an English artist, heedless of the crowd that collects around him, sits down in the street to sketch the lines of the old building, already tottering to ruin.  Faithfully and patiently does the artist draw the old gables, the unused doorway, the heavy awnings, the piles of wood, the market-women, and the grey perspective of the side street with its pointed roofs, curious archways and oil lantern swinging from house to house; and as faithfully (even to the mis-spelling of the word ‘liquer,’ on a board over the doorway) almost indeed, with the touch of the artist’s pencil, has the engraver reproduced, by means of photography, the late Samuel Prout’s drawing on the frontispiece of this volume.[41]

Few artists have succeeded, as Prout succeeded, in giving the character of the old buildings in Normandy, and certainly no other drawings with which we are acquainted, admit of being photographed as his do, without losing effect.  It is scarcely too much to say that in this engraving we can distinguish the different washes of colour, the greys and warmer tints, the broad touches of his pencil on the white caps of the women, and the very work of his hand in the bold, decisive shadows.

It is pleasant to dwell for a moment on Prout’s work, for he has become identified with Normandy through numerous sketches of buildings now pulled down; and they have an antiquarian as well as an artistic interest.  They are ‘mannered,’ as we all know, but they have more couleur locale than any of the drawings of Pugin; and are valued (we speak of money value) at the present time, above the works of most water-colour painters of his time.

But we must not dream about old Rouen, we must rather tell the reader what it is like to-day, and how modern and prosaic is its aspect; how we arrive by express train, and are rattled through wide paved streets in an ‘omnibus du Chemin de Fer,’ and are set down at a ‘grand’ hotel, where we find an Englishman seated in the doorway reading ‘Bell’s Life.’

Rouen is busy and thriving, and has a fixed population of not less than 150,000; situated about half-way between Paris and the port of Havre, there is a constant flow of traffic passing and repassing, and its quays are lined with goods for exportation.  In front of our window at the Hotel d’Angleterre, from which we have a view for miles on both sides of the Seine, the noise and bustle are almost as great as at Lyons or Marseilles.  The Rouen of to-day is given up to commerce, to the swinging of cranes, and to the screeching of locomotives on the quays; whilst the fine broad streets and lines of newly erected houses, shut out from our view the old city of which we have heard so much, and which many of us have come so far to see.  As we approach Rouen by the river, or even by railway, it is true that we see cathedral towers, but they are interspersed with smoking factory chimneys and suspension bridges; and although on our first drive through the town, we pass the magnificent portal of the cathedral and the old clock-tower in the ’rue de la Grosse Horloge,’ we observe that the cathedral has a cast-iron spire, and that the frescoes and carving round the clock-tower are built up against and pasted over with bills of concerts and theatres.