pecial circumstances or special men have called it into
brief activity. The 'bastides' and the 'villes neuves' of
thirteenth-century France were founded at a particular period and
under special circumstances, and, brief as the period was and governed
by military urgencies, they were laid out on a more or less definite
plan (p. 143). The streets designed by Wood at Bath about 1735, by
Craig at Edinburgh about 1770, by Grainger at Newcastle about 1835,
show what individual genius could do at favourable moments. But such
instances, however interesting in themselves, are obviously less
important than the larger manifestations of town-planning in Greece
and Rome.

In almost all cases, the frequent establishment of towns has been
accompanied by the adoption of a definite principle of town-planning,
and throughout the principle has been essentially the same. It has
been based on the straight line and the right angle. These, indeed,
are the marks which sunder even the simplest civilization from
barbarism. The savage, inconsistent in his moral life, is equally
inconsistent, equally unable to 'keep straight', in his house-building
and his road-making. Compare, for example, a British and a Roman road.
The Roman road ran proverbially direct; even its few curves were not
seldom formed by straight lines joined together. The British road was
quite different. It curled as fancy dictated, wandered along the foot
or the scarp of a range of hills, followed the ridge of winding downs,
and only by chance stumbled briefly into straightness. Whenever
ancient remains show a long straight line or several correctly drawn
right angles, we may be sure that they date from a civilized age.

In general, ancient town-planning used not merely the straight line
and the right angle but the two together. It tried very few
experiments involving other angles. Once or twice, as at Rhodes (pp.
31, 81), we hear of streets radiating fan-fashion from a common
centre, like the gangways of an ancient theatre or the thoroughfares
of modern Karlsruhe, or that Palma Nuova, founded by Venice in 1593 to
defend its north-eastern boundaries, which was shaped almost like a
starfish. But, as a rule, the streets ran parallel or at right angles
to each other and the blocks of houses which they enclosed were either
square or oblong.

Much variety is noticeable, however, in details. Sometimes the outline
of the ancient town was square or almost square, the house-blocks were