As the evening closed in, we saw, duskily crowning a hill before us, a clustered old city, with grand cathedral towers, and many minor church steeples, cutting the darkening air. This is Beziers, where took place the crowning massacre of the Albigenses--the most learned, intellectual, and philosophic of the early revolters from the Church of Rome, and whom it is a perfect mistake to consider in the light of mere peasant fanatics, like the Camisards or the Vaudois. In this ancient city, beneath the shadow of these dim towers, more than twenty thousand men, women, and children, were slaughtered by the troops of orthodox France and Rome, led on and incited to the work by the Bishop of Beziers, one of the most black-souled bigots who ever deformed God's earth. When the soldiers could hardly distinguish in the darkness the heretics from the orthodox--although, indeed, they might have solved the problem by cutting down every intelligent man they saw--the loving pastor of souls roared out, "_Coedite omnes, coedite; noverit enim Dominus qui sunt ejus!_" It is to be fervently hoped, that, for the sake of the Bishop of Beziers, a certain other personage has long ago proved himself equally perspicuous and discriminating. We pulled up at Hotel du Nord, at Beziers, just as the _table-d'hôte_ bell was ringing; and I speedily found myself sitting down in a most gaily lighted _salon_, to a capital dinner, in the midst of a merry company. For the last ten miles of the way, I had been amusing myself by catching glimpses of a distant lighthouse; for I knew that it shone from a headland jutting into the Mediterranean. And the first glance at the Mediterranean was now my grand object of interest, as the first glance at the Pyrenees had been; and as, I remember, long ago, the first glance of France, of the Rhine, and the Alps, had each their turn. When, therefore, a dish of soles (stewed in oil, as the Jews cook them here--and the Jews are the only people in England who can cook soles,) was placed before me, I asked the waiter where the fish came from? "_Mais, monsieur_, where should they come from, but from the sea?" "You mean the Mediterranean?" "_Mais certainment, monsieur_; there is no sea but the Mediterranean sea." An observation which, coinciding with my own mental view for the moment, I quietly agreed in.