also excavated, the court of which, paved in rustic mosaic, is precious in the eyes of antiquaries. It was on the banks of this river that the stone was quarried which served for the construction of the public buildings of the city. In its natural state below the earth it appears to be soft and moist, and may be taken out in enormous masses; but by a very few hours' exposure to the sun, it becomes as hard as adamant.

The left bank of the Bolbec, which forms the western limit of the town, was also rich in vestiges of the arts and of domestic architecture. At the southern entrance, from the number of funeral vases discovered, it is supposed that on that spot there must have been a Roman cemetery.

The valley, however, through which the Roman road winds, is more peculiarly holy ground to the explorer of the antique world. There stands the new château, broken down with the weight of many hundred years, and built upon the ruins of the Roman Acropolis; the baths, erected probably in the first centuries of the Christian era; and the theatre, the most remarkable monument of the masters of the world in the north of France.

The Roman fortress has perished, with the exception of part of a military wall, at the bottom of which swords of formidable dimensions, and sculptures, apparently anterior to the introduction of Christianity, have been found. The stones are in some cases finely cut; but M. Gaillard has detected an artifice, which at least diminished the labour, if it does not detract from the skill of the Gaulic artists.1 They chose, it seems, such stones as were most spungy and defective, and, of course, most easily cut; and, when their work was finished, dinted and roughened the surface with

'The Gauls, under the instruction of their masters, became expert sculptors.

the chisel, and then applied a coating of some kind of cement, occasionally red, but often white and brilliant.

The apartments of the baths are small and oblong, the largest being only thirty feet by eighteen. In one of them a female statue was found as large as life, and cut in the beautiful marble of Paros. It is thought to represent the wife of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, which would, in some measure, fix the date of the balnearium in the second century. Some of the apartments are ornamented with paintings in fresco, and paved with black and grey schistus. The establishment appears to have contained baths for the women as well as for the men; and it has been noticed as something worthy of remark, (although we consider it a circumstance of mere accident, from which no conclusion can be drawn,) that in the balnea virilia there was found a medal of William Rufus, king of England.

Directly facing the hill of the Acropolis, the sides of which are covered with these monuments, and the summit with the château of the middle ages, there is another eminence, on which stands the Roman theatre. The façade of this edifice, which is now wholly destroyed, must have been three hundred and thirty feet long; and the inner circumference of the building, formed by a circular corridor, six hundred and twenty-five feet. One half of the theatre stands in the valley, and the other on the sides of the eminence; but the former part is so far below the level of the modern houses, and of the Roman road, which runs

'A wall similar to those erected by the Romans at Narbonne, Périgueux, Bordeaux, and elsewhere, separates the façade from the body of the edifice; whence it is argued that the balnearium must have been more ancient than the fourth century, the date of such erections. If the statue mentioned in the text, however, is really that of Constantine's empress, we have ourselves no doubt (for ignorance is always presumptuous) that the baths were in ruins before the wall was built.

past the façade, that it looks like a vast excavation. It would be needless, however, to look for the sites of Roman buildings on the same level with the roads, the latter being, in most cases, built up like a lofty rampart; and in the course of seventeen or eighteen hundred years, it is not wonderful if we should find the ancient soil raised to a great height by vegetable earth alone. In the ruins of the comparatively recent constructions of the middle ages, we are generally obliged to descend as into a vault; the threshold of the doorway being considerably below the surface which belongs to the present denizens of the earth.

Near the theatre a figure of gilded bronze, six feet high, was found in 1823, "apparently," says M. Rever, "a statue of the god Bacchus. It is completely naked; its hair, divided in the middle of the brow, borders the temples, and unites in a knot behind."

The ducal palace of William the Conqueror exists in little more than conjecture; its ruins having been re-erected, towards the twelfth century, into a feudal château, the property of the house of Harcourt, whose feud with that of Tancarville we have noticed above. Here William organised, in 1066, the invasion of England; and here he frequently resided from inclination before his will or destiny called him to a throne.

The constructions within the extensive enclosure are evidently of different epochs; one square tower being of the thirteenth century, and a round tower as late as the fifteenth. The drawbridge, by means of which the latter is attained, is thirty-three feet broad, and thrown over a very deep ditch; the walls are thirteen feet thick, and divided into three stages.

"There," says the author of the Studies of Nature,' "arise lofty battlemented towers, with trees growing from

the summit like a head-dress. Gothic windows, resembling the entrances of caverns, open at intervals through the ivy. No living thing is seen in this desolate abode, save buzzards flying in silence round the walls; or, if you chance to hear the voice of a bird, it is that of some owl who builds here its hermit-nest. When I remember, in viewing this manor, that it was formerly the abode of petty tyrants, who there exercised their bandit-trade not only on their own vassals but on travellers, I think I see the carcass and bones of some huge wild beast."

"Alas!" exclaims M. Licquet, "who would recognise here the abode of the most formidable prince of his time? Roofless, floorless, nothing but fragments and ruins! Fern, nettles, and ivy, have usurped the palace of the Norman kings!"

To this Turner adds nothing in words; but behold how eloquent he is! Here is a Study of Nature which would have been worthy the pencil of Saint Pierre himself.