This miracle accomplished, the beneficent
fountain has retired beneath a pump-room, and appears to have given up
all pretensions to the remedial virtues formerly attributed to it. I
know not whether its waters are ever tasted nowadays; but not the less
does Leamington--in pleasant Warwickshire, at the very midmost point of
England, in a good hunting neighborhood, and surrounded by country-seats
and castles--continue to be a resort of transient visitors, and the more
permanent abode of a class of genteel, unoccupied, well-to-do, but not
very wealthy people, such as are hardly known among ourselves. Persons
who have no country-houses, and whose fortunes are inadequate to a
London expenditure, find here, I suppose, a sort of town and country
life in one.
In its present aspect, the town is of no great age. In contrast with the
antiquity of many places in its neighborhood, it has a bright, new face,
and seems almost to smile even amid the sombreness of an English autumn.
Nevertheless, it is hundreds upon hundreds of years old, if we reckon up
that sleepy lapse of time during which it existed as a small village of
thatched houses, clustered round a priory; and it would still have been
precisely such a rural village, but for a certain Doctor Jephson, who
lived within the memory of man, and who found out the magic well, and
foresaw what fairy wealth might be made to flow from it.
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