I gained the top of the central tower, which is not of equal altitude with those of the western extremity, and from thence surveyed the town, as well as the drizzling rain would permit.  I saw enough however to convince me that the site of this abbey is fine and commanding.  Indeed it stands nearly upon the highest ground in the town.  Ducarel had not the glorious ambition to mount to the top of the tower; nor did he even possess that most commendable of all species of architectural curiosity, a wish to visit the CRYPT.  Thus, in either extremity—­I evinced a more laudable spirit of enterprise than did my old-fashioned predecessor.  Accordingly, from the summit, you must accompany me to the lowest depth of the building.  I descended by the 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