t his Parisian grammar and dictionary will go but a very little
way towards making him understand their _Lingua d'oc_. Now, Normandy and
England, of course, have many points of difference, and doubtless a man
who goes at once into Normandy from England will be mainly struck by the
points of difference. But let a man go through Southern Gaul first, and
visit Normandy afterwards, and he will be struck, not with the points of
difference, but with the points of likeness. Buildings, men, beasts,
everything will at once remind him of his own country. We hold that this
is a very sufficient reason for visiting the more distant province
first. Otherwise the very important phenomenon of the strong likeness
between Normandy and England will not be taken in as it ought to be.

Go from France proper into Normandy and you at once feel that everything
is palpably better. Men, women, horses, cows, all are on a grander and
better scale. If we say that the food, too, is better, we speak it with
fear and trembling, as food is, above all things, a matter of taste.
From the point of view of a fashionable cook, no doubt the Norman diet
is the worse, for whence should the fashionable cook come except from
the land with which Normandy has to be compared? But certain it is that
a man with an old-fashioned Teutonic stomach--a man who would have
liked to dine off roast meat with Charles the Great or to breakfast off
beef-steaks with Queen Elizabeth--will find Norman diet, if not exactly
answering to his ideal, yet coming far nearer to it than the politer
repasts of Paris. Rouen, of course, has been corrupted for nine
centuries, but at Evreux, and in Thor's own city of Bayeux, John Bull
may find good meat and good vegetables, and plenty of them to boot. Then
look at those strong, well-fed horses--what a contrast to the poor,
half-starved, flogged, over-worked beasts which usurp the name further
south! Look at those goodly cows, fed in good pastures, and yielding
milk thrice a day; they claim no sort of sisterhood with the
poverty-stricken animals which, south of the Loire, have to do the
horse's work as well as their own. Look at the land itself. An
Englishman feels quite at home as he looks upon green fields, and, in
the Bessin district, sees those fields actually divided by hedges. If
the visitor chance not only to be an Englishman but a West-Saxon, he
will feel yet more at home at seeing a land where the apple-tree takes
the place of the vine, a