s. The equestrian statue of William in the public place
at Falaise prances, it has been remarked, close to the spot where rest
the ashes of Walter and Biona, Count and Countess of Pontoise, poisoned,
if contemporary accounts are true, by the same ambition which launched
havoc and misery on a whole nation. They and the Conqueror were rival
claimants to the sovereignty of Maine. They supped with the Conqueror
one evening at Falaise, and next morning William was the sole claimant.
The Norman, like the Corsican, was an assassin as well as a conqueror.

I must leave it to architects to describe the architectural glories of
Caen. But I had no idea that the Norman style, in England grand only
from its massiveness, could soar to such a height of beauty as it has
attained in the Church of St. Stephen and the Abbaye aux Dames. I
afterwards did homage again to its powers when standing before the
august ruin of Jumieges. There is something peculiarly delightful in the
freshness of early art, whether Greek or mediaeval, and whether in
architecture or in poetry,--when you see the mind first beginning to
feel its power over the material, and to make it the vehicle of thought.
There is something, too, in all human works, which makes the early hope
more charming than the fulfilment.

St. Stephen is the church of the Conqueror, as the Abbaye aux Dames is
that of his Queen. There he lies buried. Every one knows the story of
Ascelin demanding the price of the ground in which William was going to
be buried, and which the tyrant had taken from him by force; and how, at
last, the corpse of the Conqueror was thrust, amidst a scene of horror
and loathing, into its grave. But _Rex Invictissimus_ is the inscription
on his tomb.

The spire of St. Pierre is very graceful; the body of the church, in the
latest and most debased style of Gothic architecture, stands signally
contrasted with St. Stephen,--St. Stephen the simple vigor of the prime,
St. Pierre the florid weakness of the decay.

Caen is a large city, and, of course, full of soldiers, who are as
completely the dominant caste in France now, as the old _noblesse_ were
before the Revolution. To this the French have come after their long
train of sanguinary revolutions,--after all their visions of a perfect
social state,--after all their promises of a new era of happiness to
mankind. "A light and cruel people," Coleridge calls them. And how
lightly they turned from regenerating to pillaging