in a city of the middle ages. Nor would religious pomp, he must penetrate disthe speculation be very wide of the reality; tricts remote from the highways, traverse for this is an old Breton town, where the roads impracticable for locomotives, cross habits and manners, costume and pecu- marshes, plains, and mountains, and bury liarities of the middle ages, are to this hour himself in scenes that have not yet been carefully preserved. swept into the circle of Parisian centraliWe have no intention at present of tres-zation. Here, and here only, he will find passing upon the domain of history, or of the traditions of the country still subsistdiscussing any of the moot questions in- ing in the faith and usages of the people. volved in the language or complex antiqui- The first thing that strikes the traveller, ties of the ancient Armorica; but, confin- after his eye has become a little accustoming ourselves strictly to the living charac-ed to the physiognomy of the country, is teristics of the people, we propose to touch the vast number of ruins that are scattered upon some points of greater novelty, and over the surface. There is no part of the of a more popular and interesting nature. world, where, within the same compass, The history of Brittany, and the philologi- such extensive and magnificent reliques of cal researches into her dialects, the battle- Druidism are to be found. The stones of ground of so many Gaelic, Welsh, and Carnac, stretching in eleven parallel lines Irish antiquaries, have already largely oc- for a distance of upwards of seven miles, cupied the attention of the learned; but have long excited the wonder and admiwe are not aware that the in-door life and ration of Europe; and there is not a single superstitions of the Breton peasantry have, as yet, received the consideration they deserve. To these aspects of the subject, not less attractive from their simplicity than their freshness, it is our intention to restrict our observations.

The traveller who keeps to the beaten track, can scarcely hope to learn any thing about Brittany. He must diverge from the main routes, if he would see the people in their primitive and national habits. The high roads are now pretty well macadamized; the principal towns are tolerably well supplied with hotels; the cuisine is certainly not quite equal to Verrey's, but you can dine satisfactorily nevertheless; and you can get newspapers and books, and other agrémens much as you get them elsewhere. The tourist, therefore, may post easily enough from Brest to Rennes, or sail up the Rance from St. Malo to Dinan, and make a detour to Nantes on his way to Paris, traversing no inconsider able portion of Brittany: but he will not be a whit the wiser concerning the Bretons. The leisurely Englishman who risks the springs of his carriage on any of these lines, dropping at an hotel, looking about him, and then going home again, will have nothing to report about the country beyond that monotonous buckwheat which, even in its most cultivated sections, distinguishes it from all the rest of France. If he would really see the Brittany of a former age in its yet undisturbed integrity, a people sombre and heavy, with boorish manners and antique costumes, steeped in their old superstitions, speaking their old language, and living in the midst of Celtic monuments and the reliques of feudal and

form of Druidical remains, of which there are not innumerable specimens in various states of preservation. Barrows, galgals, tombeaux, and sacrés, to use the French phrases, Dolmens, Menhirs, Roches-auxFées, Cromlechs, Lichavens, appear to have been showered upon the soil with a profusion for which history assigns neither origin nor use. But while the curiosity of the stranger is intent upon the examination of these stupendous and inexplicable structures, he is still more amazed by the discovery that these Celtic temples, or altars, or graves, or whatever else they may have been, are generally either mixed up with fragments of the feudal ages, or close in the neighborhood of early Christian monuments. This strange association throws open a large and perplexing field of inquiry. Christianity seems to have pursued her triumphs, with bold and rapid steps, into the very recesses and last strongholds of that gigantic idolatry which once exercised so marvellous an influence over the human mind; and in some instances to have wrestled with its sorceries on the very spot where they were enacted. Many of the Druidical localities are connected by exulting tradition with the victories of the Cross; and in not a few cases they are blended together and rendered identical. Thus there is an old legend, still repeated and currently received amongst the peasantry, that the stones of Carnac owe their origin to a heathen army which chased St. Cornelius into the valley, because he had renounced paganism; when, being close pressed and surrounded on all sides, he had recourse to prayer, whereupon the whole host were petrified in their lines as

they stood. And near the city of Lannion, church. In vain they destroyed the edifices there is an enormous Menhir, between of public worship: "I will pull down your twenty and thirty feet in height, crowned belfries," exclaimed the famous Jean-Bonwith a stone cross, and exhibiting upon the front the passion of Christ carved amongst the usual gross images of the Celtic worship. This intermixture of symbols is carried out still farther in some of the popular superstitions, to which we shall presently refer, in which the sites of the Druidical faith are selected as the special theatres for the performance of Christian

miracles.

