neys smoking,
_fumum et opes strepitumque_. For they are always reading of Rome;
feeling themselves, as they read, to belong to it, to be neither savage
nor even rustic, but by birthright _of the city_, urbane; and what these
exiles read is of how Horace met a bore on the Sacred Road (which would
correspond, more or less, with our Piccadilly)--

Along the Sacred Road I strolled one day
Deep in some bagatelle (you know my way)
When up comes one whose face I scarcely knew--
'The dearest of dear fellows! how d'ye do?'
--He grasped my hand. 'Well, thanks! The same to you?'

--or of how Horace apologises for protracting a summer jaunt to his
country seat:--

Five days I told you at my farm I'd stay,
And lo! the whole of August I'm away.
Well but, Maecenas, you would have me live,
And, were I sick, my absence you'd forgive.
So let me crave indulgence for the fear
Of falling ill at this bad time of year.
When, thanks to early figs and sultry heat,
The undertaker figures with his suite;
When fathers all and fond mammas grow pale
At what may happen to their young heirs male,
And courts and levees, town-bred mortals' ills,
Bring fevers on, and break the seals of wills.

(Conington's translation.)

Consider those lines; then consider how long it took the inhabitants
of this island--the cultured ones who count as readers or
writers--to recapture just that note of urbanity. Other things
our forefathers --Britons, Saxons, Normans, Dutch or French
refugees--discovered by the way; worthier things if you will; but not
until the eighteenth century do you find just that note recaptured; the
note of easy confidence that our London had become what Rome had been,
the Capital city. You begin to meet it in Dryden; with Addison it is
fairly established. Pass a few years, and with Samuel Johnson it is
taken for granted. His _London_ is Juvenal's Rome, and the same satire
applies to one as applied to the other. But against the urbane lines
written by one Horace some while before Juvenal let us set a passage
from another Horace--Horace Walpole, seventeen hundred years later and
some little while ahead of Johnson. He, like our Roman colonist, is a
settler in a new country, Twickenham; and like Flaccus he loves to
escape from town life.

TWICKENHAM, June 8th, 1747.

To the Hon. H. S. CONWAY.

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