"It is yet early for you to see this unsophisticated place to advantage (so my friend had written to me early in July), for it is, as yet, full of clothiers from Leeds, and cutlers from Sheffield, besides all the red noses and faces in England collected together. There is not a livery-hat in the place but our own, and ours, at present, is the only 1l. 1s. subscriber on the books at the sulphur well; showing the caliber of the company, who cannot afford more than five or ten shillings, and most of them the half of the smaller sum. But Sheffield and Leeds will soon loom homewards, and then, they say, better company will come."

My correspondent was right. The cold which prevails yet, - particularly at night - in the month of July, and the frequent showers of rain, render Harrogate ineligible as a mere summer residence, at that period, and would scare away the more exquisitely susceptible among those of "gentle blood." At the close of that month the Spa season properly speaking begins, and this lasts till Doncaster races. Before that time, carts and gigs empty their gatherings daily. Coroneted chariots, britzschkas, and postchaises, ply about in abundance, after that, bringing their more noble cargoes of aristocratic visitors.

It suited my purpose to be betwixt and between, like Mahomet's coffin. I wished to see the tail of the "unwashed," and the head of the "exclusives," and I just hit my right time for that purpose.

Like most of the really celebrated Spas in England, Harrogate was, at the first discovery of the springs, a mere village; but unlike most of them, Harrogate remains a village to this day, though upwards of two hundred and seventy years have elapsed since the first mineral water was tapped on its bleak heath, by a Captain William Slingsby. While Cheltenham and Leamington have converted themselves, in the course of a few years, from mere villages that they were, into smart and pert towns, Harrogate has remained a village still. It has been brushed up a little to be sure, and extended somewhat, both below and above; but so wildly and irregularly - so without any design and consistency, and at such distant periods of time - that pretension to any thing above a village it has none.

This is precisely the circumstance that has saved the reputation of Harrogate. Who can cavil at the nature, genuineness, and efficacy of the Harrogate waters! On the other hand, who has not cavilled, and cavils to this day, at the waters of both Leamington and Cheltenham? Those of Harrogate are unsophisticated, because the place itself remains as it was! You dip your cup into the fountainhead, and get your strong waters. There is no shuffling, and the mind is convinced at once. Elsewhere you have the complicated machinery of pumps, the ends of whose pipes may terminate heaven knows where, and you drink in faith, but not in conviction. Harrogate is, in fact, a true and genuine Spa.

Its situation is delightful. For elevation, above the Irish and German oceans, midway between which it is nearly placed; for position, at about equal distances from the three capitals of the United Kingdom (about two hundred miles); and for geological formation, favourable to human life - Harrogate stands almost pre-eminent.

That such a place must enjoy a salubrious air it is hardly necessary for me to add. The extensive heaths which, with immense tracts of finely cultivated country, surround this favoured spot, allow full play to the sweeping breezes, and render the air remarkably pure and bracing.

Upon this point we may readily confide in the assertion of an enlightened physician, Dr. Hunter of Leeds, who has studied well the climate of Harrogate, and the powers of its waters, touching which he has written an able treatise, that has gone through several editions. That writer declares that "no case of pestilential cholera had been known to have occurred in Harrogate - neither have infectious diseases of any kind ever been prevalent."

There is a Low Harrogate and there is a High Harrogate. In point of antiquity, as a place worthy to be marked on the map, Low Harrogate bears away the palm. Yet mineral water was first discovered at High Harrogate. But High Harrogate has only chalybeate springs, very excellent in their way, still only chalybeate, and there are hundreds such in the north. Low Harrogate, on the contrary, has the "true, genuine, stinking wells," and they were only discovered, or at least used for the first time, one hundred and thirty years after the former.

The latter wells, nevertheless, are those which gave and give its reputation to Harrogate; so that when we send patients to drink the Harrogate waters, or to bathe in them, we send them to Low Harrogate, though they choose to live in the upper village, which is what almost every body tries to do.

After all, the local distinction consists merely in having to walk about half a mile on foot, ascending all the while a pretty stiff acclivity, crossing two or three streets of the lower village, which lies in a cup or narrow vale-then a field or two, and so reach the wider expanse or area with its "green" and "race-course;" hotels à prétention, a new church, two libraries and the post-office, constituting the only important points of the Upper Region or High Harrogate.

The communications between the two places are free and commodious, there being no fewer than four, namely, two for carriages, and two, much shorter, for pedestrians, as already described. The two villages stand in the relation of east and west to each other.

Low Harrogate has, within the lest few years, gained additional importance as a mineral watering place, by the discovery of purely saline waters untainted by any sulphur. This circumstance has added a new feature to Harrogate as a Spa, and has given occasion for the erection of a noble building, a representation of which stands in front of the chapter.

