And, in fact, such mere vague traces and memorials as baths, bits of pavement, and dusty holes, with smouldering brick-basements, which people call "Roman villas,"--are not at all fitted, whatever would-be classicists may pretend, to stir up the strong tide of enthusiastic association. These are but miserable odds and ends of fragments, from which you can no more leap to the dignity and the grandeur of the Romans, than you could argue, never having seen a man, from finding a cast-away tooth-pick, up to the appearance and nature of the invisible owner. But let us see a great specimen of a great Roman work, and then we are in the right track. Any builder could have made you a bath--any sapper and miner could have traced you out a camp--any of the small architects with whom we are infested could have knocked you up a villa--but give us a characteristic bit of the great people who are dead and gone, and then we can, or, at all events, we will try, to take their measure.
The amphitheatre or arena at Nismes rose on me like a stupendous spectre, and frowned me down. I was smote with the sight. The size appalled me: mightiness--vastness--massiveness were there together--a trinity of stone, rising up, as it were, in the middle of my little preconceived and pet notions, and shivering and dispersing them, as the English three-decker in the _Pilot_ came bowling into view, driving away the fog in wreaths before her and around her. First I walked about the great stone skeleton; but though the symmetrical glory of the architecture, its massive regularity, and what I would call soldier-like precision of uniformity, kept urging my mind to look and admire; still the impression of vastness was predominant, and all but drove out other thoughts. And yet it was not until I had entered, that impression reached its profoundest depth.
As I emerged from the vaulted and cavern-like corridor, through which a garrulous old woman led me, into the blaze of keen sunshine, that fell upon a mighty wilderness of stone; and as instinctively I laid my hand upon the nearest ponderous block, the full and perfect idea of size and power closed on me. _Roma!--Antiqua Roma!_--had me in her grasp; and as I felt, I remembered that Eothen had described a similar sensation, as produced by the bigness of the stones of the great pyramid. My old woman having, happily, left me, I was alone within that enormous gulf--that crater of regularly rising stone. Round and round, in ridges where Titans might have sat and seen, megatheria combat mastadons, mounted up the mighty steps of grey, dead stone--sometimes entire for the whole round--sometimes splintered and riven, but never worn, until your eye--now stumbling, as it were, over rubbish-heaps--now striding from stone ledge to stone ledge--rested upon the broken and jagged rim, with a hoary beard of plants and long dry weeds standing rigidly up between you and the blue. I turned again to the details of the building--to the vastness of the blocks of stone, and to the perfect manipulation which had placed them. If the Romans were great soldiers, they were as great masons. They conquered the world in all pursuits in which enormous energy and iron muscularity of mind could conquer. The universe of earth, and stone, and water was theirs. But they were not cloud compellers. They had none of the great power over the essences of the brain. Beauty was too subtle for them; and they only got it, incidentally, as an element--not a principle. The arena in which I stood was sternly beautiful; but it was the beauty of a legion drawn up for battle--iron to the backbone--iron to the teeth--the beauty of that rigid symmetric inflexibility which sat upon the bronze faces which, when Hannibal, encamped on Roman ground set up for sale, and grimly and unmovedly saw bought, at the common market rate, the patch of earth on which the Carthaginian lay entrenched.