e sun like so many tadpoles.

[Footnote 25: Vide Cooke's Views.]

[Footnote 26: Marius's victory is said to have been gained near Aix
(Aquae Seaetiae).]

The Roman colony of Orange, to judge from the relative positions of the
arch and circus, must have been very considerable, and have occupied a
far larger space than the present town. The arch stands detached from
its entrance, as I mentioned, on the Lyons' side, and the circus at the
extreme end, in the direction of Avignon; yet the former we may suppose
to have joined on to the ancient town, and the latter to have stood in
the same central position which the Colosseum occupied in Rome. Of the
circus nothing now remains but the chord of the semicircle, or, to
express it more familiarly, the straight line of the D figure, in which
it was built. As far as I could guess, from pacing the length of this
enormous wall, encumbered and buttressed as it was by dirty shops, it is
in length nearly or quite a hundred yards, and of a height
proportionate. The point of view from which it appears to the most
advantage, is on the road to Avignon, about two or three furlongs out of
the town. When viewed in this direction, it stands with a commanding air
of a grim old Roman ghost among a group of men of the present day;
forming, by its blackness and colossal scale of proportions, a striking
contrast to every thing around it, and overtopping houses, church-tower,
and every thing near, excepting a circular hill at the foot of which it
stands. The latter is marked as the position of the ancient Roman
citadel by the remains of tower and wall, half imbedded in turf, which
surround it: and one veteran bastion still stands firm and unbroken, in
a position facing the Circus, its companion through the silent and
ruinous lapse of so many centuries. Without the affectation of decrying
well-known and celebrated monuments of antiquity, or the wish to put any
thing really in comparison with the ruins of ancient Rome, I must still
own, that the unexpected view which I caught of the citadel and Circus
from this position, realized more strongly to my mind the august
conceptions so well expressed in Childe Harold, than any view in Rome
itself, hardly excepting the Colosseum.

O'er each mouldering tower
Dim with the mist of years, grey flits the shade of power.

The stanza concluding with these lines involuntarily occurs to the mind,
while viewing Orange in the direction of which I now spea