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The Circus Hill relates to the final plate in The Comforts of Bath, though it is so different that this must be a later version. Rowlandson always had a fondness for satirizing gout-ridden invalids in bath-chairs, and the geography of Bath allowed him to indulge his imagination to the full. The humor lies in the incongruity between the genteel architecture in the background and the impolite activities going on around it, as well as the underlying absurdity of building a health resort for convalescents upon precipitous hills. Rather than providing a place to recuperate, Rowlandson's Bath is a city that is a danger to life and limb. In the background, a coach goes careering around the corner on a narrow road, almost plunging down the slope; porters collapse under the weight of a sedan chair while struggling to carry it back up; one unfortunate invalid flies out of his chair as it runs out of control down the hill. Matthew Bramble-a gout sufferer himself-never succumbed to this particular indignity, but he did complain about the steep slope of Gay Street between the Circus and Queen's Square. "Gay-street, is so difficult, steep and slippery," he fumed, "that in wet weather it must be exceedingly dangerous . . . and when the street is covered in snow . . . I don't see how any individual could go either up or down, without the most imminent hazard of broken bones."16 The architecture in the background does not quite marry with the actual topography of the Circus, and this is clearly a grassy slope, not a paved street. Other attempts to identify the scene as Lansdowne Crescent are not entirely satisfactory either, for the architecture is too dissimilar. Rowlandson has provided a generic view of Bath's urban scenery and the kinds of hazard encountered in the spa town, rather than illustrating a specific incident in Smollett's novel.

Matthew Hargraves

Hargraves, Matthew, and Scott Wilcox. Great British Watercolors: from the Paul Mellon collection. New Haven: Yale Center for British Art, 2008, p. 58, no. 23