I suspect that no small proportion of the more valuable volumes, have been dispersed or stolen. Round the apartment hang portraits of the most eminent men of Caen: tablets are also suspended, for the purpose of commemorating those who have been benefactors to the library; but the tablets at present are blank. For its university Caen is indebted to Henry VIth, who, anxious to give éclat and popularity to British rule, founded a college by letters patent, dated from Rouen, in January, 1431. The original charter restricted the objects of the university to education in the canon and civil law; but, five years subsequently, the same king issued a fresh patent, adding the faculties of theology and the arts; and, in the following year, he still farther added the faculty of medicine.--To give permanency to the work thus happily begun, the states of Normandy preferred their petition to Pope Eugene IVth, who issued two bulls, dated the thirtieth of May, 1437, and the nineteenth of May, 1439, by which the new university received the sanction of the holy see, and was placed upon the same footing as the other universities of the kingdom. The Bishop of Bayeux was at the same time appointed chancellor; and sundry apostolical privileges were conceded, which have been confirmed by subsequent pontiffs.--Thus Normandy, as is admitted by De Bourgueville, owed good as well as evil to her English sovereigns; but Charles VIIth had no sooner succeeded in expelling our countrymen from the province, than jealousy arose in his breast, at finding them in possession of such a title to the gratitude of the people, and he resolved to run the risk of destroying what had been done, rather than lose the opportunity of gratifying his personal feeling. The university was therefore dissolved in 1450, that a new one might hereafter be founded by the new sovereign. The king thought it necessary to vary in some degree from the example of his predecessor; and for this purpose he had recourse to the extraordinary expedient of abolishing the faculty of law. A petition, however, from the states, induced him to replace the whole upon its original footing in 1452, and it continued till the time of the revolution to have all the five faculties, and to be the only one in France that retained them. Two years only intervened between the dates of the patents issued by Charles VIIth, upon the subject of this university; yet there is a remarkable difference in their language. The first of them, which is obviously intended to disparage Caen, styles it a large town, scantily inhabited, without manufactures or commerce, and destitute of any great river to afford facilities towards the transport of the produce of the country. The second was designed to have an opposite tendency; and in this, the people of Caen are praised for their acuteness, and the town for its excellent harbor and great rivers. The patent also adds, that the nearest university, that of Paris, is fifty leagues distant.