38 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
Still travellers admitted that Montreal, on account of the solidity of its 
buildings, generally of stone, compared most favourably with many of 
the finest and oldest towns in the United States. “A number of the 
modern houses,” wrote Professor Silliman of Yale College, in 1824, 
“and of its environs, which are constructed of gray limestone hand- 
somely hewn, are very beautiful and would be an ornament to the city 
of London or of Westminster itself.” Many of the churches were sym- 
metrical and imposing ; the Roman Catholic parish church on the Place 
@Armes, which illustrated the perpendicular style of Gothic in the 
middle ages, was then as now, unequalled on the continent for a certain 
simple grandeur, though its interior was gaudy and not in the best of 
taste in those days. 
With its ancient walls girdling the heights first seen by Jacques 
Cartier, with its numerous aged churches and convents, illustrating the 
power and wealth of the Romish church, with its rugged, erratic streets 
creeping through hewn rock, with its picturesque crowds of red-coated 
soldiers of England mingling with priests and sisters in sombre attire, 
or with the habitants in étoffe du pays,—the old city of Quebec, whose 
history went back to the beginning of the seventeenth century, was 
certainly “a very peculiar place’—to quote Professor Silliman, “at 
least for an American town.” It was a piece of mediævalism trans- 
ported from northern France. The plain stone buildings of 1837 still 
remain with all their evidences of sombre antiquity. None of the re- 
ligious or government edifices were distinguished for architectural 
beauty—except perhaps the English Cathedral—but represented solidity 
and convenience, while harmonizing with the rocks amid which they 
had risen. The parliament of Lower Canada still met in the Bishop’s 
Palace, which showed the necessity for repairs. The old Chateau St. 
Louis had been destroyed by fire in 1834, and a terrace bearing the 
name of Durham in course of construction over its ruins to give one of 
the most picturesque views in the world on a summer evening as the 
descending sun lit up the dark green of the western hills, or brightened 
the tin spires and roofs of the churches and convents, or lingered amid 
the masts of the many ships moored in the river or in the coves filled 
with great rafts of timber. Quebec society had many advantages, com- 
posed as it was of the most cultured representatives of the two races, 
civil and military ; but unhappily the two nationalities were separated 
from each other by political and racial antagonisms. The environs of 
Quebec and Montreal, and the north side of the St. Lawrence between 
those two towns presented French Canadian life in its most picturesque 
and favourable aspect. Here were to be seen the oldest villages—in 
arte 
