ver to be
compensatory. From the top of Notre Dame is certainly to be had a
prospect upon which, but for his fluttered nerves and trembling muscles
and troubled respiration, the traveller might well look with delight, and
as it is must behold with wonder. So far as the eye reaches it dwells
only upon what is magnificent. All the features of that landscape are
grand. Below you spreads the city, which has less that is merely mean in
it than any other city of our continent, and which is everywhere ennobled
by stately civic edifices, adorned by tasteful churches, and skirted by
full foliaged avenues of mansions and villas. Behind it rises the
beautiful mountain, green with woods and gardens to its crest, and
flanked on the east by an endless fertile plain, and on the west by
another expanse, through which the Ottawa rushes, turbid and dark, to its
confluence with the St. Lawrence. Then these two mighty streams
commingled flow past the city, lighting up the vast Champaign country to
the south, while upon the utmost southern verge, as on the northern, rise
the cloudy summits of far-off mountains.

As our travellers gazed upon all this grandeur, their hearts were humbled
to the tacit admission that the colonial metropolis was not only worthy
of its seat, but had traits of a solid prosperity not excelled by any of
the abounding and boastful cities of the Republic. Long before they
quitted Montreal they had rallied from this weakness, but they delighted
still to honor her superb beauty.

The tower is naturally bescribbled to its top with the names of those who
have climbed it, and most of these are Americans, who flock in great
numbers to Canada in summer. They modify its hotel life, and the objects
of interest thrive upon their bounty. Our friends met them at every turn,
and knew them at a glance from the native populations, who are also
easily distinguishable from each other. The French Canadians are nearly
always of a peasant-like commonness, or where they rise above this have a
bourgeois commonness of face and manner, and the English Canadians are to
be known from the many English sojourners by the effort to look much more
English than the latter. The social heart of the colony clings fast to
the mother-country, that is plain, whatever the political tendency may
be; and the public monuments and inscriptions celebrate this affectionate
union.

At the English cathedral the effect is deepened by the epitaphs of those
whose l