It was a substantial and hardy efflorescence, and they fancied
that fainter-hearted plants would have pined away in that garden, where
the little fountain, leaping up into the joyless light, fell back again
with a musical shiver. The consciousness of this latent cold, of winter
only held in abeyance by the bright sun, was not deeper even in the once
magnificent, now neglected Governor's Garden, where there was actually a
rawness in the late afternoon air, and whither they were strolling for
the view from its height, and to pay their duty to the obelisk raised
there to the common fame of Wolfe and Montcalm. The sounding Latin
inscription celebrates the royal governor-general who erected it almost
as much as the heroes to whom it was raised; but these spectators did not
begrudge the space given to his praise, for so fine a thought merited
praise. It enforced again the idea of a kind posthumous friendship
between Wolfe and Montcalm, which gives their memory its rare
distinction, and unites them, who fell in fight against each other, as
closely as if they had both died for the same cause.
Some lasting dignity seems to linger about the city that has once been a
capital; and this odor of fallen nobility belongs to Quebec, which was a
capital in the European sense, with all the advantages of a small
vice-regal court, and its social and political intrigues, in the French
times.
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