he same (somewhat intricate) route, and I took especial care
to avoid all "temporary wooden stair-cases." The crypt, beneath the choir,
is perhaps of yet greater interest and beauty than the choir itself. Within
an old, very old, stone coffin--at the further circular end--are the
pulverized remains of one of the earliest Abbesses.[119] I gazed around
with mixed sensations of veneration and awe, and threw myself back into
centuries past, fancying that the shrouded figure of MATILDA herself glided
by, with a look as if to approve of my antiquarian enthusiasm! Having
gratified my curiosity by a careful survey of this subterraneous abode, I
revisited the regions of day-light, and made towards the large building,
now a manufactory, which in Ducarel's time had been a nunnery. The
revolution has swept away every human being in the character of a nun; but
the director of the manufactory shewed me, with great civility, some relics
of old crosses, rings, veils, lachrymatories, &c. which had been taken from
the crypt I had recently visited. These relics savoured of considerable
antiquity. Tom Hearne would have set about proving that they _must_ have
belonged to Matilda herself; but I will have neither the presumption nor
the merit of attempting this proof. They seemed indeed to have undergone
half a dozen decompositions. Upon the whole, if our Antiquarian Society,
after having exhausted the cathedrals of their own country, should ever
think of perpetuating the principal ecclesiastical edifices of Normandy, by
means of the _Art of Engraving_, let them begin their labours with the
ABBAYE AUX DAMES at Caen.

The foregoing, my dear friend, are the principal ecclesiastical buildings
in this place. There are other public edifices, but comparatively of a
modern date. And yet I should be guilty of a gross omission were I to
neglect giving you an account, however superficial, of the remains of an
apparently CASTELLATED BUILDING, a little beyond the Abbaye aux Dames--or
rather to the right, upon elevated ground, as you enter the town by the way
we came. As far as I can discover, this appears to have escaped
Ducarel.[120] It is doubtless a very curious relic. Running along the upper
part of the walls, there is a series of basso-relievo heads,
medallion-wise, cut in stone, evidently intended for portraits. They are
assuredly not older than the reign of Francis I. and may be even as late as
that of Henry II. Among these rude medallions, is a fem