It is doubtful if at this period the old folks bothered themselves much about their late colony. Like their own proverb, “In love there is always one who kisses and one who holds the cheek,” French Canada was expending a good deal of sentiment upon people who had forgotten that tucked away in a remote corner of the new world was “a relic preserved in ice,” a relic of France before the Revolution, its capital the farthermost point of manner and civilization, a town with an Indian sounding name, which yet bore upon its front the impress of nobility. For Quebec is and should be the central point of interest for all Canadians; the history of the old rock city for many a day was in effect the history of Canada. History speaks from every stone in its ruined walls--walls that have sustained five sieges. The Revolution did not create the same excited interest in Canada that might have been looked for, yet there were those who “wept bitterly” when they heard of the execution of the King. The patois, ignorance, superstition, devotion of its inhabitants, were identical with a time prior to the Revolution; and with them were the same social ideas and the same piety. But the power divided in France among king, nobles, and priest, in Canada was confined to priest alone; and when the dream of a republic was dreamt it was the priest and not the British soldier who made the awakening. The British soldier and those who sent him seem to have been not a whit better informed about the colony gained than France was about the colony lost. Some London journalists were not sure whether Canada formed part of the Cape of Good Hope or of the Argentine Republic. For a long time the English Government annually sent a flagpole for the citadel, probably grown in a Canadian forest. Nor did time improve their knowledge, for as late as the Trent affair one statesman in the House of Commons informed his more ignorant brethren that Canada was separated from the United States by the Straits of Panama. The acts of Regicide France inspired horror in Canada, yet were not without their fruits. Despite his title of the “Corsican ogre” and their horror of revolution, the submission of all Europe to Napoleon did not make the French of Canadian birth more submissive. Nor did the nation of shop-keepers, whom he despised and who were to cut his ambition and send him to his island prison, become more plausible, courteous or conciliatory, through their sense of victory. Many a thing, had the positions been reversed, which would have been passed unnoticed by a phlegmatic Briton, was to the Gallican a national insult. And LeMoine, that past grand master of the Franco-Anglo-Canadian complexion, says all too truthfully that conciliation was not a vice-regal virtue; and one of the singers of the day, a Briton of the Britons, confirms the opinion: