s, the
thick voice of the circus, that died away fifteen hundred years ago.

[Illustration: ARLES--RUINS OF THE ROMAN THEATRE]

The theatre has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with
a different music. The Roman theatre at Arles seemed to me one of the
most charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld; I took a particular
fancy to it. It is less than a skeleton--the arena may be called a
skeleton--for it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the
row of columns which formed the scene--the permanent back-scene--remain;
two marble pillars--I just mentioned them--are upright, with a fragment
of their entablature. Before them is the vacant space which was filled
by the stage, with the line of the proscenium distinct, marked by a deep
groove impressed upon slabs of stone, which looks as if the bottom of a
high screen had been intended to fit into it. The semicircle formed by
the seats--half a cup--rises opposite; some of the rows are distinctly
marked. The floor, from the bottom of the stage, in the shape of an arc
of which the chord is formed by the line of the orchestra, is covered by
slabs of coloured marble--red, yellow and green--which, though terribly
battered and cracked to-day, give one an idea of the elegance of the
interior. Everything shows that it was on a great scale: the large sweep
of its enclosing walls, the massive corridors that passed behind the
auditorium and of which we can still perfectly take the measure. The way
in which every seat commanded the stage is a lesson to the architects of
our epochs, as also the immense size of the place is a proof of
extraordinary power of voice on the part of the Roman actors. It was
after we had spent half an hour in the moonshine at the arena that we
came on to this more ghostly and more exquisite ruin. The principal
entrance was locked, but we effected an easy _escalade_, scaled a low
parapet, and descended into the place behind the scenes. It was as light
as day, and the solitude was complete. The two slim columns, as we sat
on the broken benches, stood there like a pair of silent actors. What I
called touching just now was the thought that here the human voice, the
utterance of a great language, had been supreme. The air was full of
intonations and cadences; not of the echo of smashing blows, of riven
armour, of howling victims and roaring beasts. The spot is, in short,
one of the sweetest legacies of the ancient world; and there seems