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LIKE the modern love of the picturesque and the enthusiastic 

 devotion to the minutest sights and sounds of natural history, 

 our longing for seaside pleasures is a direct growth of the 

 peaceful times which followed the Great War. Late in the 

 last century a few bathing-machines made their appearance on 

 the southern coasts. George III. showed the fashionable 

 world that life was endurable at Weymouth. But residence at 

 the sea and dalliance by its summer waves was a luxury which 

 no prudent families could enjoy during war-prices, or when 

 Napoleon and his flotilla waited on the opposite shore to 

 swoop down upon England upon any dark night. After the 

 general pacification, artistic and imaginative pleasures gradually 

 succeeded to the all-absorbing interest of the Peninsular War. 

 Of late years the general diffusion of wealth has combined with 

 these to send people to the seaside. Quickened modes of 

 crossing the Atlantic and the Channel showed men that the 

 sea was no longer the oceanus dissociabilis of Horace. The 

 increase of railways, too, facilitated the conveyance of children 

 to the sea, so that family life suffers no interruption by the 

 prevailing habit. Wordsworth's advocacy of mountain and 

 sea scenery, in which he has since been followed by all the 

 poets of the reflective school, was aided by Scott's objective 

 painting of nature, and has greatly contributed towards a love 

 of the sea. Like most social phenomena, therefore, this enjoy- 

 ment of seaside pleasures is the result of many different causes. 



