Picturesque Quebec | Page 6

Montmorency, the natural steps. Montcalm's house, and a thousand
other relics of the mysterious past that has hallowed these with all the
mystic interest that attaches to antiquity, great deeds, and beautiful
memories. To see all these, a tourist requires at least two days' time,
and surely no one who pretends to be a traveller, in these days of rapid
transit will fail to visit Quebec, the best city, the most hospitable place,
and richer in its wealth of rare sights and grand old memorials. French
peculiarities and English oddities, than any other city on this broad
continent."
"Leaving the citadel, we are once more in the European Middle ages.
Gates and posterns, cranky steps that lead up to lofty, gabled houses,
with sharp French roofs of burnished tin, like those of Liège;
processions of the Host; altars decked with flowers; statues of the
Virgin; sabots, blouses, and the scarlet of the British lines-man,-- all
these are seen in narrow streets and markets that are graced with many
a Cotentin lace cap, and all within forty miles of the down-east, Yankee
state of Maine. It is not far from New England to Old France.... There
has been no dying out of the race among the French Canadians. They
number twenty times the thousand that they did 100 years ago. The
American soil has left physical type, religion, language, and laws
absolutely untouched. They herd together in their rambling villages,
dance to the fiddle after Mass on Sundays,--as gayly as once did their
Norman sires,--and keep up the _fleur-de- lys_ and the memory of
Montcalm. More French than the French are the Lower Canada
habitans. The pulse-beat of the continent finds no echo here."--(Sir

Charles Dilke.)
In the rosy days of his budding fame, the gifted Henry Ward Beecher
discoursed as follows of the Rock City [4]:--
"Curious old Quebec!--of all the cities on the continent of America, the
quaintest.... It is a populated cliff. It is a mighty rock, scarped and
graded, and made to hold houses and castles which, by a proper natural
law, ought to slide off from its back, like an ungirded load from a
camel's back. But they stick. At the foot of the rocks, the space of
several streets in width has been stolen from the river.... We landed....
"Away we went, climbing the steep streets at a canter with little horses
hardly bigger than flies, with an aptitude for climbing perpendicular
walls. It was strange to enter a walled city through low and gloomy
gates, on this continent of America. Here was a small bit of mediaeval
Europe perched upon a rock, and dried for keeping, in this north-east
corner of America, a curiosity that has not its equal, in its kind, on this
side of the ocean....
"We rode about as if we were in a picture-book, taming over a new leaf
at each street!... The place should always be kept old. Let people go
somewhere else for modern improvements. It is a shame, when Quebec
placed herself far out of the way, up in the very neighbourhood of
Hudson's Bay, that it should be hunted and harassed with new-fangled
notions, and that all the charming inconveniences and irregularities of
narrow and tortuous streets, that so delight a traveller's eyes, should be
altered to suit the fantastic notions of modern people....
"Our stay in Quebec was too short by far. But it was long enough to
make it certain that we shall come back again. A summer in Canada
would form one of the most delightful holidays that we can imagine.
We mean to prove our sincerity by our conduct. And then, if it is not all
that our imagination promises, we will write again and confess."
Professor Benjamin Silliman discourses thus:--
"A seat of ancient dominion--now hoary with the lapse of more than

two centuries--formerly the seat of a French empire in the west--lost
and won by the blood of gallant armies, and of illustrious
commanders-- throned on a rock, and defended by all the proud
defiance of war! Who could approach such a city without emotion?
Who in Canada has not longed to cast his eyes on the water-girt rocks
and towers of Quebec."--(Silliman's Tour in Canada, 1819.)
Charles Lever has left a curious glimpse of Quebec from Diamond
Harbour, as seen, by his incomparable Irish Gil Blas, Mr. Cornelius
Cregan, the appreciated lodger of Madam Thomas John Davis at the
"Hotel Davis."
"As viewed from Diamond Harbour, a more striking city than Quebec
is seldom seen. The great rock rising above the Lower Town, and
crowned with its batteries, all bristling with guns, seemed to my eyes
the very realization of impregnability. I looked upon the ship that lay
tranquilly on the water below, and whose decks were thronged with
blue-jackets--to the