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Royal Tunbridge Wells
be expected to have the same effect. Of course the place was not to everybody's taste, and a few persons resolutely refused to visit it. " Lady Mary Cole writes me word she is better, but not well," Lady Dalkeith wrote to Lady Susan Stewart, July 6, 1760; " that Dr. Duncan advises her to go to Tunbridge, but she dislikes the place so much she does not think she can prevail with herself to go. I must say she will be very much to blame if she does not." As the watering-place grew and flourished, it became little by little a residential town, and many of the houses, particularly on The Grove, became the homes of permanent tenants. Sir James Bland Burgess, a poet and dramatist, lived in one of the houses on the site of the bowling-green on Mount Sion, called Bowling-Green Houses, and about 1786 no less a person than Richard Cumberland settled down next to him. Cumberland House, Mrs. Pitt Byrne has informed us, was " a quaint old tenement, rather imposing from its dimensions and the site it occupied on the brow of the hill, standing back among the chestnut trees which overshadowed it, and railed off from the London turnpike road on the north side, opposite Culverdens." Cumberland is to-day best remembered as a 112 |
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