matter: it involved frequent stoppages by the way, and the inns and posting-houses upon the road became, necessarily, _very_ important, and oftentimes very profitable concerns. Miss Burney, the author of _Evelina_, records in her diary the particulars of her journey to Bath with Mrs. Thrale, in the year 1780. She stopped the first night at Maidenhead Bridge; slept at Speen Hill the second, and Devizes the third; arriving at Bath on the fourth day of her journey. The inn patronized by Miss Burney at Devizes was the Black Bear, of which one Thomas Lawrence was the landlord. It is in regard to this establishment we have to request that the reader will give us his attention for a few minutes.
Mr. Lawrence had been by turns a solicitor, a poet, an artist, an actor, a supervisor of excise, a farmer, an innkeeper, and, of course, a bankrupt. Probably he might have retired from the Black Bear with a fortune, but that he had a numerous family of sixteen children to support, and that he was not particularly well qualified to succeed as an innkeeper. He seems to have set up for being 'a character,' and his neighbours were inclined to ridicule and censure him for giving himself airs. A bustling, active, good-humoured man, he was prone now and then to play the scholar and the fine gentleman, the while he lost sight of his more recognised position as a landlord. He wore a full-dress suit of black, starched ruffles, and a very grand periwig; was ceremonious and stately in his manners, affected an inordinate love of literature and an air of connoisseurship that contrasted rather strangely with his calling. Certainly there was not such another landlord to be seen upon the road between London and Bath; if, indeed, anywhere else. He was proud of his elocutionary powers, and in a full, sonorous voice he would read aloud select passages from Shakespeare and Milton to all such persons as evinced an inclination to listen to him--sometimes, indeed, to people who did not in the least wish to hear him. It is hardly to be wondered at that divers of the Black Bear's customers occasionally felt indignant and outraged when, travel-worn and hungry, eager for the bill of fare and supper, they were met by the landlord's proposal to expatiate for their benefit upon the beauties of the poets, or to recite for their entertainment certain most elegant extracts. It was food for the body they desiderated, not solace for the mind; and it was, perhaps, only natural that they should treat Mr. Lawrence's suggestions rather curtly. Not that the innkeeper was prompt to take offence. The man who rides a hobby-horse seldom heeds or perceives the criticism of bystanders upon the paces or proportions of his steed. Mr. Lawrence could obtain a hearing from other quarters. Once a week he visited Bath, and passed an evening in the green-room of the theatre there. The actors would listen to him, or pretend to do so; some of them would permit him to read their parts to them, and give them counsel as to the manner in which these should be rendered on the stage, purposing to revenge themselves afterwards, the rogues, by availing themselves of the comforts of the Black Bear, without calling for their accounts when they quitted that hostelry.