Picturesque Quebec | Page 6

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 Li��ge; 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 Highlander who paced his short path as sentry, some hundred feet high upon the wall of the fortress, and I thought to myself with such defenders as these that standard yonder need never carry any other banner. The whole view is panoramic, the bending of the river shuts out the channel by which you have made your approach, giving the semblance of a lake, on whose surface vessels of every nation lie at anchor, some with the sails hung out to dry, gracefully drooping from the taper spars;