outhouses, replaced the stucco pillars around the atrium with a colonnade of polished stone, and, where stucco remains, has repainted it in fresh colours.  He knows that there are no gaps or weak spots in his stockade fence—­wood is always cheap.  In a word he has improved the estate; is modestly proud of it; and will be content, like the old Athenian, to leave his patrimony not worse but something better than he found it.

Sensible men—­and the Romans were eminently that—­as a rule contrive to live decently, or, at least, tolerably.  What struck Arthur Young more than anything else in his travels through France on the very eve of the Revolution seems to have been the general good-tempered happiness of the French gentry on their estates.  We may moralise of the Roman colonists as of the French proprietors that ’unconscious of their doom the little victims played’; but we have no right to throw back on them the shadow of what was to come or to cloud the picture of a useful, peaceable, maybe more than moderately happy life, with our later knowledge of disaster mercifully hidden from it.

Although our colonist and his family have all been born in Britain, are happy enough here on the whole, and talk without more than half meaning it, and to amuse themselves with speculations half-wistful, of daring the tremendous journey and setting eyes on Rome some day, their pride is to belong to her, to Rome, the imperial City, the city afar:  their windows open back towards her as Daniel’s did towards Jerusalem—­Urbs quam dicunt Roman—­the City.  Along the great road, hard by, her imperial writ runs.  They have never subscribed to the vow of Ruth, ’Thy people shall be my people and thy God my God.’  They dwell under the Pax Romana, not merely protected by it but as citizens.  Theirs are the ancestral deities portrayed on that unfading pavement in the very centre of the villa—­Apollo and Daphne, Bacchus and Ariadne—­

     For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
     For ever panting, and for ever young.

Parcels come to them, forwarded from the near military station; come by those trade-routes, mysterious to us, concerning which a most illuminating book waits to be written by somebody.  There are parcels of seeds—­useful vegetables and potherbs, helichryse (marigold as we call them now) for the flower garden, for the colonnade even roses with real Italian earth damp about their roots.  There are parcels of books, too—­rolls rather, or tablets—­wherein the family reads about Rome; of its wealth, the uproar of its traffic, the innumerable chimneys smoking, fumum et opes strepitumque.  For they are always reading of Rome; feeling themselves, as they read, to belong to it, to be neither savage nor even rustic, but by birthright of the city, urbane; and what these exiles read is of how Horace met a bore on the Sacred Road (which would correspond, more or less, with our Piccadilly)—­