Time has partially preserved the peristyles, the intercolumniations, and entablatures; the elegance of the designs of which equal throughout the richness of the materials. These being, in many respects, the greatest and most entire, is attributed to there having been, for so long a time, few inhabitants to deface them, to a dry climate, and their distance from any city which might apply the materials to other uses. These ruins present a sad contrast with the hovels of the wild Arabs, now the only inhabitants of a city which, in former times, emulated Rome. “Of all the contrasts of past magnificence with present meanness,” says Mr. Addison, “of the wealth and genius of by-gone times with the poverty and ignorance of the present day, no more striking instance, perhaps, can be found than is presented in the present poor Arab village of Tadmor. You there see a few poverty-stricken inhabitants living in square hovels of mud mixed with chopped straw, roofed with earth, leaves, and dry sticks, congregated round the magnificent Temple of the Sun of yore; despoiled of its ornaments by one of the haughtiest and most powerful of the Roman emperors, who came with his victorious troops from the distant provinces of Gaul and of Britain, to rend asunder the dominion of which this spot, in the midst of desert solitudes, had rendered itself the head.” Mr. Addison then goes on to state that the “_village of Tadmor_ consists, altogether, of about a dozen or fifteen families, and there can be hardly more than twenty able-bodied males in the whole place. This little community possesses a few herds of goats and dromedaries, which, together with the poultry, form the chief wealth of the villagers. These poor people are not, however, sufficiently advanced in the desert to be without the reach of the Syrian government; they all pay a capitation tax to Ibrahim Pasha. The portion of cultivated land on this spot is very small; there are merely a few scanty gardens, which produce roots, vegetables, and a miserable supply of corn. There are one or two palm-trees along the banks of the stream, and a few shrubs of the thorny acacia.”