sea.

over night what he dug up in the morning. At length, the labourers found a skeleton in the ruins of the Roman building; and, two days afterwards, the whole town and the surrounding country talked of the discovery, and it was universally reported that a general, with two croix d'honneur about his neck, had been dug up in Cæsar's Camp, as the Cité des Limes is called by the common people. The good folks probably thought that they could not do too much honour to one who for a thousand

years

had been an inhabitant of Cæsar's Camp, nay, who might even have been himself a Cæsar. The anecdote is characteristic enough of Dieppe and its environs.

The Cité des Limes has other wonders besides this general and his decorations. It was natural that these gigantic walls should operate upon the imagination of a poetic people. Animating them in their own way, they related the following story in clear moonshiny nights, about the time of the full moon in September, the passenger, approaching from Dieppe, sees a great number of young females of exquisite beauty standing around a table, on which are spread wares, apparel, and trinkets of all sorts: when any one goes up to the table to look at the commodities, the beautiful damsels presently surround him, joking and toying with him, till at length they so completely entangle him in the net of their charms, that he follows them involuntarily to the edge of the cliff

, where, amidst acclamations and scornful laughter, they tumble him into the

Who knows but this tradition may have as high an historical import as those remains of the ancient inhabitants of the Cité des Limes, dug up on its site? Perhaps there once dwelt in them a conquering race, which, having attained a higher point of cultivation than the conquered, offered for sale to the latter the products of its luxury at a fair held here some time in September; whereupon, the elders and the priests of the vanquished strove to secure their youth from the influence of the new civilization by this tale. All popular traditions owe their origin to some circumstance or other, and it would be worth while to study them from this point of view; the skeleton, most assuredly, belongs in general to history; the imagination of the people has created merely the form in which it is clothed.

In a village situated on the opposite side of Dieppe, on the road to Caudebec, a tradition has been current from time immemorial, that females covered with white veils are to be seen at night on a certain spot, and researches on that spot have proved that it was a burial-ground during the Roman sway in Gaul. The tradition has, therefore, outlived the Franks, the Normans, the English, and the French; for it must assuredly have originated at the time when the cemetery, as such, still excited the imagination of the people. In another village situated on the left bank of the river Dieppe, the credulous frequently saw horsemen in white, scampering over the fields, and turning up the ground with their lances. Tradition added that, in former times, these borsemen in white had been defeated in battle by other horsemen in red, and that the former came to look for their slain comrades. There can be no doubt that a battle was once fought here. Perhaps the tradition dates back from the times of the Romans, for it is well known that the Roman cavalry wore white mantles. Who were the horsemen in red, it would be more difficult to decide.

The traditions on the left side of Dieppe are more Roman, those on the right, more German in their nature. The river was probably the boundary between the old German Belgians and the Gauls properly so called.

Another tradition, which still survives among the people on this side of the river, reminds one of the high respect in which matrimony held by the Germans. According to this tradition, old maids were doomed after death to draw an iron harrow in hell; their mortal sin was celibacy. But the names of a great number of villages point still more decidedly than these traditions to the Germans, the German-Belgians, or the Saxons, who once dwelt in these parts. Thus Saqueville is, in Latin, Villa Saxonis; and Anglisqueville must derive its name from the Angles.

In regard to the popular festivals, the river forms again a decided boundary between the inhabitants of the two shores. The feast of Epiphany is held throughout all Normandy, as far as Dieppe. Farther 011, towards Picardy, on the other hand, this day is not a popular but only a church festival. The children here celebrate the festival of St. Nicholas in its stead. In the environs of Dieppe, indeed, it is not the day on which presents are made to children, as in all Belgium and on the Rhine, but merely a day of amusement for them; when they go about with paper lanterns of various colours, fastened to the ends of long sticks. In Eu, on the contrary, it is on this day that presents are made to children. In the immediate environs of Dieppe, as well as farther on towards the Seine, the children receive their gifts on Mid-Lent Sunday ; on that day, they put a wooden shoe in the fire-place, and Mi-carème, whom they figure to themselves as a kind of fairy, drops the gifts into it. This wooden shoe is also met with along the Rhine, at the festival of St. Nicholas.

To me, this gradual transition of the feast of St. Nicholas into another, seems not wholly unimportant. It is well known that the first Christian priests adopted as much as possible of the ceremonies, at least, of Paganisin. That the feast of St. Nicholas may be a holyday for children, even without its presents, is not doubtful, in the environs of Dieppe; but without them it has a totally different character from that which it presents in the whole of ancient Belgium to the Rhine, as it now exists there. The inference, that this was a festival for children before the time of St. Nicholas and his gifts, does not appear to me too bold. If it was a Pagan festival of the ancient German-Belgians, its confinement between the Rhine and the Seine, which could not otherwise be easily accounted for, is perfectly natural. But enough of this. I merely wished to show by one example the historical importance of suchlike trifles, as most historians might deem them, in order to justify my partiality for such inquiries.

