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Fortunately, enough examples can be identified as Roman to serve our purpose. Some of these occur in the Lombardy plain where, both under the Republic and at the outset of the Empire, many 'coloniae' were planted full-grown and where town-life on the Roman model was otherwise developed.
Even when the brilliant May sun shone on her, and the streets and parks were thronged with fashionable pleasure-seekers, and London looked not unbeautiful, she realised it. For all that made town-life pleasant and desirable was now beyond her reach.
Eclogues he called them, and meant to have published them by subscription. I remember some of his verses, if you want to hear them. The old man had a great deal to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to hibernation. Intramural aestivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or semi-asphyxia.
That there were noble women and good wives, and that the froth and scum and dregs of idle town-life did not make up the existence of the contemporary Roman world, may be seen from passages like the following, which are either quoted or condensed from a letter of Pliny concerning a lady named Arria. The events belong to the reign of Nero's predecessor Claudius.
Midway between the pulsating town-life and the desert there lies, mostly, a sinister extra-mural region, a region of gaping walls and potsherds, where the asphodel shoot up to monstrous tufts and the fallacious colocynth, the wild melon, scatters its globes of bitter gold.
And yet, in the midst of so many contrasts, in the midst of so many dangers which exact exceptional presence of mind and strong nerves, life in the forest is full of charm and allurements. The spirit is strengthened and elevated by this continuous warfare, open and pronounced, so unlike those depressing struggles against narrow minds, and tiger-hearts, which distinguish town-life.
There are parts of tropical America where the natives have actually been protected by the malaria, which keeps the white man at arm's length. But more often the microbe is on the side of the civilised race, killing off the natives who have not run the gauntlet of town-life.
The very bit of material which she had hidden underneath a pillow was the cause; and so I answered, "Town-life is so different; one becomes so accustomed to a ring of changes in the all-around of life, that, when in the country, one looks for something to remind one of the life that has been left." "Then you did not come from genuine kindness?" "No, I am afraid not."
To those who have been lucky enough to escape sickness, the combination of open air and hard work will act as a lasting tonic against the less healthy conditions of town-life. It is something, bred up as we have been in a complex civilization, to have reduced living to its simplest terms and to have realized how little one really wants.
True; but somehow even Dickens was not regarded with that grave critical interest which private citizens of the previous generation bestowed on Scott. The incomparable Sir Walter at that time was dwelling far away amid the swamps and grim hills and shaggy thickets of Ashestiel. Town-life was not for him, and he grudged the hours spent in musty law-courts.
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