The Place d'Armes, down in the old part of the city, where is the original Seminary of St. Sulpice, is surrounded by famous structures. Here are the chief banks and insurance buildings and the head office of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The most noted of them is the Grecian-fronted Bank of Montreal, the largest financial institution in Canada, and believed, with the Canadian Pacific management, who are closely connected, to be the most potential force in the Dominion. Adjoining the old Seminary, and facing the square, is Montreal's most famous church—Notre Dame—its lofty front rising into the twin spires that overlook all the country round. Its pews seat ten thousand, and when crowded it accommodates fifteen thousand people. In one of the towers hangs "Le Gros Bourdon," the largest bell in America, called Jean Baptiste, and weighing nearly fifteen tons. The church is mediæval Gothic, built of cut limestone, the spires rising two hundred and twenty-seven feet, and containing ten bells, making a chime upon which, on great occasions, tunes are played. The interior, like all the French Catholic churches, is brilliantly decorated, for the religious development is the same as that of France in the seventeenth century, everything contributing to the intensity of the devotion and the elaborateness of decoration and paraphernalia of the service. At High Mass, when crowded by worshippers, the choir filled with robed ecclesiastics officiating in the stately ceremonial, the effect is imposing. The original church of Notre Dame was built in 1671, a long, low structure with a high pitched roof. It was pulled down in 1824 and replaced by the present church, which was five years building, and is one of the largest churches in America, two hundred and fifty-five feet long. We are told that the architect, James O'Donnell, who is buried in the crypt, was a Protestant, but during the work became so impressed by his religious surroundings that he was converted to a Roman Catholic. The church is never closed, and at any time one can enter, and with the silent worshippers kneel at the shrine in a solemn stillness, in sharp contrast with the activity of the business quarter without. This remarkable contrast deeply impressed the ascetic Thoreau, whose boast was that he never attended church. "I soon found my way to the Church of Notre Dame," he writes. "I saw that it was of great size and signified something. Coming from the hurrahing mob and the rattling carriages, we pushed back the listed door of this church and found ourselves instantly in an atmosphere which might be sacred to thought and religion, if one had any. It was a great cave in the midst of a city, and what were the altars and the tinsel but the sparkling stalactites into which you entered in a moment, and where the still atmosphere and the sombre light disposed to serious and profitable thought? Such a cave at hand, which you can enter any day, is worth a thousand of our churches which are open only Sundays." When General Montgomery's American army captured Montreal in 1775, the square in front of Notre Dame was his parade-ground, and thus it got the name of Place d'Armes.
The greatest church of Montreal is the new Cathedral of St. James, popularly known as St. Peter's, as yet incomplete, designed to reproduce, on a scale of one-half the dimensions, the grand Basilica at Rome. It is three hundred and thirty-three feet long, the transepts two hundred and twenty-five feet wide, and the stone dome two hundred and fifty feet high, making it the largest church in Canada. Four huge stone piers, each thirty-six feet thick, and thirty-two Corinthian columns, support this grand dome. The outside walls, built of the universal gray limestone, are massive but rough, and the roof, on account of the heavy snows, is sloping, but otherwise it reproduces all the special features of St. Peter's at Rome, including the portico, to be surmounted by colossal statues of the Apostles. The interior is being decorated with brilliant paintings representing scenes in the life of St. James. It is located on Dominion Square, and the Bishop's Palace adjoins it. One of the remarkable churches, though small, is Notre Dame de Lourdes, built and adorned with the single idea of expressing in visible form the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, with the appearance of the Virgin to the maiden in the grotto at Lourdes. It is superbly decorated, and is the only church of the kind in America, being well described as "like an illuminated Missal, which to a Protestant has interest as a work of art, and to a Catholic has the superadded interest of a work of devotion." Adjoining the Jesuit St. Mary's College is their solid stone Church of the Gesu, its lofty nave bounded by rich columns, and with the long transepts adorned by fine frescoes, some giving representations of scenes in Jesuit history and martyrdom. The great Episcopal Cathedral of Christ Church, a Latin cross in Early English architecture, reproduces the Salisbury Cathedral of England, with a spire two hundred and twenty-four feet high. There are also many other fine Protestant churches; and when it is realized that Montreal has a church for about every two thousand inhabitants, the care for its religious welfare will be realized. The Royal Victoria Hospital, a gift to the city in honor of the Queen's Jubilee, cost $1,000,000.