ARQUES I was listening one evening at my inn at Dieppe to an historical conversation : one of my fellow lodgers had been making an excursion with his wife, to Arques; he returned full of all that he had seen, and began to overflow as soon as he saw the landlord. He could not find terms strong enough to express how interesting his visit to Arques had proved. He had particularly explored the field of battle:-“Everybody that

comes hither,” said our host, “thinks like you, and not a traveller fails to afford himself the pleasure of seeing Arques.”

“ It is, indeed, a most interesting place.”

“If one did but know," rejoined the landlord, “who it was that funght there ?”

Why, Henry the Fourth, to be sure- -everybody knows that.” “Right, everybody does know that; but with whom did he fight?-that is the secret; some say with the Flemings and the Belgians, others even talk of the English; but I rather think it was the Gauls, from whom we are all descended."

The stranger looked with some surprise at our learned host; he then very calmly replied, “You are wrong, Sir; Henry the Fourth defeated the League (Ligue) at Arques.”

Ah, yes! the line (ligne) against which he sent the cavalry, as the little corporal used always to do.”

With these two technical terms, the landlord had got upon a field with which he was well acquainted. He had been an hussar under Napoleon, and had served in Spain, and the two words, line and caralry, had touched the most sonorous chords of his heart, and long did they continue to vibrate. I have no mind to leave Normandy, and to transport myself along with him to Spain. At any rate, this conversation proves what fruit Feret's rescarches have produced among the people: for there can be no doubt that the sceptical erudition of our host had merely confounded the two places, the field of Battle of Arques and the Cité des Limes, in order to send out Henry the Fourth against the Belgio-Gauls.

This learned conversation confirmed me in my resolution to go the next day to Arques. One of the most beautiful walks to be found far and near leads to this place. On setting out, you proceed for some distance along the middle of the hill, on the left near Dieppe, and enjoy a delicious view of the valley, the town, the harbour, and the sea. You then come to an alley of lofty trees, whose boughs form living arcades over your head. At length, the village with its church, and near it the ruins of the castle, appear before you.

The castle is scated on a solitary elevation, and affords picturesque views from all sides. It was built by William Count de Talau, uncle of William the Bastard. It was taken by Philip Augustus, but restored to Richard Cæur de Lion by the peace of 1196. In later times it was alternately in the possession of the French and English, till it was finally reduced by the former under Charles the Seventh. llenry the Fourth cannonaded the army of the League from this castle. This celebrated structure is now a ruin, and is daily falling more and more to decay. In the year 1780, an ordinance was issued permitting the inhabitants of Arques to employ the then remaining materials of the castle for useful buildings. The palace was pulled down for the purpose of building huts. Those mills in the valley, those farm-yards, those barns, that cot which belongs to a day-labourer, were built with the stones of the proud castle. I have not read any book about Dieppe and its environs, but what contains lamentations over the Vandalism of the age which presumes to lay hands on the fallen ruins of a castle, and to convert them into mean buildings. Spare your tears, ye sentimental antiquarics, for a better occasion, and consider what tears of blood were mingled with the mortar which cemented the stones of the castle of Arques !

one.

Arques was a town so early as the ninth century, and, in the eleventh, it was one of the most important places in Normandy. Dieppe has acted the same part towards it, as, in later times, Havre has done towards Harfleur. Arques is now an inconsiderable village, interesting only on account of its beautiful and romantic environs, and its historical recollections. I shall advert to only one of them. Arques witnessed the first decisive victory gained by Henry the Fourth after his accession to the crown, over the League, in 1589. From the castle you overlook the whole field of battle, and to the tactician it may be a great treat to study there the movements of the two armies: I do not grudge it him. Somewhat more or less fog, and the great king might have died a little

But, perhaps not: Henry the Fourth was the expression of a necessity of the times. It was requisite that royalty, then supported by the people, should annihilate the noblesse, and set itself up in the place of the latter. Hence it was that Henry conquered the League; the crop was ripe, no matter what was the name of the reaper. With Henry the Fourth, for whom preceding monarchs had done much to clear the way, absolute monarchy in France gained the final victory over the nobility and, under Louis the Fourteenth, it attained its highest exaltation, to begin rolling down the hill on the other side, crushing all that should strive to stop its descent.

