r!_ les antiquites!--_Heou! Monsieour!_ les
Arenes!--Commissionaire pour voir la Maison Carree!--_Heou--ou!
Monsieour!_ decrotteur, s'il vous plait!--Le Temple de Diane,
_Monsieour!_" are the cries with which every third or fourth ragamuffin
at Nismes salutes you, enforcing his application by a peculiar yell, of
which no combination of letters can give an idea uncouth enough. As it
is hardly possible to walk in the central part of Nismes without seeing
its antiquities before you, it is best to avoid a troublesome live
appendage of this sort, by appearing totally deaf. The Arenes are nearly
in front of the Hotel du Louvre, and the Maison Carree is within two or
three minutes' walk of it: the Temple of Diana and the Baths are
situated in the most conspicuous spot in the public gardens, whither a
perpetual concourse of people may be seen thronging; and the Pharos
overlooks them from the summit of a small precipitous hill, which may be
ascended in five minutes by a good walker. Every thing therefore lies
within the compass of an evening's stroll.

The Maison Carree is a beautiful bijou, better known than any other of
the curiosities of Nismes. I believe the opinion of Mons. Seguier
(formed from a laborious examination of the nail-holes belonging to its
last bronze inscription) is generally adopted; viz. that it was a temple
dedicated to Caius and Lucius Caesar, grandsons of Augustus. A perfect
copy of it, built from actual measurement, may be found in the Temple of
Victory and Concord, in the Duke of Buckingham's gardens at Stowe. So
admirable is the preservation of the original in every part, owing to
the dry and pure air of Languedoc, as almost to operate as a
disadvantage. Its freshness and compactness suggest rather too much the
idea of a modern pavilion of twenty or thirty years standing, instead of
that of a temple; and if I may venture to say so, the same want of the
aerugo of age, which renders it more valuable as an architectural relic,
produces an incongruous and unpoetical effect on the imagination. Age,
in fact, has its own characteristic branch of beauty. An old man with
curly hair and a fresh smooth complexion, like Godwin's Struldbrugg, St.
Leon, would be an unpleasant and unnatural object. There is a masculine
and imposing medium between youthful vigour and decay, in which the
leading features of the former man may be distinctly traced; as in
Wordsworth's beautiful description of the old knight of Rylstone, a