" "_Le Chateau des Pyrenees_," _etc._ STEVENSON. _Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes._ TAINE. _The Ancient Regime._ " _Journeys through France._ " _Origins of Contemporary France._ " _Tour through the Pyrenees._ _'Twixt France and Spain._ VIOLLET-LE-DUC. _Histoire d'une Cathedrale et d'un Hotel-de-Ville._ _Entretiens sur l'Architecture._ _Dictionnaire raisonne de l'Architecture francaise du XI^e au XVI^e siecle._ The South of France. I. THE SOUTH OF FRANCE. If it is only by an effort that we appreciate the valour of Columbus in the XV century, his secret doubts, his temerity, how much fainter is our conception of the heroism of the early Mediterranean navigators. Steam has destroyed for us the awful majesty of distance, and we can never realise the immensity of this "great Sea" to the ancients. To Virgil the adventures of the "pious AEneas" were truly heroic. The western shores of the Mediterranean were then the "end of the earth," and even during the first centuries of our own era, he who ventured outside the Straits of Gibraltar tempted either Providence or the Devil and was very properly punished by falling over the edge of the earth into everlasting destruction. "Why," asks a mediaeval text-book of science, "is the sun so red in the evening?" And this convincing answer follows, "Because he looks down upon Hell." For centuries before the Christian era the South of France, with Spain, lay in the unknown west end of the Sea. Along its eastern shores lay civilisations hoary with age; Carthage, to the South, was moribund; Greece was living on the prestige of her glorious past; while Rome was becoming all-powerful. Legend tells that adventurous Phoenicians and Greeks discovered the French coasts, that Nimes was founded by a Tyrian Hercules, and Marseilles, about 600 B.C., by a Phoenician trader who married a chief's daughter and settled at the mouth of the Rhone. But these early settlements were merely isolated towns, which were not interdependent;--scarcely more than trading posts. It was Rome who took southern Gaul unto herself, and after Roman fashion, built cities and towns and co-ordinated them into well-regulated provinces; and it is with Roman rule that the connected history of Gaul begins.