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Updated: June 19, 2025
The world would be covered with huge and densely-peopled excrescences with Babylons, Romes, and Londons in which wealth, power, and corruption were securely and permanently intrenched, and from which the human race would ne'er diverge but under the pressure of absolute impossibility to wrench a subsistence from their over-peopled vicinities.
There are here some hundred thousand of you cooped up within these old walls, and one half the population do nothing all day long but whine at the heels of English travellers, or hang on at the doors of the convents, waiting their one meal a-day. Why is this? Outside the walls is a magnificent plain, which, were it cultivated, would feed ten Romes, instead of one.
Wee'l break the windows which the Whore Of Babylon hath painted; And, when the Popish Saints are down, Then Barow shall be Sainted. There's neither Crosse nor Crucifixe Shall stand for man to see: Romes trash and trump'ries shall goe downe; And, hey! then up goe we.
Such a condition cannot be discovered before marriage The detestable crime of abortion is appallingly rife in our day. It is abroad in our land to an extent which would have shocked the dissolute women of pagan RomeS This wholesale, fashionable murder, how are we to stop it? Hundreds of vile men and women in our large cities subsist by this slaughter of the innocent."
I say "perchance," because Rodin never gave any closer reason for the comparison he drew, so I can only give my own personal impression of what he may have meant. There are, to my thinking, two distinct Romes as there are two distinct Pragues. The old original Rome seems to me fundamentally, gloriously, and, indeed, unblushingly pagan.
August of great Augustus took its name, Romes second Emperour of lasting fame, With sickles now the bending Reapers goe The rustling tress of terra down to mowe; And bundles up in sheaves, the weighty wheat, Which after Manchet makes for Kings to eat: The Barly, Rye and Pease should first had place, Although their bread have not so white a face. The Carter leads all home with whistling voyce.
A dreadful road, through forests only beginning to be felled, brought us to Avon; it is a straggling, ugly little place, and not any of their "Romes, Carthages, Ithacas, or Athens," ever provoked me by their name so much. This Avon flows sweetly with nothing but whiskey and tobacco juice. The next day's journey was much more interesting, for it showed us the lake of Canandaigua.
For instance, when a smart young Irishman came over with some Irish hounds, his consigner besought the New Englanders to remember that it was as godly to "winne this fellowes soule out of the subtillest snare of Sathan, Romes pollitick religion, as to winne an Indian soule out of the Dieuells clawes;" and he urged them to watch the Papist narrowly as to his carriage in Puritandom, his attitude toward Protestantism.
It is the illimitable feeling that gives it a special character. London is not grand. It possesses only one of the qualifications of a grand city, size; but it wants the equally important one, beauty. It is the union of these two qualities that produced the grand cities, the Romes, the Babylons, the hundred portals of the Pharaohs; multitudes and magnificence; the millions influenced by art.
And if time was, when this round Earth, which to innumerable mortals has seemed an empire never to be wholly explored; which, in its seas, concealed all the Indies over four thousand five hundred years; if time was, when this great quarry of Assyrias and Romes was not extant; then, time may have been, when the whole material universe lived its Dark Ages; yea, when the Ineffable Silence, proceeding from its unimaginable remoteness, espied it as an isle in the sea.
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