more agreeable to the eyes of a stranger,
especially in the heats of summer, than the great number of public
fountains that appear in every part of Rome, embellished with all the
ornaments of sculpture, and pouring forth prodigious quantities of
cool, delicious water, brought in aqueducts from different lakes,
rivers, and sources, at a considerable distance from the city. These
works are the remains of the munificence and industry of the antient
Romans, who were extremely delicate in the article of water: but,
however, great applause is also due to those beneficent popes who have
been at the expence of restoring and repairing those noble channels of
health, pleasure, and convenience. This great plenty of water,
nevertheless, has not induced the Romans to be cleanly. Their streets,
and even their palaces, are disgraced with filth. The noble Piazza
Navona, is adorned with three or four fountains, one of which is
perhaps the most magnificent in Europe, and all of them discharge vast
streams of water: but, notwithstanding this provision, the piazza is
almost as dirty, as West Smithfield, where the cattle are sold in
London. The corridores, arcades, and even staircases of their most
elegant palaces, are depositories of nastiness, and indeed in summer
smell as strong as spirit of hartshorn. I have a great notion that
their ancestors were not much more cleanly. If we consider that the
city and suburbs of Rome, in the reign of Claudius, contained about
seven millions of inhabitants, a number equal at least to the sum total
of all the souls in England; that great part of antient Rome was
allotted to temples, porticos, basilicae, theatres, thermae, circi,
public and private walks and gardens, where very few, if any, of this
great number lodged; that by far the greater part of those inhabitants
were slaves and poor people, who did not enjoy the conveniencies of
life; and that the use of linen was scarce known; we must naturally
conclude they were strangely crouded together, and that in general they
were a very frowzy generation. That they were crouded together appears
from the height of their houses, which the poet Rutilius compared to
towers made for scaling heaven. In order to remedy this inconvenience,
Augustus Caesar published a decree, that for the future no houses
should be built above seventy feet high, which, at a moderate
computation, might make six stories. But what seems to prove, beyond
all dispute, that the antient Ro