It seems that you have not lost all your barbarian habits.  Are you aware that, in every city in the Roman empire, there were, as a matter of course, public baths open, not only to the poorest freeman, but to the slave, usually for the payment of the smallest current coin, and often gratuitously?  Are you aware that in Rome itself, millionaire after millionaire, emperor after emperor, from Menenius Agrippa and Nero down to Diocletian and Constantine, built baths, and yet more baths; and connected with them gymnasia for exercise, lecture-rooms, libraries, and porticos, wherein the people might have shade and shelter, and rest?—­I remark, by-the-by, that I have not seen in all your London a single covered place in which the people may take shelter during a shower—­Are you aware that these baths were of the most magnificent architecture, decorated with marbles, paintings, sculptures, fountains, what not?  And yet I had heard, in Hades down below, that you prided yourselves here on the study of the learned languages; and, indeed, taught little but Greek and Latin at your public schools?”

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?”