The situation of this city is in a plain, equally fertile and beautiful, about fifteen miles in breadth and ten in length. On the south and east it is circled by a chain of mountains. The plain is divided into cultivated fields, in which are grown wheat, barley, saffron, silk, and madder. The cultivation is so clean and exact, as to give the grounds the appearance of a garden. As the French farms are usually on a small scale, they are invariably kept cleaner than those in England and America. Not a weed is suffered to remain on the ground. The French want nothing but a more enlarged knowledge and a greater capital, to rival the English husbandmen. They have the same industry, and take perhaps more pride in the appearance of their fields. This detailed attention greatly improves the face of the country; for miles succeeding miles it has the air of a series of parks and gardens. The English mansion is alone wanting to complete the beauty of the scenery. From the high ground in the city nothing can be finer than the prospect over the plain and surrounding country. The Rhone is there seen rolling its animated through meadows covered with olive trees, and at the foot of hills invested with vineyards. The ruined arches of the old bridge carry the imagination back into the ancient history of the town. On the opposite side of the Rhone are the sunny plains of Laguedoc, which, when refreshed by the wind, breathe odours and perfumes from a thousand wild herbs and flowers. Mont Ventoux, in the province of Dauphiny, closes the prospect to the North: its high summit covered with snow, whilst its sides are robed in all the charms of vegetable nature. On the east are the abrupt rocks and precipices of Vaucluse, distant about five leagues, and which complete, as it were, the garden wall around Avignon and its territory. The climate of Avignon, though so strangely inveighed against by Petrarch, is at once healthy and salubrious. There are certainly very rapid transitions from extreme heat to extreme cold, but from this very circumstance neither the intensity of the heat nor of the cold, is of sufficient duration to be injurious to health or pleasure. The air, except in actual rain, is always dry, and the sky is an etherial Italian blue, scarcely ever obscured by a cloud. When the rains come on they are very violent, but fall at once. The sun then bursts out, and the face of Nature appears more gay, animated and splendid than before. I do not remember, that amongst all the pictures of the great masters, I have ever seen a landscape in which a southern country was represented after one of these showers. Homer has described it with equal force and beauty, in one of his similies: but as the book is not before me, I must refer to the memory of the classic reader.