I Remained There An Hour And Got A Cornplete Impression; The Place Was Per- Fectly Soundless, And For The Time, At Least, Lonely; The Splendid Afternoon Had Begun To Fade, And There Was A Fascination In The Object I Had Come To See.

It came to pass that at the same time I discovered in it a certain stupidity, a vague brutality.

That element is rarely absent from great Roman work, which is wanting in the nice adaptation of the means to the end. The means are always exaggerated; the end is so much more than attained. The Roman rigidity was apt to overshoot the mark, and I suppose a race which could do nothing small is as defective as a race that can do nothing great. Of this Roman rigidity the Pont du Gard is an admirable example. It would be a great injustice, however, not to insist upon its beauty, - a kind of manly beauty, that of an object constructed not to please but to serve, and impressive simply from the scale on which it carries out this intention. The number of arches in each tier is dif- ferent; they are smaller and more numerous as they ascend. The preservation of the thing is extra- ordinary; nothing has crumbled or collapsed; every feature remains; and the huge blocks of stone, of a brownish-yellow, (as if they had been baked by the Provencal sun for eighteen centuries), pile themselves, without mortar or cement, as evenly as the day they were laid together.

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