s eye see Wolfe
crossing the stream on his perilous expedition, may in his mind's ear
hear him reciting to his officers those lines from Gray's Elegy, and
telling them that he would rather have written such verses than be sure
of taking Quebec. His monument is near to the promenade on Dufferin
Terrace--his monument which, a rare event in war, is the monument also
of his rival, the French commander, Montcalm, killed in the hour of
defeat, as Wolfe was at the moment of victory. Quebec itself seems to
illustrate in {291} its own progress and its own history the moral of
that common monument. Quebec is as loyal to the British Crown as
Victoria or as the Channel Islands. But it is still in great part an
old-fashioned French city. The France that survives there and all
through the province is not the France of to-day, but the France of
before the great Revolution. The stranger seeking his way through the
streets had better, in most cases, question the first crossing-sweeper
he meets in French, and not in English. The English residents are all
expected to speak French. But the English residents and the French
live on terms of the most cordial fraternity. Little quarrels, local
quarrels of race and sect, do unquestionably spring up here and there
now and again, but they are only like the disputes of Churchmen and
Dissenters in an English city, and they threaten no organic
controversy. England has great reason to be proud of Quebec. The
English flag has a home on those heights which we have already said may
challenge the world for bold picturesqueness and beauty.

{292}

CHAPTER XLI.

THE CLOSE OF THE REIGN.

[Sidenote: 1684-1753--Berkeley]

In the early days of the year 1753 literature and philosophy lost a
great man by the death of Bishop Berkeley.

George Berkeley was born on March 12, 1684, by the Nore, in the county
Kilkenny. His father was an Irishman of English descent, William
Berkeley. In the first year of the eighteenth century George Berkeley
went, a lad of fifteen, to the University of Dublin, to Trinity
College. In Trinity College he remained for thirteen years, studying,
thinking, dreaming, bewildering most of the collegians, his colleagues,
who seemed to have been unable to make up their minds whether he was a
genius or a blockhead. Within the walls of Trinity he worked,
gradually and laboriously piecing together and thoughtfully shaping out
his theory of the metaphysical conception of