departed shades, they rise upon us from their graves in strange
romantic guise. Again their ghostly camp-fires seem to burn, and the
fitful light is cast around on lord and vassal and black robed priest,
mingled with wild forms of savage warriors, knit in close fellowship
on the same stern errand. A boundless vision grows upon us: an untamed
continent, vast wastes of forest verdure, mountains silent in primeval
sleep; river, lake, and glimmering pool; wilderness oceans mingling
with the sky. Such was the domain which France conquered for
civilization. Plumed helmets gleamed in the shade of its forests;
priestly vestments in its dens and fastnesses of ancient barbarism.
Men steeped in antique learning, pale with the close breath of the
cloister, here spent the noon and evening of their lives, ruled savage
hordes with a mild, parental sway, and stood serene before the direst
shapes of death. Men of a courtly nurture, heirs to the polish of a
far-reaching ancestry, here, with their dauntless hardihood, put to
shame the boldest sons of toil."

Of all this mighty empire of the past, Quebec was the undisputed capital,
the fortress, the keystone.

It would be a curious study to place in juxtaposition the impressions
produced on Tourists by the view of Quebec and its environs--from the era
of Jacques Cartier, the discoverer of Canada, down to that of the Earl of
Dufferin, one of its truest friends.

Champlain, La Potherie, La Houtan, Le Beau, Du Creux (Creuxius), Peter
Kalm, Knox, Silliman, Ampere, Mrs. Moodie, Dickens, Lever, Anthony
Trollope, Sala, Thoreau, Warburton, Marmier, Capt. Butler, Sir Charles
Dilke, Henry Ward Beecher, have all left their impressions of the rocky
citadel: let us gaze on a few of their vivid pictures.