trouble to explain how it had come about. The law of 1790 establishing the land-tax required every parish to furnish a detailed account of the then existing properties in land, and it is shown by these that there then existed in France nearly two-thirds as many landholders as now exist, although the population of the country is now about twenty-five per cent. greater than it then was. CHAPTER V. IN THE SOMME. AMIENS By turns English, French, and Burgundian, Upper Picardy, of which Amiens was the capital, became definitely French under the astute policy of Louis XI. The Calaisis and the Boulonnais, with Ponthieu and Vimieu, eventually constituted what was called Lower Picardy, and the whole province, divided under the Bourbons into the two 'generalities' of Amiens and Soissons, formed before 1789 one of the twelve great departments of the monarchy, and was brought under the domain of the Parliament of Paris. The city of Amiens, associated now, I fear, chiefly, in the English and American mind, with 'twenty minutes' stop' on the way between Calais and Paris, and with a buffet which perhaps entitles it to be called the Mugby Junction of France, is really one of the most interesting of French cities. No student of Ruskin can need to be told that its glorious cathedral makes it one of the most interesting, not of French only, but of European cities; and two or three excellent small hotels make it a most comfortable as well as a most instructive midway station, not for 'twenty minutes,' but for a couple of days, between the capitals of England and France. Arthur Young found it so a hundred years ago, when he encountered there the illustrious Charles James Fox returning to London from a visit to the Anglomaniac Due d' Orleans, in the company of a charming 'Madame Fox,' of whom Arthur Young and London had no previous cognisance. Like Dijon, and Nancy, and Toulouse, and Rennes, and Rouen, Amiens still wears that 'look of a capital' which is as unmistakeable, if also as undefinable, as Hazlitt found the 'look of a gentleman' to be. York and Exeter, for example, in England, have this look, while Liverpool and Hull have it not. There are traces of the Spaniards in Amiens, as there are wherever that most Roman of all the Latin peoples has ever passed, and the curious _hortillonages_ of Amiens, which may be roughly described as a kind of floating kitchen gardens, remind one so strongly of the much more picturesque Chinampas of Mexico as to suggest the impression that the idea of establishing them may have come hither by way of Spain. At the present time, Amiens is a point of no small political interest. It is the bailiwick of one of the few really notable men of the actual Republican party in France--- M. Goblet--and yet it is one of the strongholds of Boulangism. There is an old song, the refrain of which, as I heard it sung, more years ago than I care to recall, always haunts me when I visit this ancient city:--