Lippincotts Magazine of Popular Literature and Science | Page 6

9 Wine street, now the sign of the Golden Key. His father, a draper, carried on his business under the sign of a hare: although all his life a shopkeeper, he had been brought up in the country, and was passionately fond of country sports. He related of his first experience of city life in London that, happening to look out at the shop-door just as a porter was passing with a hare in his hands, it brought the country so vividly before him that he burst into tears, and the impression was so lasting that years after, when opening a shop in Bristol, he took the hare for a sign, having it painted on a pane in the window on each side of the door and printed on the shop-bills. Of Robert Southey's recollections of Bristol there is his own very charming account in the first volume of his Life by his son.
We return to Pope's letter to Mrs. Martha Blount for his description of Clifton: "Passing still along by the river, you come to a rocky way on one side, overlooking green hills on the other: on that rocky way rise several white houses, and over them red rocks; and as you go farther more rocks above rocks, mixed with green bushes, and of different colored stone. This, at a mile's end, terminates in the house of the Hot Well, whereabouts lie several pretty lodging-houses, open to the river with walks of trees. When you have seen the hills seem to shut upon you and to stop any farther way, you go into the house, and looking out at the back door, a vast rock of an hundred feet high, of red, white, green, blue and yellowish marbles, all blotched and variegated, strikes you quite in the face; and, turning on the left, there opens the river at a vast depth below, winding in and out, and accompanied on both sides with a continued range of rocks up to the clouds, of an hundred colors, one behind another, and so to the end of the prospect, quite to the sea. But the sea nor the Severn you do not see: the rocks and river fill the eye, and terminate the view much like the broken scenes behind one another in a play-house.
"Upon the top of those high rocks by the Hot Well, which I have described to you, there runs on one side a large down of fine turf for about three miles. It looks too frightful to approach the brink and look down upon the river; but in many parts of this down the valleys descend gently, and you see all along the windings of the stream and the opening of the rocks, which turns close in upon you from space to space for several miles in toward the sea. There is first, near Bristol, a little village upon this down called Clifton, where are very pretty lodging-houses, overlooking all the woody hills, and steep cliffs and very green valleys within half a mile of the Wells, where in the summer it must be delicious walking and riding, for the plain extends, one way, many miles: particularly, there is a tower that stands close at the edge of the highest rock, and sees the stream turn quite round it; and all the banks, one way, are wooded in a gentle slope for near a mile high, quite green; the other bank all inaccessible rock, of an hundred colors and odd shapes, some hundred feet perpendicular."
[Illustration: SUSPENSION BRIDGE AT CLIFTON.]
The reputation of the Hot Well, whose waters Pope was sent to drink, has utterly collapsed. The Hot Well house was long ago removed to admit a widening of the river, and the well itself is now inaccessible. There is no spa, once of great reputation, that has sunk into such complete oblivion as the Clifton Hot Well: this may be due, in part, to the exaggerated estimate that was formed of the virtue of the water, and to the blamable practice which prevailed of sending patients here at their last gasp as a forlorn hope. Of too many it might be said as in these lines from the epitaph on his wife by the poet Mason in Bristol cathedral:
To Bristol's fount I bore with trembling care Her faded form: she bowed to taste the wave, And died.
The little village of Clifton has now become a handsome suburb, where reside the wealthy successors of the merchant-venturers of Bristol. It is continuous with Bristol, and where the one begins or the other ends is not evident except to the parish authorities. The downs are what they were in Pope's time, with the exception of what is now their most striking feature--the suspension bridge across the chasm. As early as 1753,