After an unpleasant journey, owing to the heat of the weather and fulness of the coach, and passing through the neat town of Lunelle, famous for its wines, we arrived about noon at Nismes, where I took up my residence at a traiteur’s, in a particularly airy situation near the esplanade; this situation I felt of importance, as from its position on an extensive plain, this city suffers intolerably from the heats of summer. On the following day, being Sunday, I attended divine service at one of the Protestant churches, in company with Mrs. and Miss L⸺, with whom I had previously been acquainted at Toulouse and Montpellier; we were shewn into the corporation seat, and I am afraid gave much trouble to its proper occupiers, who, with great politeness, incommoded themselves to accommodate us. We were much pleased with the discourse of the preacher, as well as the indications of devotion on the part of the congregation. Nismes abounds with Protestants, who indeed constitute a large proportion of its more industrious and opulent population; a circumstance to which the sanguinary political scenes, of which it has so frequently been the theatre, are to be attributed. The Roman religion has undoubtedly a tendency to check the energetic industry of its professors, by the encouragement which its numerous fêtes give to habits of amusement, idleness, and dissipation; and, alas! it is too correspondent with the dispositions of fallen human nature, for rapine and fraud to spring out of such vitiated soil, and avail themselves of the advantages attained by honest industry. But far be it from me, to decry the importance of religious observances, and rational relaxation from the toils of suffering humanity; or to throw the least censure on that admirable and divine institution, which, according to our admired Spectator, rubs off the rust of the preceding week, and leads the poor man to a close acquaintance with his best friend. The institutions of catholicism, or rather papalism, are in this respect essentially contradictory to the divine command, which has solemnly declared, amidst the awful denunciations of Mount Sinai,—“Six days shalt thou labour; but the seventh day is the sabbath of the Lord thy God;” for who of its more strict professors does not pay as much religious observance to the fifth day, as to the one indicated by the merciful Creator.