e--for the fame of your young British empire has
reached us even in the realms below, and we recognise in you, with all
respect, a people more like us Romans than any which has appeared on
earth for many centuries--how is it you have forgotten that sacred duty
of keeping the people clean, which you surely at one time learnt from us?
When your ancestors entered our armies, and rose, some of them, to be
great generals, and even emperors, like those two Teuton peasants, Justin
and Justinian, who, long after my days, reigned in my own Constantinople:
then, at least, you saw baths, and used them; and felt, after the bath,
that you were civilised men, and not 'sordidi ac foetentes,' as we used
to call you when fresh out of your bullock-waggons and cattle-pens. How
is it that you have forgotten that lesson?"

The minister, I fear, would have to answer that our ancestors were
barbarous enough, not only to destroy the Roman cities, and temples, and
basilicas, and statues, but the Roman baths likewise; and then retired,
each man to his own freehold in the country, to live a life not much more
cleanly or more graceful than that of the swine which were his favourite
food. But he would have a right to plead, as an excuse, that not only in
England, but throughout the whole of the conquered Latin empire, the
Latin priesthood, who, in some respects, were--to their honour--the
representatives of Roman civilisation and the protectors of its remnants,
were the determined enemies of its cleanliness; that they looked on
personal dirt--like the old hermits of the Thebaid--as a sign of
sanctity; and discouraged--as they are said to do still in some of the
Romance countries of Europe--the use of the bath, as not only luxurious,
but also indecent.

At which answer, it seems to me, another sneer might curl the lip of the
august shade, as he said to himself--"This, at least, I did not expect,
when I made Christianity the state religion of my empire. But you, good
barbarian, look clean enough. You do not look on dirt as a sign of
sanctity?"

"On the contrary, sire, the upper classes of our empire boast of being
the cleanliest--perhaps the only perfectly cleanly--people in the world:
except, of course, the savages of the South Seas. And dirt is so far
from being a thing which we admire, that our scientific men--than whom
the world has never seen wiser--have proved to us, for a whole generation
past, that dirt is the fertile cause of disease