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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 wise–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 and drunkenness, misery and recklessness.”

“And, therefore,” replies the shade, ere he disappears, “of discontent and revolution; followed by a tyranny endured, as in Rome and many another place, by men once free; because tyranny will at least do for them what they are too lazy, and cowardly, and greedy to do for themselves. Farewell, and prosper; as you seem likely to prosper, on the whole. But if you wish me to consider you a civilised nation: let me hear that you have brought a great river from the depths of the earth, be they a thousand fathoms deep, or from your nearest mountains, be they five hundred miles away; and have washed out London’s dirt–and your own shame. Till then, abstain from judging too harshly a Constantine, or even a Caracalla; for they, whatever were their sins, built baths, and kept their people clean. But do your gymnasia–your schools and universities, teach your youth nought about all this?”