PREFACE.

WATERING PLACES are usually divided into two classes, the inland and the maritime; the one depending for attraction on its convenience for sea-bathing, the other claiming preference on the merit of its medicinal springs ; and neither of them indifferent to the contingent advantage of a romantic or picturesque neighbourhood. If the choice were to be decided by the superiority arising from this important accessory, it would doubtless be awarded to the former class, an inland Watering Place being likely to comprehend within its circuit a greater variety of rural beauty, a richer store of objects not only worth seeing, but worth going to see, than can be expected on most points of the coast, where the view necessarily comprehends a large proportion of sterile land
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PREFACE. iv

and water, or, as it has been emphatically remarked, a dry desert on one side, and a wet one on the other.

AMONG the places of fashionable resort in the interior of the kingdom, it would perhaps be difficult to select one possessing features more generally attractive than that which is the subject of the present description. Distinguished for the salubrity of its air, and exhibiting the most diversified combinations of mountain and valley, wood and water; affording also, in its numerous and unrivalled trout-streams, inexhaustible sport for the angler, it presents a greater variety of incentives than might elsewhere be found, for exercise in the open air; without which, all the mineral waters that have ever been discovered are of little avail to the valetudinarian.

ADOPTING that order which appears most convenient, I shall commence with the description of Matlock Bath.

H. B.
[End of page iv of preface]