Place Bellecour, or Place Louis XIV. or Place Bonaparte, by the pertinacity of prescription, retains its first name, and is indeed a square which great men might be ambitious of having named after them. It is almost too vast: that is, the distance of the sides from each other destroys its unity: its extent, however, makes it an agreeable promenade; on the south side are rows of trees. The streets in the neighbourhood of this square are handsome and well built: the rest of the town is what an old manufacturing populous city may be supposed to be: the quay on the majestic Rhone is a striking sight. Following the course of the river along a raised road or dike, we arrive at the piece of ground recovered from the river by means of this dike; which ground was given by the municipal authorities to Napoleon, who intended to build a palace on this spot, at the junction of the Saône and Rhone. I talked with a labourer who had been employed in levelling the land: further than this, the work was not proceeded in. The situation is admirable: a lofty edifice,--and can one suppose that the palace of Napoleon would have been any other than a lofty edifice?--would have commanded a view of Lyons and of the surrounding hills and country: besides all this, the river presents here the appearance of a large and beautiful lake, its stream being hidden, at a little distance from the point of confluence, by intervening ground. Whether Paris, Lyons, or Constantinople was destined to be the capital of the French empire is a doubt, for the solution of which we must now interrogate the grave. The cathedral of Vienne is a very fine church, and the loftiest within of any I have ever seen, and I have seen all the cathedrals in England. In the earliest age of Christianity, at Vienne, Lyons, and Tournus, those whom the church honours under the common name of the martyrs of Vienne, sealed their faith with their blood. We passed the Isere by a ferry; the bridge, destroyed four years before, during the war, not having been yet rebuilt; and this on the high road from Paris to Marseilles. Valence was the last prison of Pope Pius VI. for here he died. Philosophers and protestants flattered themselves that he was the last of the popes: they forgot the reasoning of Gamaliel. At an indifferent inn where we rested at mid-day, at the sign of the Grand Monarque, among other scribblings on the wall of our apartment, I observed a note to the following effect:--"Englishmen, beware of the Grand Monarque! I paid five francs for my bed,--a bed in this chamber!!! I paid seven francs for my supper." The writer states of what dishes his moderate supper consisted, complains of the wine, and concludes with some indignant and patriotic effusions.