"The city is rich in public institutions and in Catholic churches and charities, but it is mainly in the prospect from the site of the Old Government House and from the Citadel, that its surpassing beauty lies. The exquisite expanse of country, rich in field and forest, mountain-heights and water, which lies stretched out before the view, with miles of Canadian villages, glancing in long white streaks, like veins along the landscape; the motley crowd of gables, roofs and chimney tops in the old hilly town immediately at hand; the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the sunlight; and the tiny ships below the rock from which you gaze, whose distant rigging looks like spiders' webs against the light, while casks and barrels on their decks dwindle into toys, and busy mariners become so many puppets; all this framed by a sunken window [1] in the fortress and looked at from the shadowed room within, forms one of the brightest and most enchanting pictures that the eye can rest upon." (Dickens' _American Notes_.) A distinguished French _littérateur_, fresh from the sunny banks of the Seine, thus discourses anent the Ancient capital; we translate:-- "Few cities," says M. Marmier, [2] "offer as many striking contrasts as Quebec, a fortress and a commercial city together, built upon the summit of a rock as the nest of an eagle, while her vessels are everywhere wrinkling the face of the ocean; an American city inhabited by French colonists, governed by England, and garrisoned with Scotch regiments; [3] a city of the middle ages by most of its ancient institutions, while it is submitted to all the combinations of modern constitutional government; an European city by its civilization and its habits of refinement, and still close by, the remnants of the Indian tribes and the barren mountains of the north, a city of about the same latitude as Paris, while successively combining the torrid climate of southern regions with the severities of an hyperborean winter; a city at the same time Catholic and Protestant, where the labours of our (French) missions are still uninterrupted alongside of the undertakings of the Bible Society, and where the Jesuits driven out of our own country (France) find a place of refuge under the aegis of British Puritanism!" An American tourist thus epitomises the sights:--