The largest public square in the city is the Champ de Mars, formerly a parade-ground, adjoining which are two noble public buildings, the handsome Court-house, three hundred feet long, and the adjacent Hotel de Ville, nearly five hundred feet long. The Victoria Skating Rink, the largest in the world, is the most noted amusement structure. The city is noted for athletic sports, and toboggan slides abound, some of enormous length, down the mountain slopes. The Montreal Bonsecours Market is famed everywhere, and presents an imposing Doric front nearly five hundred feet long upon the river bank, surmounted by a domed tower. Here gather in force the French Canadian peasantry, known as the habitans, to sell their produce and wares, and it gives a quaint exhibition of old-time French customs. The ancient Church of Notre Dame de Bonsecours is alongside, originally founded by Marguerite Bourgeoys in 1673 for the reception of a miraculous statue of the Virgin, entrusted to her by one of the associates of the Society founding Montreal, Baron de Faucamp. The church was burnt and then rebuilt in 1771, and is a quaint structure of a style rarely seen outside of Normandy, having shops built up against it after the fashion common in old European towns. Thus does this famous city combine the methods and styles of the Middle Ages with the manners and enterprises of to-day. It is an impressive fact that notwithstanding the prodigious religious development, all the denominations get on without friction. There is an underlying spirit of toleration, and it is recorded that after the British conquest of Canada the Protestants who came into Montreal occupied one of the Catholic churches for worship, assembling after the Catholic morning mass; and that for twenty years after 1766 the Church of England people occupied the Catholic church of the Recollets every Sunday afternoon. The Presbyterians are said to have also used the same church prior to 1792, and then having removed into a church of their own, they presented the priests of the Recollet church a gift of candles for the high altar and of wine for the mass as a token of good will and their thanks for the gratuitous use of the church. Then the churches were few, but now all denominations have their own, and numerously.
MONTREAL SURROUNDINGS.
The suburbs are attractive, and gradually dissolve into the gardens and farms of the French husbandmen, living in comfortable houses with steep roofs, fronted by and sometimes almost embedded in foliage and flowers. Occasionally an ancient windmill is perched on a hill, stretching out its broad gyrating sails, as in old Normandy. There are frequent villages along the St. Lawrence, each clustered around its church. At Caughnawaga, already referred to, there is an extensive church with a tall and shining white tin-covered spire, and in a rather sorry-looking group of houses around it live the few who are left of the descendants of the once warlike and powerful Mohawks, known as the "praying Indians," here long ago gathered by the zealous missionary priests of St. Sulpice. At Lachine, spreading opposite on the western shore of the St. Lawrence for several miles, is a popular place of suburban residence, with rows of pleasant villas lining the banks of Lake St. Louis. Over beyond this lake comes in the main channel of Ottawa River, with the rapids of St. Anne flowing down from another inland sea made by its prolonged enlargement, the "Lake of the Two Mountains." A canal flanks these rapids, and the village of St. Anne has grown around its ancient church, which is deeply reverenced by the Canadian boatmen and voyageurs on these waters as their special shrine, for in the early days all the fur-trading with the great Canadian northwest was by canoes and bateaux on the Ottawa and Lake Nipissing, and thence by portage to Lake Huron. Here came many years ago, on a bateau down the St. Lawrence, the minstrel bard, Tom Moore, and inspired by the locality, he composed in a cottage, still pointed out, his noted "Canadian Boat Song":
"Faintly as tolls the evening chime,
Our voices keep tune, and our oars keep time.
Soon as the woods on shore look dim,
We'll sing at St. Anne's our parting hymn.
Row, brothers, row; the stream runs fast,