How Henry acquired the name of Father of the People, it is now-adays not difficult to say. He annihilated the last vestiges of popular liberty, he intrigued with every woman, and he squandered the treasures of his people. But all this is sooner forgotten than a hearty shake of the hand given by a king to an humble citizen. What may be effected by such means is now no secret. He walked about in the streets of Paris and talked with the shopkeepers; he once went into the cottage of a peasant, and sat down to table with him. And thus it was that he became popular, and a Father of the people. History, whose eyes are frequently not opened till long after the events which it records, is gradually doing justice to this monarch; but this merit it will not deny him, that on many occasions he displayed a truly chivalrous spirit, as at Arques, where, when one of his wings was beaten, he rushed almost alone upon the enemy, exclaiming, “ N'y a-t-il pas un bon chevalier qui suivra son roi !"

In the army of the League, as well as in that of the king, there were bands of German Landsknechts. Those of the League went over to the royalists at the beginning of the battle, and, afterwards, when it became general, they fell upon their own countrymen and the king's troops. Owing to them, victory seemed for a time to incline to the Leaguers ; but when, in spite of their treachery, the royalists prevailed, they were slaughtered without mercy. What nation has not produced traitors! but there is none to share with the Germans—for the Flemings and the Swiss are of German origin—the disgrace of having produced Landsknechts. Not a battle was fought in which the French did not bear a part, but they were always volunteers, and scarcely ever chaffered away their blood and their lives for money. The worst of it is, that the race of Landsknechts does not seem to be yet extinct; for it frequently appeared to me as if I saw them in Napoleon's battles, twenty or thirty years ago.

When we consider how readily these Landsknechts everywhere lent a hand, as soon as their hire was dropped into it, in the oppression of the people, we shall be sensible that the Germans have a

stain upon their national character, which only time and change of conduct can wipe away.

Le Manoir D’ANGO. I had resolved to go on from Arques to Varengeville. I wished to see how the residence of a citizen of Dieppe looked in its ruins after that of a sovereign of the country. The road, leading up and down hill, was rather fatiguing. By way of compensation, however, I had frequently the finest views, sometimes of Dieppe and the sea, at others of the charming environs of the town. I passed through Appeville, where the Scie forms a wild and deep valley. From Appeville my road led past the wood of Hautot. Here, under a lofty tree, I found a beggar family, man, woman, and several children, seated at their dinner. Having several times witnessed such scenes, I had made enquiries here and there, and learned the following particulars concerning this class of vagrants. In the whole of Upper Normandy there are a great number of persons, who live solely upon the charity of the peasants, and by stealing fruit, poultry, eggs, &c. This condition is hereditary, as the dignity of peer formerly was. It is not charity alone—for fear contributes its sharethat procures these colonies of itinerant beggars food and shelter. In every solitary farm-yard of Upper Normandy there is a place which stands open night and day for the reception of these mendicants. This kind of lodging is legalised, as it were, for the farmer demands of them their travelling-book :-how they came by such a book I know not, as in other parts of the continent it is only given to travelling artisans—and keeps it till the next morning, lest they should steal something from him during the night. Shelter is never refused, as such a refusal would expose the farm-buildings to the risk of being burned down.

A piece of bread they obtain at every house; but it would be too dry, if they were obliged to eat it without butter or meat, and a fowl in the pot was promised by Henry the Fourth to all Frenchmen. Accordingly, the beggars fish for fowls with hooks, which they bait with a bit of the bread that the owner of the fowl has given them. At the appointed hour the whole family meet in a wood, and there feast upon their prize.

At Dieppe I was told that these happy mortals, whom care never annoys, living without law, being either above or below it, contract marriages in their own way. The beggar-lad seeks himself a lass of his own caste, and merely asks her if she is willing to be his helpmate. If she consents, the business is settled, and they proceed to the solemn ceremony of marriage. A fowl, the produce of their fishery, is put into an earthen pot and boiled. As soon as it is done, the bridegroom takes up his staff and strikes the pot with it. The marriage is valid for so many years as there are pieces. I do not venture to assert that this practice really prevails, but, as a report, it serves to characterise these colonies of vagrants, for it shows, at least, what the people think of them.

It would be very difficult to determine the origin of these Norman gipsies, and to decide whether they are the descendants of a subdued race, which preferred the freedom of the beggar to the law of the conqueror; for, even though they may themselves have old traditions, it is almost impossible to induce these people to speak. I am not aware that any writer has ever yet made mention of these Norman beggar-colonies.

With these recollections I arrived at the village of Varengeville. It