es. It is the shell of the huge
theatre, hollowed from the solid hill, and fronted with a wall that
seems made rather to protect a city than to form a sounding-board for
a stage, which first tells us that we have reached the old Arausio. Of
all theatres this is the most impressive, stupendous, indestructible,
the Colosseum hardly excepted; for in Rome herself we are prepared
for something gigantic, while in the insignificant Arausio--a sort
of antique Tewkesbury--to find such magnificence, durability, and
vastness, impresses one with a nightmare sense that the old lioness
of Empire can scarcely yet be dead. Standing before the colossal,
towering, amorphous precipice which formed the background of the
scena, we feel as if once more the 'heart-shaking sound of Consul
Romanus' might be heard; as if Roman knights and deputies, arisen from
the dead, with faces hard and stern as those of the warriors carved on
Trajan's frieze, might take their seats beneath us in the orchestra,
and, after proclamation made, the mortmain of imperial Rome be laid
upon the comforts, liberties, and little gracefulnesses of our modern
life. Nor is it unpleasant to be startled from such reverie by the
voice of the old guardian upon the stage beneath, sonorously devolving
the vacuous Alexandrines with which he once welcomed his ephemeral
French emperor from Algiers. The little man is dim with distance,
eclipsed and swallowed up by the shadows and grotesque fragments of
the ruin in the midst of which he stands. But his voice--thanks to the
inimitable constructive art of the ancient architect, which, even
in the desolation of at least thirteen centuries, has not lost its
cunning-emerges from the pigmy throat, and fills the whole vast hollow
with its clear, if tiny, sound. Thank heaven, there is no danger of
Roman resurrection here! The illusion is completely broken, and we
turn to gather the first violets of February, and to wonder at the
quaint postures of a praying mantis on the grass grown tiers and
porches fringed with fern.

The sense of Roman greatness which is so oppressive in Orange and in
many other parts of Provence, is not felt at Avignon. Here we exchange
the ghost of Imperial for the phantom of Ecclesiastical Rome. The
fixed epithet of Avignon is Papal; and as the express train rushes
over its bleak and wind-tormented plain, the heavy dungeon-walls and
battlemented towers of its palace fortress seem to warn us off, and
bid us quickly lea