The cathedral is one of the largest buildings in _Germany_, It has suffered considerably in the late wars, and is now covered with wood. Its appearance is not, however, very striking, and it is surrounded with mean houses. I observed that a statue, "_a l'Empereur_" is still standing in front of one of the houses in this city. Its population is said to be 26,000. The inhabitants, for a considerable distance round Mayence, subsist principally by agriculture. They export their grain on the Rhine to Switzerland. They have abundance of vegetables, and the lower orders live a good deal on cabbage, which is here of a large size. * * * * * CHAP. XVI. At Mayence I embarked on the Rhine for Cologne (above 100 English miles distant), to see the banks of a river so highly celebrated. Our company in the boat was not numerous, and would have been sufficiently agreeable, but for the continual _political rhapsodies_ of two Frenchmen, one of whom was an officer, and spoke with confidence of recovering all the conquests of France. These Frenchmen, in spite of the remonstrances of the Germans present, insisted, like the physicians in Molière, _that they best knew what was for their good_, and that they (the Germans) mast be again united to France. One of these politicians asked me, if I did not think that Talleyrand would demand the left bank of the Rhine, as _essential_ to France, at the congress of Vienna. I answered, I did not think it was probable he would ask for countries which France had so recently relinquished, nor was it to be expected that the Allies would, to oblige him, depart from their principle of restraining France within those boundaries, which had, for centuries, been found as extensive as were consistent with the tranquillity of the rest of Europe; and that, for my own part, I could not conceive the acquisition of those provinces to be _essential_ to France, which had never been more prosperous than at a period when she formed no pretensions to so great an aggrandizement.