People say that there was too much luxury in England in the years before the War, but I doubt if there was much. I could only see people doing small things in an ostentatious way, whereas real luxury consists in doing big things as a matter of course. It was real luxury, I think, to keep the sea out with a breakwater, and bridge a great big valley with a granite viaduct, and then go on with other schemes, as Treffry did: also, perhaps, to build an arch of polished jasper thirty feet high, eleven feet wide and eight feet thick. But he was not a Nero with a Golden House, and he built his jasper archway into medieval walls at Fowey.
Nero made much the same mistake, not with the Golden House itself, but with his landscape-gardening there: it took up too much space right in the heart of Rome, and the site was quite unsuitable. He might have done his gardening so much better in the Alban hills, or better still at Capri, where Tiberius had already done so much. Look round that island from its highest point, and then look down from the Palatine on to the slopes below: it makes you feel that Nero was a fool to take to gardening there.
I have seen a ribald pamphlet accusing Mrs Grundy of the gravest improprieties. Tiberius was the Mrs Grundy of his generation--she might have written his message to the Senate in 22 A.D. with its condemnation of men and women dressing so much alike, ‘promiscas viris et feminis vestes.’ It is in Tacitus, _Annales_, III. 53; and in Suetonius, _Tiberius_, 35, there are instances enough of his severity to ladies who were not respectable. The fast set paid him out by inventing tales about him. No such tales were current till he tried to pull these people up; and the tales were only about his life at Capri. He was respectable at Rome and Rhodes and every other place; and nobody could really know what happened at Capri, as the public was shut out.
Tiberius must have gone to heaven, as Dante met him there, _Paradiso_, VI. 86; and if people won’t take Dante’s word for it, I may refer them to a former Vicar of Widdicombe, the Rev. John Rendle. He was a Wrangler in 1781 and got a Fellowship, and was Vicar of Widdicombe from 1790 till his death in 1815; and in 1814 he produced a _History of Tiberius, the first Defender of the true Faith_. The book shows perfect mastery of the evidence, and an adroitness in destructive criticism that might have made his fortune at the Bar. And his contention is that all those tales about Tiberius were invented out of spite: not, however, because he was a Mrs Grundy, but because he was at heart a Christian.