Of all the provinces of France, Brittany is the richest in the evidences of religious sentiment. The fields, the causeways, the streets, the mountains, are starred with churches, chapels, crosses, images, expiatory monuments, and consecrated chaplets. A notion was entertained on the return of the Bourbons, of restoring the road-side crosses that had been demolished during the revolution; but it was found that the reconstruction of the crosses at the cross-roads

Saint-André to the maire of a village, “ in order that you may have no more objects to recall to you the superstitions of past times." "You must leave us the stars, and we can see them farther off," was the memorable reply of the enlightened peasant.

A single instance, recorded by Souvestre, will sufficiently illustrate the intrepid devotion of priests and people. At Crozon all the churches were demolished; the priests, tracked day and night, could not find a solitary spot to offer up the mass in security; the villages were filled with soldiers. In this extremity, how did they contrive to perform the offices of religion, to baptize the new-born, to marry the affianced? Listen!

"Midnight sounds: a flickering light rises at a distance on the sea: the tinkle of a bell is heard half lost in the murmur of the waves. Instantly in Finisterre alone would cost no less than from every creek, rock, and sinuosity of the 1,500,000 francs, and the intention was of beach, long black shadows are seen gliding course abandoned. The nation could not across the waters. These are the boats of the afford to indulge in so expensive a luxury; fishermen freighted with men, women, children, but the piety of the Bretons, fortunately and the aged of both sexes, who direct their did not stand in need of such suggestive course towards the open sea, all steering to the helps. It had successfully resisted too same point. The bell now grows louder, the light becomes more distinct, and at last the obmany shocks, and survived too much per-ject that has drawn this multitude together apsecution, to require the admonitions of pears in the midst of the ocean! It is a bark, tinsel Virgins, and Saints twice crucified on the deck of which stands a priest ready to in the agonies of village art.

celebrate mass. Assured of having God only for a witness, he has convoked the neighboring parishes to this solemnity, and the faithful people have responded to his call. They are all beneath, and the heavens above darkened with upon their knees, between the sea rolling heavily clouds !"

The sanguinary agents of the revolution had tough work to do in this sturdy province. The struggle in Brittany between the guillotine and the unlettered faith of the people was long and obstinate. The Bretons clung to their religion with unexampled fidelity, until they wearied the guil- Can any one imagine a more striking speclotine with victims. There was no em-tacle! Night, the billows, two thousand ployment of physical force, no resistance: heads bent lowly round the man standing the population were calm and resolute. over this abyss, the chants of the holy ofEvery man's mind was made up to martyr-fice, and, between each response, the awful dom, and, with a few insignificant excep- menaces of the sea murmuring like the tions, the inhabitants of Basse-Bretagne voice of God! were inaccessible to the terrors or the seductions of power. Throughout the whole of that memorable season of carnage they remained, as one of their graphic historians describes them, on their knees with clasped hands: an attitude which they kept to the end, till the clotted knife fell from the hands of their executioners. The priests and the people were true to each other to the last extremity. In vain the republican committees pronounced the penalty of death against the minister who should celebrate any of the functions of the

It is a natural sequence that a strong attachment, amounting almost to infatuation, should exist between pastors and their flocks who have suffered so much in common; and this attachment, as might be expected, is not unfrequently heightened into fanaticism on the part of the people. The Breton priests occupy the most conspicuous place in the foreground of the picture. They wield an unlimited ascendency over the confiding and sensitive population. Taken direct from the plough, clothed in the coarsest cassocks, with heavy brogues to

