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perfect master of infantry exercises, and field movements, and has worked indefatigably to raise the corps to its present high state of discipline.

They are a jolly set, some thousand strong, hearty fellows, including all grades of housekeepers in this great northern sea port, the Liverpool of France, as Havre calls itself not without reason. The shopkeeper, the shipowner, the merchant, the maltster, the duke, and the drysalter, all must do their duty in the national guard. Men with such important avocations will be at times flinchers, but absence from muster call is by no means tolerated, nor can it be commuted by fine, if the delinquency be repeated, or the Ægrotats suspiciously numerous.

"Malade, malade,-vous l'êtes donc toujours, qu'on vous voit jamais dans le rangs," said the captain of a company to a portly merchant who preferring the desk to drill, was unaccountably often on the sick list. The merchant was entering the Lloyd Francais, for a well laden Indiaman of his property had just been telegraphed to that cosmogonous institution. He could not escape, so turned round stammering, "Mon capitaine-j'vais vous dire sitot que j'entends le rapel, ce m'incommode."

At half past four a.m., the rappel was beaten in all the streets of Havre. Of course I was roused; who could help it, with the ear-numbing bumping on the tightened parchment? The national guard, such as went to bed at all that night, crept out of it, and giving a holiday to their ordinary costume of banker, merchant, and shopkeeper, buckled on their armour.

In the dark they hurried to the parade ground of their respective companies, which when slowly formed, were marched with drums and colours to the Place Louis xvI., where in the course of an hour the regiment managed to muster. Their Parisian brethren in arms were already arrived, and taking their breakfast to the number of five hundred, in a sort of temporary café erected on purpose.

Daylight broke on their welcomings and felicitations, a thousand citizen warriors were shaking hands on the quay of the Bassin de Commerce. The coquettish vivandieres, in their crimson short petticoats and plumed hats, were gliding merrily through the ranks to the call for a petite verre, biscuit, or cigar. I supplied myself with one of the latter from a rosy cheeked, bright eyed Cantonier, who had been installed with regimental honours for woman's daring and woman's tenderness amidst the flames and sulphureous smoke of the awful days of June, at the barricades of the Rue St. Antoine. I warrant she could step gracefully the Redowa polka with the young fellow between whose breast and a thousand levelled guns she interposed her pretty person in that deadly fight.

February, 1849.-VOL. LIV.-NO. CCXIV.

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By seven all were marching down the principal street, the Rue de Paris, and by eight were on board the two steamers alongside the Grand Quai. An immense multitude of people were by this time collected, and lined the quay to the extremities of both jetties, with those of the national guard who did not join in the trips, drawn up in time and presenting arms. Here I was struck at the difference between a crowd of my countrymen and a crowd of Norman French, so greatly for all the purposes of effect in favour of the latter. Instead of the gloomy, uninteresting line of dark coats and hats which even the dress of women relieves not, there was the almost universal blouse of the men, and entirely universal bonnet de cotton, of the women. A blue and white border to a picture is gayer than a black one any morning, especially when the sun glances smilingly on these his own primitive colours.

As we glided from the port across the wide mouth of the Seine, some five miles wide at this point, Havre never put on a pleasanter look. Its great outworks of stone, rows of lofty houses of every possible altitude for foundations to bear without a topple, grey and white stone ones, interspersed with the black and white streaks of its half timbered ancient erections, the forest of masts in the basin, the wide prospect crowned with a verdant horizon dotted every where with country houses, like patches of snow, a bold cliff as lofty and steep as that of Sandown, which faces it on the British coast, crowned with its lighthouses stretching to the left of the prospect, and the woods overhanging Honfleur and the banks of the Seine, its right.

