The fashionable suburban cottages and places of Quebec are on the St. Louis Road leading northward to the old battle-ground and beyond it; but, these face chiefly towards the rivers St. Lawrence and St. Charles, and lofty hedges and shrubbery hide them in an English seclusion from the highway; so that the visitor may uninterruptedly meditate whatever emotion he will for the scene of Wolfe’s death as he rides along.  His loftiest emotion will want the noble height of that heroic soul, who must always stand forth in history a figure of beautiful and singular distinction, admirable alike for the sensibility and daring, the poetic pensiveness, and the martial ardor that mingled in him and taxed his feeble frame with tasks greater than it could bear.  The whole story of the capture of Quebec is full of romantic splendor and pathos.  Her fall was a triumph for all the English-speaking race, and to us Americans, long scourged by the cruel Indian wars plotted within her walls or sustained by her strength, such a blessing as was hailed with ringing bells and blazing bonfires throughout the Colonies; yet now we cannot think without pity of the hopes extinguished and the labors brought to naught in her overthrow.  That strange colony of priests and soldiers, of martyrs and heroes, of which she was the capital, willing to perish for an allegiance to which the mother-country was indifferent, and fighting against the armies with which England was prepared to outnumber the whole Canadian population, is a magnificent spectacle; and Montcalm laying down his life to lose Quebec is not less affecting than Wolfe dying to win her.  The heart opens towards the soldier who recited, on the eve of his costly victory, the “Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” which he would “rather have written than beat the French to-morrow;” but it aches for the defeated general, who, hurt to death, answered, when told how brief his time was, “So much the better; then I shall not live to see the surrender of Quebec.”

In the city for which they perished their fame has never been divided.  The English have shown themselves very generous victors; perhaps nothing could be alleged against them, but that they were victors.  A shaft common to Wolfe and Montcalm celebrates them both in the Governor’s Garden; and in the Chapel of the Ursuline Convent a tablet is placed, where Montcalm died, by the same conquerors who raised to Wolfe’s memory the column on the battle-field.

A dismal prison covers the ground where the hero fell, and the monument stands on the spot where Wolfe breathed his last, on ground lower than the rest of the field; the friendly hollow that sheltered him from the fire of the French dwarfs his monument; yet it is sufficient, and the simple inscription, “Here died Wolfe victorious,” gives it a dignity which many cubits of added stature could not bestow.  Another of those bitter showers, which had interspersed the morning’s sunshine, drove suddenly across the open plain, and our tourists comfortably sentimentalized the scene behind the close-drawn curtains of their carriage.  Here a whole empire had been lost and won, Basil reminded Isabel; and she said, “Only think of it!” and looked to a wandering fold of her skirt, upon which the rain beat through a rent of the curtain.