Change of air or the pursuit of health and recreation. (Through France, Switzerland, Italy, &c.) illustrating the beneficial influence of bodily exercise, change of scene, pure air, and temporary relaxation in sickness and in health / by James Johnson.

  • Johnson, James, 1777-1845.
Date:
1832
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Change of air or the pursuit of health and recreation. (Through France, Switzerland, Italy, &c.) illustrating the beneficial influence of bodily exercise, change of scene, pure air, and temporary relaxation in sickness and in health / by James Johnson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    150/302 (page 138)
    nothing*, compared with that resulting* from the individual conduits from each house, as in London. This is the grand source of cleanliness, com- fort, and salubrity. Descending* into this ancient and subterranean Temple of Cloacina, we find ourselves on an angle, where two streams, of very different qua- lities, unite—one, a brisk and gurgling current of translucent and deli- cious water—the other, a foul and slug*g*ish sewer, fraug*ht with all the impurities which modern Rome takes the trouble to consign to the Tiber. If the former be (as classic authors assert) the virg*in Juturna, con- demned, after being* ruined by the g*ay seducer of the skies, to mingle with the dregs of the Eternal City, the moral is not the least impressive which ancient and modern times present to the contemplative mind ! I do not despise, though I cannot admire, professed antiquarians. I only pity them for spending so much of the short span of existence, in useless research and fruitless speculation, which bewilder without instruc- ing, and fatigue without amusing us. I am wrong, however, in the last expression. They do sometimes amuse us. Thus, one party insinuate^ that the Cloaca Maxima must have been the Colossal drain of some ancient, perhaps antediluvian city, which had vanished from the surface of the earth, and even from the records of history, thousands of years be- fore Romulus and Remus were born—while another party insists that the said Cloaca is a comparatively modern work, constructed, not in the time of the Tarquins, but of the Caesars ! Common sense and common? reason might suggest that the Tarquins drained the marsh of the Forum •—and that the same power and spirit which afterwards erected the aque- ducts, enlarged the drains of the Tarquins. But what has common sense,, or plain reason, to do with antiquarian research ? And now having carried the eye round the circuit of the Roman Forum, and philosophized in a hurried manner on some of the most prominent remains of its fallen grandeur, I shall trespass but a few minutes longer on the patience of the reader, by a rapid glance over some other fragments- of antiquity that arrest the attention of the spectator while taking the southern view from the Tower of the Capitol. THERMAE. Go, turgid glutton! strip! and gasp for breath, In one brief struggle with convulsive death; Go, gorged with peacock. Juvenal. At some distance to the left, and also at some distance to the right of