be most legitimate--will delight in this admirable
specimen of the class, which has a very interesting history, not to be
narrated here. On the other side of the road (the left), all the way,
runs a long, low line of hills, or rather one continuous hill, or
perpetual cliff, with a straight top, in the shape of a ledge of rock,
which might pass for a ruined wall. I am afraid the reader will lose
patience with my habit of constantly referring to the landscape of Italy
as if that were the measure of the beauty of every other. Yet I am still
more afraid that I cannot apologise for it, and must leave it in its
culpable nakedness. It is an idle habit; but the reader will long since
have discovered that this was an idle journey and that I give my
impressions as they came to me. It came to me, then, that in all this
view there was something transalpine, with a greater smartness and
freshness and much less elegance and languor. This impression was
occasionally deepened by the appearance, on the long eminence of which I
speak, of a village, a church, a chateau, that seemed to look down at
the plain from over the ruined wall. The perpetual vines, the
bright-faced flat-roofed houses, covered with tiles, the softness and
sweetness of the light and air, recalled the prosier portions of the
Lombard plain. Toulouse itself has a little of this Italian expression,
but not enough to give a colour to its dark, dirty, crooked streets,
which are irregular without being eccentric, and which, if it were not
for the superb church of Saint-Sernin, would be quite destitute of
monuments.

I have already alluded to the way in which the names of certain places
impose themselves on the mind, and I must add that of Toulouse to the
list of expressive appellations. It certainly evokes a vision--suggests
something highly _meridional_. But the city, it must be confessed, is
less pictorial than the word, in spite of the Place du Capitole, in
spite of the quay of the Garonne, in spite of the curious cloister of
the old museum. What justifies the images that are latent in the word is
not the aspect, but the history, of the town. The hotel to which the
well-advised traveller will repair stands in a corner of the Place du
Capitole, which is the heart and centre of Toulouse, and which bears a
vague and inexpensive resemblance to Piazza Castello at Turin. The
Capitol, with a wide modern face, occupies one side, and, like the
palace at Turin, looks across at a h