Of these saline springs there are several; and I have noticed by the compass that they are found in what is called in Yorkshire a beck or trough (the bed of a rivulet) to the northward of a line running S. E. and S. W., and that southerly of that line no saline, but on the contrary, all the sulphur springs are to be found. Of the latter, two principally deserve our attention. On the morning after my arrival I betook myself early to the examination of all the springs.

Between half-after six and eight o'clock, a.m., all the world was up and stirring. I could from my window survey the various throngs, as they formed and moved to the different points of their destination. Some directed their steps to the original or OLD WELL, as it is called, a few yards from the Crown Hotel, in which I was staying; and there, under a squatty and ugly dome, supported by rudely carved stone pillars, they found a gratuitous beverage of fetid water.

Others passing a little to the left of the said hotel, entered the garden, formerly known as the Crown Gardens, but now designated as the Montpellier Pleasure-grounds, in which they found the Crown Sulphur-well, so formerly called, but now styled the Montpellier Sulphur Well, which its new proprietor assures us furnishes a larger proportion of the stinking gas than the original well.

These, then, are the two principal sulphur-springs at Harrogate, and their analysis will be found in the general table at the end of this work - a plan I have adopted, as in my former publication on the Spas of Germany, for the sake of convenience, as well as with a view to avoid any interruption in my narrative, by the introduction of chemical numbers and chemical names, which can interest only a few readers scientifically or medically inclined. The plan was much approved of in the former publication, and I shall adopt it in reference to all the mineral waters I may have to mention in the present one.

Besides the two principal sulphur wells I have enumerated, there are two other wells with sulphureted water, one of which has' changed its denomination even since Dr. Hunter's late edition, and has been converted from the CRESCENT into the VICTORIA New Pump-room and Baths; while the other, known as Thackwray spring, or No. 5, has acquired a notoriety far superior to its celebrity, from the circumstance of its having been the subject of legal contention between certain proprietors of hotels at Harrogate, and the person who claimed to be sole owner of it.

That contention, for which great preparations had been made in the way of scientific evidence on both sides (never used, and lightly paid for), and a still more formidable array of legal talent brought up (too much used and too heavily paid for), terminated, as such causes generally terminate, in the men at law gaining every thing, and the litigants nothing.

The question was, who was to have the sole command of the well - the inhabitants or Thackwray? The judges proposed to split the difference. Thackwray was declared to be the owner, but was bound to erect a room over the well, with a pump in it, which however was not to be maintained at his expense. From "noon till eve" the said pump-room was to be kept open for any body to use the water of the well, as they list, and both plaintiffs and defendants were at liberty to put a lock on the said pump, to prevent its being used out of season.

Now mark the result of the quarrel. The plaintiffs, who gained the cause, had to disburse £1,352 7s 3d, for their victory, towards which sum the visitors, who, the lawyers contended, must feel the deepest interest in the cause, contributed the magnificent quota of £14 2s! And the defendant, who secured the nominal ownership of the well, died (probably of broken heart) a few months after the assizes!

And after all, what think my readers has become of the well, the pump-room, and the pump? Why, the latter has got so fast locked in rust, from never having been used at all by the visitors, or plaintiffs, that upon my trying to work it, in order that I might taste the water, I got a strain at my shoulder, and was grinned at by a gaping clown or two with red hair for my useless efforts; - and thus almost all these pretended patriotic displays generally end "in fumo et caligine."

Not so with the men of law, however; for they always take care of themselves too well, to permit any such result : and accordingly we find that on that memorable occasion (March, 1837) they shared among themselves a picking of £789 9s 3d leaving a sum of £341 7s, to be divided in various proportions among the late Dr Smith, the father of English Geology, the illustrious Dalton, Professors Phillips and Daniel, and the late Dr Turner.

Both the disputed well, and the one which supplies the Victoria baths, are within a few yards of the spot in which surges the original OLD WELL, the glory and pride of Harrogate, from which almost all the water exported thence is bottled - and may be bottled by any body.

This proximity induced people to fancy that the disputed and the old well might be only one and the same spring. But there are strong reasons to dissent from such an opinion; and I for one feel convinced that more than one other spring might be discovered, by tapping the lowest level of the vale on one side of the bank before alluded to, without interfering with any of those already in existence. Indeed, within the memory of the youngest inhabitant, not fewer than three other springs, with waters charged more or less with the sulphurous gas, were known to be used, all in the same line of stratification, and within one, two, or three yards of the old well.

These springs were mentioned and much noticed by Dr Sprat and Bishop Watson; but they can hardly be said to form part of the present arrangement of useful springs at Harrogate. The curious and the whimsical excepted, almost all invalids and visitors are satisfied with the Old Well water, and that at the Montpellier Garden, for drinking; and with that of the latter, and of the Victoria, for bathing.

