‘Twelve months hence,’ said Mrs. Pinmoney, ‘you will tell another tale. In the meantime you will not die of despair as long as there is a good turnpike road and a pipe of Madeira in England.’ ‘You will find,’ said Mr. Forester to Anthelia, ‘in the little valley we are about to enter, a few specimens of that simple and natural life which approaches as nearly as the present state of things will admit to my ideas of the habits and manners of the primaeval agriculturists, or the fathers of the Roman republic. You will think perhaps of Fabricius under his oak, of Curius in his cottage, of Regulus, when he solicited recall from the command of an army, because the man whom he had intrusted, in his absence, with the cultivation of his field and garden had run away with his spade and rake, by which his wife and children were left without support; and when the senate decreed that the implements should be replaced, and a man provided at the public expense to maintain the consul’s family, by cultivating his fields in his absence. Then poverty was as honourable as it is now disgraceful: then the same public respect was given to him who could most simplify his habits and manners that is now paid to those who can make the most shameless parade of wanton and selfish prodigality. Those days are past for ever: but it is something in the present time to resuscitate their memory, to call up even the shadow of the reflection of republican Rome—_Rome the seat of glory and of virtue, if ever they had one on earth_.[66] ‘You excite my curiosity very highly,’ said Anthelia, ‘for, from the time when I read ——in those dear books that first Woke in my heart the love of poesy, How with the villagers Erminia dwelt, And Calidore, for a fair shepherdess, Forgot his guest to learn the shepherd’s lore; how much have I regretted never to discover in the actual inhabitants of the country the realisation of the pictures of Spenser and Tasso!’ ‘The palaces,’ said Mr. Forester, ‘that everywhere rise around them to shame the meanness of their humble dwellings, the great roads that everywhere intersect their valleys, and bring them continually in contact with the overflowing corruption of cities, the devastating monopoly of large farms, that has almost swept the race of cottagers from the face of the earth, sending the parents to the workhouse or the army, and the children to perish like untimely blossoms in the blighting imprisonment of manufactories, have combined to diminish the numbers and deteriorate the character of the inhabitants of the country; but whatever be the increasing ravages of the Triad of Mammon, avarice, luxury, and disease, they will always be the last involved in the vortex of progressive degeneracy, realising the beautiful fiction of ancient poetry, that, when primaeval Justice departed from the earth, her last steps were among the cultivators of the fields.’[67]