Photographs, Engravings, Models, Medals, Have Placed It Definitely In Your Eye, So That From The Sentiment With Which You Regard It Curiosity And Surprise Are Almost Completely, And Per- Haps Deplorably, Absent.

Admiration remains, how- ever, - admiration of a familiar and even slightly patronizing kind.

The Maison Carree does not over- whelm you; you can conceive it. It is not one of the great sensations of the antique art; but it is perfectly felicitous, and, in spite of having been put to all sorts of incongruous uses, marvellously preserved. Its slender columns, its delicate proportions, its charming com- pactness, seemed to bring one nearer to the century that built it than the great superpositions of arenas and bridges, and give it the interest that vibrates from one age to another when the note of taste is struck. If anything were needed to make this little toy-temple a happy production, the service would be rendered by the second-rate boulevard that conducts to it, adorned with inferior cafes and tobacco-shops. Here, in a respectable recess, surrounded by vulgar habitations, and with the theatre, of a classic pretension, opposite, stands the small "square house," so called because it is much longer than it is broad. I saw it first in the evening, in the vague moonlight, which made it look as if it were cast in bronze. Stendhal says, justly, that it has the shape of a playing-card, and he ex- presses his admiration for it by the singular wish that an "exact copy" of it should be erected in Paris. He even goes so far as to say that in the year 1880 this tribute will have been rendered to its charms; nothing would be more simple, to his mind, than to "have" in that city "le Pantheon de Rome, quelques temples de Grece." Stendhal found it amusing to write in the character of a _commis-voyageur_, and some- times it occurs to his reader that he really was one.

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