This city was formerly celebrated for the number of its devotees and prostitutes, which the French police has very much reduced. The first object I visited, was the cathedral, which, from the water appears like a stupendous fragment, that had withstood the shock of war, or some convulsion of nature, by which the rest of the pile had been prostrated; but upon inquiry, I found that it owed its mutilated appearance to no such event, but to the obstacles which have occurred for ages in completing it, according to its original design. In the year 1248, Conrad, the elector and bishop of Hocksteden, in the pride and exultation of holy enthusiasm, resolved to erect a temple to God, which should have no equal in size and magnificence; it was intended that the two western towers should have been five hundred feet in elevation, and the nave or body of the church in proportion, and every external stone which the eye could perceive, decorated with the most exquisite ornament of pure gothic architecture. The successors of the prince bishop, who resembled in the splendor of his spirit the emperor who so elegantly wished to leave the town _stone_, which he had found _brick_, continued the building for two centuries and a half; but owing to their resources being insufficient, they were obliged to leave it in a very imperfect state, but capable of being used for religious purposes. There is no building of the kind to compare with it, but the Duomo at Milan. One of the western towers, which I ascended, is about two hundred and fifty feet high, from which there is a fine view of the city, the Rhine, and the surrounding country; the other tower is not above forty feet high. The roof of the greater part of the body of the church is temporary and low; but so spacious is the area which it covers, that one hundred massy pillars, arranged in four rows, present a light and airy appearance upon it. My guide, who was a good humoured intelligent man, with many significant shrugs of regret, informed me, that the moveable decorations of the church and altar were once worthy of a stranger’s attention; but that the generals of the French armies, during the revolution, had pillaged this holy sanctuary of its richest ornaments; however, the grand altar in the choir was not sufficiently portable for their rapacious hands, and remains to show the magnificent scale upon which every part of the cathedral was originally designed. This altar is formed of one solid block, of the finest sable marble, sixteen feet long and eight broad, placed upon the summit of a flight of steps.