I should be sorry to insinuate that any thing of this kind was evident at the time, just alluded to, which was the Friday previous to the annual meeting, the day appointed for taking into consideration the report intended to be submitted to the full assembly of the inhabitants.  The president also read his projected speech, in the course of which he took the opportunity of declaring in strong terms his dislike to Napoleon’s plan of education, directed almost exclusively to military affairs and mathematics:  he even stated that the present generation “etoit sans morale.”—­The opinion could not be allowed to pass:  he found himself beset on all sides; not an individual supported him; and after a variety of attempts to palliate and explain away the offensive passage, he was obliged to consent to expunge it.  This will give some farther idea of the state of public feeling in France:  the compliment upon the lilies passed as words of course; but the same body that tolerated it, positively refused to stamp with the sanction of their approbation, any comparison unfavorable to the system of Napoleon, when put in opposition to that of the subsisting government.

There is another literary body at Rouen; called la Societe d’Emulation, of more recent establishment, it having been founded in 1791.  Conformably to the national spirit which then prevailed, it is directed exclusively to the encouragement of manufactories and agriculture.—­This society distributes annual medals as the reward of improvements and discoveries, though I am afraid that as yet it has been productive but of slender utility.

Rouen also possesses a Botanic Garden, which was founded in 1738; but the scite which it now occupies was not thus applied till twenty years subsequently, when the municipality conveyed the ground in perpetuity to the academy in its corporate capacity, stipulating that it should yield a nosegay every year as an appropriate rent in kind.  At the revolution a grant like this would scarcely be respected; still less did the jacobins appreciate the pleasures or advantages derived from the garden.  The demagogues of that period seem to have entered heartily into Jean Jacques Rousseau’s notions, that the arts and sciences were injurious to mankind:  this fine establishment was seized as national property, and, according to the revolutionary jargon, was soumissione; but a more temporate faction obtained the ascendancy before the sale was carried into effect.—­The collection is extensive, and the plants are in good order:  I am not however, aware that the city has ever given birth to any man of eminence in this department of science.  Lately, indeed, the Abbe Le Turquier Deslongchamps, a very well-informed botanist, as well as a most excellent man, has published a Flore des Environs de Rouen, in two volumes; and there are many instances in which such works have been known to diffuse a taste, which public gardens and the lectures of professors had in vain endeavored to excite.