parish to furnish a detailed account of the
then existing properties in land, and it is shown by these that there
then existed in France nearly two-thirds as many landholders as now
exist, although the population of the country is now about twenty-five
per cent. greater than it then was.

CHAPTER V.

IN THE SOMME.

AMIENS

By turns English, French, and Burgundian, Upper Picardy, of which Amiens
was the capital, became definitely French under the astute policy of
Louis XI. The Calaisis and the Boulonnais, with Ponthieu and Vimieu,
eventually constituted what was called Lower Picardy, and the whole
province, divided under the Bourbons into the two 'generalities' of
Amiens and Soissons, formed before 1789 one of the twelve great
departments of the monarchy, and was brought under the domain of the
Parliament of Paris.

The city of Amiens, associated now, I fear, chiefly, in the English and
American mind, with 'twenty minutes' stop' on the way between Calais and
Paris, and with a buffet which perhaps entitles it to be called the
Mugby Junction of France, is really one of the most interesting of
French cities. No student of Ruskin can need to be told that its
glorious cathedral makes it one of the most interesting, not of French
only, but of European cities; and two or three excellent small hotels
make it a most comfortable as well as a most instructive midway station,
not for 'twenty minutes,' but for a couple of days, between the capitals
of England and France. Arthur Young found it so a hundred years ago,
when he encountered there the illustrious Charles James Fox returning to
London from a visit to the Anglomaniac Due d' Orleans, in the company
of a charming 'Madame Fox,' of whom Arthur Young and London had no
previous cognisance.

Like Dijon, and Nancy, and Toulouse, and Rennes, and Rouen, Amiens still
wears that 'look of a capital' which is as unmistakeable, if also as
undefinable, as Hazlitt found the 'look of a gentleman' to be. York and
Exeter, for example, in England, have this look, while Liverpool and
Hull have it not. There are traces of the Spaniards in Amiens, as there
are wherever that most Roman of all the Latin peoples has ever passed,
and the curious _hortillonages_ of Amiens, which may be roughly
described as a kind of floating kitchen gardens, remind one so strongly
of the much more picturesque Chinampas of Mexico as to suggest the
impression that the idea of establishing them may have c