Amid congratulations, good wishes, and huzzas, we steamed proudly away, the good boat Calvados, with its crack Dutch captain, leading the van into the Channel. Happy king Henry the Eighth had been in all the pride and pomp of his royal tub (tub in a nautical not a corporate sense) the Harry, grace de Dieu, as we see his expedition drawn by a cotemporary artist at Hampton court, if he could have led his royal fleet to the field of the cloth of gold, with as joyful a heart and as unsmiting a conscience, as worn in the breasts of those who surrounded me in their progress to their field of greeting. Harry-the-hog and his ministers were plotting in their unwieldey tub, holding one thousand men aboard, and a course of one mile an hour, how they might entrap their host the gallant Francis the First, on the same waters that were bearing a thousand laughing, smoking, and singing descendants of the subjects of the said Francis, single hearted in their purpose, disdainful of diplomatic reservations. We had two military bands of music in the steamers, with two pieces of cannon for saluting. The cannon on shore fired, the music on shore played; we responded in kind, and thus, after three hour's smooth transit, we passed Toques and Dives,

and entered the river Orne. It was at Dives that William the Conqueror collected his three thousand vessels and fifty thousand men for the conquest of England. To better purpose was his rendezvous than Bony's at Boulogne. It was from Saint Valerysur-Somme, a little further down the coast, that the fleet set sail.

The rocks of Calvados, famous for finding a bed gratis for shipwrecked mariners and oysters, were next passed, then the marine village of Amfreville, and on the opposite side Port, Ouistreham, and Sallenelles, towns of some size, would have turned out their national guard to return our salute, but not a guard was within ten miles- all, at Caen, with the rest of military Normandy, to hail the first entrance into the harbour of a ship and a regiment of real Parisian veterans of the barricades. Since their renowned duke summoned around him his barons, knights, and vassals, to join in his triumph, Normandy had never seen a more auspicious day. A double rank of national guards lined the entire quay on either side. The sun shone, bayonets and accoutrements glittered on the persons of nearly six thousand soldiers. The autumnal tints of the Avenue Caffarelli, and the shrubberies on the banks of the Orne, formed a varied relief to the sparkling refraction. A more animating scene it is impossible to suppose. Then what a host of grand historic monuments burst on the sight as we rounded the pier! The Abbayeaux-Dames, in all its vastness, its two towers (what Westminster's ought to have been but for Wren's Italian penchant) rising as pillars of glory to the memory of the foundress Matilda, as the pyramids of St. Etienne far away to the left immortalise her husband the Great Duke.

This royal pair had married in contravention of a canon of the church which prohibits marriage of first cousins, and Lanfranc, then resident at Bec, reprehended the duke in harsh terms.

The duke, incensed at his insolence, banished the "proud priest," but shortly finding it no joke to quarrel with the church, came to an understanding with him, when Lanfranc engaged to visit the supreme pontiff, who granted a dispensation to the duke and duchess on their founding two abbeys respectively for monks and nuns. By the Doomesday Survey it appears, the abbey possessed many estates in the counties of Essex, Dorset, Devon, and Gloucester, which the Lady Abbess occasionally visited. M. De la Rue tells us that he saw a diary of the abbess Georgetta du Molley Bacon, in which it is recorded that she embarked at the port of Caen, Aug. 16, 1370, with fifteen attendants, and landed at London,where she proceeded to Felsted in Essex, and that she returned home the following year.

The Nuns of this house were mostly of noble birth, and were invested with many privileges and exemptions.

