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.

You perceive by my date that I am got into a new camp, and have left my tub at Windsor.  It is a little plaything-house that I got out of Mrs Chevenix’s shop, and the prettiest bauble you ever saw.  It is set in enamelled meadows with filagree hedges: 

A small Euphrates through the place is roll’d,
And little finches wave their wings of gold.

Two delightful roads; that you would call dusty, supply me continually with coaches and chaises:  barges as solemn as Barons of the Exchequer move under my window; Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect; but, thank God! the Thames is between me and the Duchess of Queensberry.  Dowagers as plenty as flounders inhabit all around, and Pope’s ghost is just now skimming under my window by the most poetical moonlight....