I have already alluded to the additional reputation which Harrogate has acquired of late years from the discovery of purely saline springs. Within a Doric temple, measuring one hundred feet in length and thirty-three feet wide, lighted on one side by a series of lofty windows, we find the first spring of this class; the discovery of which dates only since 1819. From a supposed resemblance in composition to the famed Cheltenham waters, this spring has been denominated the Cheltenham Saline, having dropped its two aliases - of Oddy, and Williams-by which it was at first designated.

The discovery of a water of a medicated nature, free from sulphur, and endowed with purgative properties, was hailed with enthusiasm. Forthwith a pump-room, worthy of its importance, was planned, and under the care of Mr Clark, of Leeds, the structure just mentioned was raised, to which the name of Royal Promenade and Cheltenham Pump-room was affixed.

The building is in every respect worthy of praise; but it lacks space for the many other conveniences required to enable its present occupier to complete it in all parts, as a regular Cur-saal, in imitation of those on the continent. Mr Gordon, who rents the place, is willing and spirited enough to undertake all that is necessary, and much of that he has indeed effected already. But he lacks support and encouragement. Much as Harrogate is frequented; and cheap - unusually cheap - though the subscription to the room be, Gordon would be a considerable loser by the concern, were it not for the benefit he derives from a stated number of balls given during the season in this grand saloon - one of the best of its kind in England.

A band, engaged purposely for the season, from London, enlivens the hours during which the promenaders frequent the pump-room. The architect has for this purpose erected a small gallery within a recess in the wall, opposite the windows immediately above the pump which supplies the Cheltenham saline, about the centre of the room. The affable Mrs Gordon superintends a small and select library of volumes of light reading, placed behind a glazed screen at one end of the room; while on several of the-tables are laid the more popular periodical publications, and most of the metropolitan and provincial newspapers.

Concerts à la Musurd serve to quicken the steps of the promenaders in the evening; and nothing in fact has been spared to render the establishment attractive.

It was not likely that a discovery, leading to such important consequences to Harrogate, being once made, should not induce spirited individuals to seek for similar springs on their own grounds. Accordingly we find, in the recent history of that Spa, that the master of the Crown Hotel, who had already, in 1822, found a sulphur spring in his garden, (to which I have alluded under the denomination of the Montpellier Spa, where the sulphureted water is both drunk and used for baths,) did, in. 1836, discover a saline mineral spring, analogous to the one in the Great Promenade-room, which he immediately added to his establishment in the same gardens, thereby rendering that establishment complete. This new saline spring, like the other, lies in the same direction from the beck which divides the Vale of Low Harrogate.

By way of recapitulation, then, before we conclude the chapter, it will be useful to repeat, 1st, that at Harrogate that is, on the common above Low Harrogate - there are two purely chalybeate springs, without sulphur, and with few saline ingredients besides ; which springs bear the names of the Old or Sweet Spa, and Tewit Well. 2dly, that in Low Harrogate we have two principal sulphureted springs, the Old Well, and the Crown or Montpellier Spa, besides the sulphur spring which supplies the Victoria room and baths. 3dly, that two principal saline springs, called Gordon's Cheltenham, and Thackwray's Cheltenham, have been added to the number of late years; besides minor ones of both classes, which will be alluded to hereafter.

All these waters have been analysed at various epochs, and by different individuals of merit and authority; some of them very recently indeed ; as for example, that of Thackwray's Cheltenham saline, which has undergone within the last two months a fresh analysis by Mr. West, of Leeds, who was instructed to forward me the result of his inquiry. Of that result I have availed myself in the general Table of analyses.

I have already mentioned the valuable work of Dr Hunter amongst the most recent productions touching Harrogate. With that physician I had the good fortune to form a personal acquaintance during my tour, which has tended to increase the confidence I already felt disposed to place in all his statements respecting Harrogate. He resided on the spot, and watched the effect of the several waters for some years, and in his researches he was aided by the scientific as well as practical skill of Mr West, whom I found upon many occasions, both personally and through correspondence, to be a minute, painstaking, and accurate chemist.

Did I address myself solely to the profession (which heaven forbid!) I should hardly have deemed it necessary to add in this place, that the "Treatise on Mineral Waters," published by Sir Charles Scudamore, the second edition of which is now lying before me, contains a short account of the waters at Harrogate, with analyses undertaken by himself and Mr Garden, the well-known and justly-esteemed operative chemist of London.

Of these also I have availed myself in drawing up my general table. Sir Charles's work unfortunately is almost too strictly scientific and professional to find its way among the general reading public; and I only lament that my excellent friend had not given to it a more popular garb on its second appearance. It might perchance have spared me my present task.