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"As The Seat Of French Power In America Until 1759, The Great Fortress
Of English Rule In British America, And The Key Of The St. Lawrence,
Quebec Must Possess Interest Of No Ordinary Character For Well-
Informed Tourists.
To the traveller, there are innumerable points and
items vastly interesting and curious - the citadel and forts of Cape
Diamond, with their impregnable ramparts that rival Gibraltar in
strength and endurance against siege, the old walls of the city and
their gates each of which has its legend of war and bloody assault and
repulse, the plains of Abraham, every foot of which is commemorated
with blood and battle; Wolfe's monument, where the gallant and brave
soldier died with a shout of victory on his lips, the Martello towers,
with their subterranean communications with the citadel; the antique
churches, paintings, and all their paraphernalia, treasures, and
curiosities that are religiously preserved therein, the falls of
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 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.
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