a ledge of rock, which might pass for a ruined wall.
I am afraid the reader will lose patience with my habit
of constantly referring to the landscape of Italy, as if
that were the measure of the beauty of every other.
Yet I am still more afraid that I cannot apologize for
it, and must leave it in its culpable nakedness. It is
an idle habit; but the reader will long since have dis-
covered that this was an idle journey, and that I give
my impressions as they came to me. It came to me,
then, that in all this view there was something trans-
alpine with a greater smartness and freshness and
much less elegance and languor. This impression was
occasionally deepened by the appearance, on the long
eminence of which I speak, of a village, a church, or
a chateau, which seemed to look down at the plain
from over the ruined wall. The perpetual vines, the
bright-faced flat-roofed houses, covered with tiles, the
softness and sweetness of the light and air, recalled
the prosier portions of the Lombard plain. Toulouse
itself has a little of this Italian expression, but not
enough to give a color to its dark, dirty, crooked streets,
which are irregular without being eccentric, and which,
if it were not for the, superb church of Saint-Sernin,
would be quite destitute of monuments.

I have already alluded to the way in which the
names of certain places impose themselves on the
mind, and I must add that of Toulouse to the list of
expressive appellations. It certainly evokes a vision,
- suggests something highly _meridional_. But the city,