To the American traveller who wends his way toward Paris from Cherbourg, Havre, or Dieppe, the first impression of Normandy is that of a country strikingly like England. There are the same high chalk cliffs, the same “little grey church on the windy shore,” often the same orchards and hedges, poppies and roses. There are trees and wide stretches of forest as in few other parts of France, placid, full-brimmed rivers and quiet countrysides, and everywhere the rich green of meadow and park and pasture, that vivid green of the north which made Alphonse Daudet at Oxford shudder, “Green rheumatism,” as he thought of the sun-browned plains and sharp, bare hills of his own Provence. Normandy is brighter than England, with a dash more of color in the landscape, but its skies are not sunny and its air breathes the mists of the sea and the chill of the north. There is a grey tone also, of grey towns and grey sea, matched by an austere and sombre element in the Norman character, which, if it does not take its pleasures sadly after the manner of Taine’s Englishmen, is prone to take them soberly, and by an element of melancholy, a sense of _le glas des choses mortes_, which Flaubert called the melancholy of the northern barbarians. The Norman landscape also gives us the feeling of finish and repose and the sentiment of a rich past, not merely in the obvious externals of crumbling wall and ivied tower, but in that deeper sense of a people bound from immemorial antiquity to the soil, adapted to every local difference through long generations of use and wont, in an intimate union of man and nature which makes the Norman inseparable from his land. All this, too, is English, but English with a difference. Just as, in Henry James’s phrase, the English landscape is a landlord’s landscape, and the French a peasant’s, so the _mairie_ and the _préfecture_, the public garden and the public band, the café and the ever-open church, the workman’s _blouse_ and the grandam’s _bonnet_, remind us continually that we are in a Latin country and on our way to Paris.