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 Liege;
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; others refitting again for sea, and
loading the huge pine-trunks moored as vast rafts to the stern. There
were people everywhere, all was motion, life and activity. Jolly-boats
with twenty oars, man-of-war gigs bounding rapidly past them with
eight; canoes skimming by without a ripple, and seemingly without
impulse, till you caught sight of the lounging figure, who lay at full
length in the stern, and whose red features were scarce
distinguishable from the copper-coloured bark of his boat. Some moved
upon the rafts, and even upon single trunks of trees, as, separated
from the mass, they floated down on the swift current, boat-hook in
hand to catch at the first object chance might offer them. The quays
and the streets leading down to them were all thronged, and as you
cast your eye upwards, here and there above the tall roofs might be
seen the winding of stairs that lead to the Upper Town, alike dark
with the moving tide of men. On every embrasure and gallery, on every
terrace and platform, it was the same.
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