In the Roman world things were changed; there were more closed doors and courts impenetrable of access. Insignia of office, gradations of wealth and rank, sundered those of high estate from classes which now acknowledged their own inferiority; privacies, exclusions, distinctions innumerable, altered the face of public life as the easy _mos majorum_ was confined by the ordinances of encroaching fashion. It was now that women began to be cast for leading parts upon the great stage of life. Under the Empire, by the rapid removal of her disabilities the Roman matron achieved a position of independence which made her, according to her nature, a potent force of good or evil. It was now that the intricate threads of social prescription were woven into that ceremonial mantle which was afterwards to sit so uneasily on the shoulders of barbarian men. But the time for shyness was not yet come, for Italy is a sunny land where clear air makes clear minds, blandly or keenly observant of the world, and never impelled by onset of outer mists and darkness to tend a flickering light within themselves. There was melancholy, high and stately, such as Lucretius knew, when he went lonely among the homesteads or along the shore; but it was too exalted to be one with diffidence, for he who will hold the sum of things in his thoughts walks on clouds above the heads of men, free of all misgiving. Perhaps beyond the Alps, in some Rhaetian upland where Roman dignity was interfused with old barbaric roughness, the first signs of our malady were perceived and the first ancestor of all the shy was born. But even yet the time was not ripe, nor the place prepared. Christianity had to come, turning men's eyes inwards and proclaiming the error of the objective pagan way. A new feeling, the sense of personal unworthiness before God, spreading through the Roman world, now stirred mankind to still communing with themselves, and sanctioned the stealing away from the noisy festivals of life. By enjoining a search into the depths of the heart, it encouraged the growth of a self-consciousness hitherto unknown. It was not always a panic of contrition, sweeping the joyous out of the sunlight into a monastic shade, which brought the troubled into a new way of peace, but sometimes a quiet joy in renunciation, congruous with a timid mood, leading by gradual allurement to cloisters of shadowy lanes and cells which were forest bowers. The new faith gave open sanction to evasion of the banquet, and thus fortified and increased those who loved not the ceremonial day. The spirit of solitude, no more a maenad, but a nun, sheltered earth's children in the folds of her robe, and no man said her nay.