to pull down immediately. The Government House is very superior to
that at Kingston, and the town is full of life and bustle. In one
of the suburbs is a plank road – not footpath – five or six miles
long, and a famous road it is too. All the rides in the vicinity
were made doubly interesting by the bursting out of spring, which
is here so rapid, that it is but a day’s leap from barren winter,
to the blooming youth of summer.
The steamboats to Quebec perform the journey in the night; that is
to say, they leave Montreal at six in the evening, and arrive at
Quebec at six next morning. We made this excursion during our stay
in Montreal (which exceeded a fortnight), and were charmed by its
interest and beauty.
The impression made upon the visitor by this Gibraltar of America:
its giddy heights; its citadel suspended, as it were, in the air;
its picturesque steep streets and frowning gateways; and the
splendid views which burst upon the eye at every turn: is at once
unique and lasting.
It is a place not to be forgotten or mixed up in the mind with
other places, or altered for a moment in the crowd of scenes a
traveller can recall. Apart from the realities of this most
picturesque city, there are associations clustering about it which
would make a desert rich in interest. The dangerous precipice
along whose rocky front, Wolfe and his brave companions climbed to
glory; the Plains of Abraham, where he received his mortal wound;
the fortress so chivalrously defended by Montcalm; and his
soldier’s grave, dug for him while yet alive, by the bursting of a
shell; are not the least among them, or among the gallant incidents
of history. That is a noble Monument too, and worthy of two great
nations, which perpetuates the memory of both brave generals, and
on which their names are jointly written.
The city is rich in public institutions and in Catholic churches
and charities, but it is mainly in the prospect from the site of
the Old Government House, and from the Citadel, that its surpassing
beauty lies. The exquisite expanse of country, rich in field and
forest, mountain-height and water, which lies stretched out before
the view, with miles of Canadian villages, glancing in long white
streaks, like veins along the landscape; the motley crowd of
gables, roofs, and chimney tops in the old hilly town immediately
at hand; the beautiful St. Lawrence sparkling and flashing in the
sunlight; and the tiny ships below the rock from which you gaze,
whose distant rigging looks like spiders’ webs against the light,
while casks and barrels on their decks dwindle into toys, and busy
mariners become so many puppets; all this, framed by a sunken
window in the fortress and looked at from the shadowed room within,
forms one of the brightest and most enchanting pictures that the
eye can rest upon.
Page 141
Dickens, Charles – American Notes for General Circulation
In the spring of the year, vast numbers of emigrants who have newly
arrived from England or from Ireland, pass between Quebec and
Montreal on their way to the backwoods and new settlements of
Canada. If it be an entertaining lounge (as I very often found it)
to take a morning stroll upon the quay at Montreal, and see them
grouped in hundreds on the public wharfs about their chests and
boxes, it is matter of deep interest to be their fellow-passenger
on one of these steamboats, and mingling with the concourse, see
and hear them unobserved.
The vessel in which we returned from Quebec to Montreal was crowded
with them, and at night they spread their beds between decks (those
who had beds, at least), and slept so close and thick about our
cabin door, that the passage to and fro was quite blocked up. They
were nearly all English; from Gloucestershire the greater part; and
had had a long winter-passage out; but it was wonderful to see how
clean the children had been kept, and how untiring in their love
and self-denial all the poor parents were.
Cant as we may, and as we shall to the end of all things, it is