by the wanton violence of the Calvinists or democrats.  The central tower is square and short:  it is, however, handsome.  Two windows, very similar to those of the tower of St. Romain, in Rouen cathedral, light it on either side; and saints, placed under canopies, ornament the angles behind the buttresses.—­The great western door is closed, and the front defaced:  the eastern end, likewise, is altogether modern.—­Within, the same kind of architecture prevails as in the exterior, but the whole is so concealed, and degraded by ornaments in the worst of taste, and by painted saints in the most tawdry dresses, that the effect is disgusting.  I never saw so great an array of wretched representations of the heavenly host:  the stone images collected round the holy sepulchre, are even worse than those at Dieppe.  Near the chapel of the sepulchre, however, are four bas-reliefs, attached to the wall, exhibiting different events in our Savior’s life of good execution, and not in had taste:  an open gallery of fillagree stone-work, under the central tower on the south side, is an object really deserving of admiration.

M. Langlois has engraved the gable end of an old house at Louviers, said to have belonged to the Knights Templars.  We found it used as an engine-maker’s shop; and neither within nor without, could we discover any thing to justify his opinion, that it is a building of the twelfth or thirteenth century.  On the contrary, the windows, which are double, under a flatly-pointed arch, and are all of them trefoil-headed, would rather cause it to be considered as erected two centuries later.

The town of Louviers, though never fortified, is noticed on several occasions in history.  It was the seat of the conferences between Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Philip Augustus, which ended in the treaty of 1195, defining new limits to Normandy.—­It was, as I have already mentioned, one of the items of the compensation made by the same Duke to the Archbishop of Rouen, for the injury done to the church, by the erection of Chateau Gaillard.—­During the wars of Edward IIIrd, “Louviers,” to use the language of old Froissart, “after the battle of Caen, was soon entered by the Englishmen, as it was not closed; and they over-ran, and spoiled, and robbed it without mercy, and won great riches; for it was the chief place in all Normandy for drapery, and was full of merchandize.”—­And, in the subsequent warfare of the fifteenth century, this town, like the others in the duchy, was taken by our countrymen, under Henry Vth, and lost by them under his successor.—­Hither the Norman parliament retired when the Huguenots were in possession of Rouen; and here they remained till the recapture of the capital.—­It was probably owing in a great measure to this circumstance, that Louviers was induced to distinguish itself by a devoted attachment to the party of the league, for which it suffered severely in 1591, when it was captured and pillaged by the royalists shortly after their victory at Ivry.