into a large open space that terminated in the quadrangular and lofty keep.  This, which is externally strengthened by massy buttresses, similar to those of the walls, is within divided into two apartments, each of them about fifty feet by twenty.  In one of them is a well, communicating with a reservoir below, which is filled by the water of the river, and was sufficiently capacious for watering the horses of the garrison.  The greatest part, if not the whole, of the walls seems to have been faced with brick of comparatively modern date.  The keep also was coated with brick within, and with stones carefully squared without.  The windows are so battered, that no idea can be formed of their original style.  The walls of the keep are filled with small square apertures.  At Rochester, and at many other castles in England, we observe the same; and unless you can give a better guess respecting their use, you must content yourself with mine:  that is to say, that they are merely the holes left by the scaffolding.  At the foot of the hill to the west is a gate-house, by no means ancient, from which a wall ascends to the castle; and another similar wall connects the fortress with the ground below, on the north-eastern side; but the extent or nature of these out-works can no longer be traced.  Still less possible would it be to say any thing with certainty as to the excavations, of the length of which, tradition speaks, as usual, in extravagant terms, and mixes sundry marvellous and frightful tales with the recital.

In the general plan a great resemblance is to be traced between many castles in Wales and its frontiers, especially Goodrich Castle, and this at Arques.  Yet I do not think that any of ours are of an equal extent; nor can you well conceive a more noble object than this, when seen at a distance:  and it is only then that the eye can comprehend the vast expanse and strength of the external wall, with the noble keep towering high above it.

[Illustration:  Church at Arques]

Until the revolution, the decaying town of Arques was not wholly deprived of all the vestiges of its former honours:  the standards of the weights and measures of Upper Normandy were deposited here.  It was the seat of the courts of the Archbishop of Rouen, and, though the actual session of the municipal courts took place at Dieppe, they bore the legal style and title of the courts of Arques.  Since the revolution these traces of its importance have wholly disappeared, nor is there any outward indication of the consequence once enjoyed by this poor and straggling hamlet.