They were not bound by vows, and were allowed to see their friends in private apartments, had the charge of younger relatives, and were permitted to eat meat at their meals in days when fasting was enjoined in other houses. Between these churches rose the matchless spire of St. Peter, a work of elegance and grace unsurpassed by any erected during the six hundred years which have since rolled on. The leaning tower of St. John, with those of St. Michael de Vaucelles and the Chateau, form the intermediate background, while grotesque houses, like those of Havre, left not the eye to tire a moment on a continuous parallel. Every eminence, unfinished building, scaffolding, waggon, heaps of material from the dock, excavations, was garnished with folk having a predominating cerulean hue-they were as banks of animated convolvoluses, bordered with dew-sprinkled, glistening spike-grass. A new ship, the Coralia, built at Caen, entered the new port before us. It was manned with the flags of all nations, and contained the Bishop of Bayeux, in his golden mitre of prodigious altitude, and embroidered robes of purple and white satin, surrounded by thirty of the clergy of the diocese in white frocks, four large banners, with the crozier and staff, being borne aloft-the prefect (the lord lieutenant) of the department, the mayor in their scarfs of office, -judges in robes of crimson and ermine, the council of the department (a body equivalent to our bench of county magistracy) barristers and municipal officers, all in official costume. The bishop, a hearty florid man, a staunch pillar of the church, is deservedly popular. He was rector of Havre prior to his installation, which those of his late flock who filled the steamer which followed in his lordship's wake did not forget. "Vive le curé du Havre !" "Vive l'Abbé Robin !" "Vive la réligion!" burst forth when we drew alongside the quay. With the readiness of the bishop of Norwich, and with infinitely more dignity, the bishop of Bayeux commenced an harangue upon the felicitous visit of the Parisian fellow soldiers, at a moment when the port throws open its gates for the first time, to receive the products of industry and the defenders of law and order. He then drew a glowing picture of the future prosperity of Caen, worthy of a place beside the Birkenhead inauguration speech of Lord Carlisle. The church is never so popular as when a dignitary has sense and genius to enlist universal sympathy, by sympathising itself with popular feeling on unexceptionable occasions of festivity. When he fervently prayed for the revival of prosperity to this ancient city, and declared nat though the religion of Jesus Christ was a stranger to political revolutions, it never was to the real welfare and happiness of man, and that “equality, liberty, and fraternity," practised in their true acceptation, could not fail to be an "Egis

of security and happiness," enthusiasm was at its height; the doubtful, suspicious, distrustful Louis Philipists, Henry Cinquists, all joined in amen to this prayer of their bishop. Caen, it should be told, is the heart of conservative, monarchical France. The visit of the national guard would have failed to draw many of the old, wealthy titled inhabitants who attended the cortège to day, but for the civic portion of the rejoicings, and the character the bishop was determined to give it. In my opinion it is the church, and the church alone, that has stayed the down hill tendency of the revolution. It was a dexterous and thoughtful speech of Lamartine attributing to Christ the authorship of all republicanism. The character of republicanism has been so often blasted as to be entirely lost amongst men of reflection, and this desperate effort to set it up again for a short time, has only been sheltered from contempt by the universal benevolence of the church with whom it has contrived to ally itself. The church never had a chance of being so truly catholic as at this era, and aware of its opportunity, is zealous and eager to acquire a permanent ascendancy before the rattletrap fools-cap constitution is shelved on the top of the twenty one constitutions that have been consecutively the law of France during the last sixty years.

But, bless me, what is that salute so altogether im-propria maribus? on both cheeks too! a Bayeux grazier has mingled the essence of Norman tulips with the mille fleur cosmetic that laved the Camellia-cheeked guardsman of the Boulevard des Italiens. Not proof against Provincial cordiality, the Parisian platoon gave way before an attack altogether superannuated in the code and signals of field saluting. What a shaking of hands! what embracings! not one of my companions put his feet on shore unwelcomed or unnoticed. Even when I (alien as I was) touched the pier, some hands grasped mine, and Vive les Havrais was cried in a kind, assuring tone-the utterer supposing me some Havre "follower of the army," Of course I put on the air of a visitor on the threshold of his host, well pleased to pay my respects. The whole cortège ecclesiastical, municipal, medical, and military, moved on to the fine square called Place de la Liberté, (the fifth liberty taken with its name since Louis XIV. gave it his) making a column of about a mile and half, with music and artillery, traversing the quays to the Pont de Vaucelles, and the whole length of the Rue St. Jean, the Rue St. Pierre, and La Venelle aux Chevaux. No idea of the procession along this latter street can be given but by the animated pencil of Maclise for the military groupings, while that of Prout is needed for the grotesque buildings that rose above the joyous throng, while in balconies to the sixth and seventh story, were delighted faces smiling in the sunshine upon the beautifully commingled spectacle of curious unique monuments of the glories of past c nturies

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