It were unpardonable to take leave of Havre without one word upon the celebrated individuals to whom it has given birth; and you must allow me also, from our common taste for natural history, to point it out to your notice as a spot peculiarly favorable for the collecting of fossil shells, which are found about the town and neighborhood in great numbers and variety.  The Abbe Dicquemare, a naturalist of considerable eminence, who resided here, may possibly be known to you by his observations on this subject, or still more probably by those upon the Aetiniae; the latter having been translated into English, and honored with a place in the Transactions of our Royal Society.  Of more extensive, but not more justly merited, fame, are George Scudery and his sister Magdalen:  the one a voluminous writer in his day, though now little known, except for his Critical Observations upon the Cid; the other, a still more prolific author of novels, and alternately styled by her contemporaries the Sappho of her age, and “un boutique de verbiage;” but unquestionably a writer of merit, notwithstanding the many unmanly sneers of Boileau, whose bitter pen, like that of our own illustrious satirist, could not even consent to spare a female that had been so unfortunate as to provoke his resentment.  She died in 1701, at the advanced age of ninety-four.  The last upon my list is one of whom death has very recently deprived the world, the excellent Bernardin de Saint Pierre; a man whose writings are not less calculated to improve the heart than to enlarge the mind.  It is impossible to read his works without feeling love and respect for the author.  His exquisite little tale of Paul and Virginia is in the hands of every body; and his larger work, the Studies of Nature, deserves to be no less generally read, as full of the most original observations, joined to theories always ingenious, though occasionally fanciful:  the whole conveyed in a singularly captivating style, and its merits still farther enhanced by a constant flow of unaffected piety.

The road from Havre to Rouen is of a different character, and altogether unlike that from Dieppe; but what it gains in beauty of landscape it loses in interest.  And yet, perhaps, it is even wrong to say that it gains much in point of beauty; for, though:  trees are more generally dispersed, though cultivation is universal, and the soil good, and produce luxuriant, and though the mind and the eye cannot but be pleased by the abundance and verdure of the country, yet in picturesque effect it is extremely deficient.  Monotony, even of excellence, displeases.  I am speaking of the road which passes through Bolbec and Yvetot:  there is another which lies nearer to the banks of the Seine, through Lillebonne and Caudebec, and this, I do not doubt, would, in every point of view, have been preferable.