of Parliament to
establish such places, if they think fit, and choose to pay for them out
of the rates:"--Then, I think, the august shade might well make
answer--"We used to call you, in old Rome, northern barbarians. It seems
that you have not lost all your barbarian habits. Are you aware that, in
every city in the Roman empire, there were, as a matter of course, public
baths open, not only to the poorest freeman, but to the slave, usually
for the payment of the smallest current coin, and often gratuitously? Are
you aware that in Rome itself, millionaire after millionaire, emperor
after emperor, from Menenius Agrippa and Nero down to Diocletian and
Constantine, built baths, and yet more baths; and connected with them
gymnasia for exercise, lecture-rooms, libraries, and porticos, wherein
the people might have shade and shelter, and rest?--I remark, by-the-by,
that I have not seen in all your London a single covered place in which
the people may take shelter during a shower--Are you aware that these
baths were of the most magnificent architecture, decorated with marbles,
paintings, sculptures, fountains, what not? And yet I had heard, in
Hades down below, that you prided yourselves here on the study of the
learned languages; and, indeed, taught little but Greek and Latin at your
public schools?"

Then, if the minister should make reply--"Oh yes, we know all this. Even
since the revival of letters in the end of the fifteenth century a whole
literature has been written--a great deal of it, I fear, by pedants who
seldom washed even their hands and faces--about your Greek and Roman
baths. We visit their colossal ruins in Italy and elsewhere with awe and
admiration; and the discovery of a new Roman bath in any old city of our
isles sets all our antiquaries buzzing with interest."

"Then why," the shade might ask, "do you not copy an example which you so
much admire? Surely England must be much in want, either of water, or of
fuel to heat it with?"

"On the contrary, our rainfall is almost too great; our soil so damp that
we have had to invent a whole art of subsoil drainage unknown to you;
while, as for fuel, our coal-mines make us the great fuel-exporting
people of the world."

What a quiet sneer might curl the lip of a Constantine as he replied--"Not
in vain, as I said, did we call you, some fifteen hundred years ago, the
barbarians of the north. But tell me, good barbarian, whom I know to be
both brave and wis