protect his feet, and a stout stick in his their superstitions. Living apart from the hand, the devoted minister traverses the rest of the world, and buried in their grim muddy roads and the most difficult moun- solitudes, they have no reunion except the tain paths, at all seasons of the year, with church. It is their spectacle. The prounflagging zeal, to carry the viaticum to cessions and religious ceremonies, the fêtes, the dying, or offer up prayers for the dead. and saints' days, and anniversaries, fill up He is followed everywhere with love and the void of their desires; and to these ends, awe. His aid is sought at all times of ca- as the pleasures and graces of their lives, lamity, and his counsel brings strength and the whole poetical capacity of their nature comfort. His sermons possess almost di- is directed. Hence, all their customs are vine authority, and exercise a supernatural tinged, more or less, with religious feeling. power upon his audience. The crowd pal- Until very recently they had no physicians pitate under his appeals, like the sea under amongst them; and priests, prayers, and a storm. They cry aloud, weep, shriek, offerings were resorted to in lieu of mediand fling themselves upon the earth, in that cine. At the first indication of disease, at delirium of religious enthusiasm which su- the solemn hour of death, and even long pervenes upon the undue excitement of the after the grave has received its tenant, the passions to the exclusion of the reason. offices of religion are invoked for help and In all states of society, such exhibitions are consolation. The dying are soothed with deplorable; but in the Breton they are at candles and devotions, the dead celebrated least natural and sincere, and contribute, in annual fêtes. The morrow of All Saints in the absence of healthier influences, to sees the bereaved family gathered in the regulate and control the simple morality of common apartment, and, in accordance his life. Sometimes they react upon the with a curious and pathetic superstition, priest himself, and convert the apostle of they leave some meat upon a table as they the frenzy into its victim. On one occa- retire from the room, under the certain besion a poor zealot, who had probably belief that the dead will return to the scene come insane through the excitement of his arduous ministry, and who used to sleep at the foot of a stone cross by the roadside through summer and winter, informed the assembled crowd that Christ had appeared to him, and asked him for his left hand. "It is yours, Lord," he answered. "I have kept my promise," he cried to the affrighted congregation, raising his left arm over his head-a stump bandaged with bloody linen: then, in a fit of horrible inspiration, he tore the linen from the reeking wound, and, making a semicircle in the air, flung the streaming blood for ten feet round him on the heads of the people.

of their household affections to partake of the anniversary repast.

Like all other countries, Brittany has undergone changes, and received the vaccination of knowledge. But there are large districts, upon the confines of which civilization, in our active and accumulated sense of the term, is still arrested by the feudal immobility of the population. These districts are principally comprehended in the departments of Finisterre, Morbihan, and the Côtes-du-Nord; and it is here we must look for these surviving characteristics of the middle ages which confer such peculiar interest upon the people. There are certain minor points of contrast amongst the departments themselves; but in the es

Notwithstanding such revolting incidents, however, the relations between the pastor and his flock are productive of im-sential attributes of nationality there is a portant advantages in the existing condi- common agreement. They all have their tion of the population. The Breton has Druidical remains, and old castles, and trafew ideas beyond those revealed to him by ditions connected with them; they all have religion. He is a man living within the ballads and balladmongers, lays and superechoes of civilization, yet far enough off stitions; and wherever you move amongst not to be able to distinguish its voice. them, you are sure to fall in with an hisVillemarqué tells us that when he was mak-torical recollection already familiar in some ing his collection of ballads, travelling shape to most of the literatures of Europe. through all parts of the country, visiting It is in this enchanted ground you hear the popular festivals, pardons, veillés, filer- from the lips of the peasantry a thousand ies, and fairs, and mixing familiarly with legends about the Round Table; until at the people, he found to his great astonish- last you get so accustomed to the famous ment, that they were all well acquainted names, hitherto revealed to you only in the with their national ballads, but that not one antiquated diction of the unpronounceable of them could read. In this vast want of old poetry, that you would not be very mental resources, they are thrown upon much surprised if some of the stalwart

champions were to come prancing by you | Constable fought Thomas of Canterbury in full armor on the highway. It was in for entrapping his brother during a tempothe chateau of Kerduel that King Arthur rary truce; and the Church of St. Sauheld a magnificent court, surrounded by veur, where his proud heart is preserved, the flower of his chivalry, Lancelot, Tris- after having run more hazards, dead and tan, Ywain, and the rest; with his fair alive, than any other heart ever outlasted. Queen Gwenarc'han and the beautiful Amongst such recollections as these, the Brangwain. The old chateau is gone, but a Breton peasant draws his first breath. His modern one stands in its place, and the earliest experiences are linked with the rename and all the memories associated with liques of the feudal ages. His boyhood is it are still reverently preserved. By the passed amongst ruins, dignified with awful way, the Breton antiquaries are very an-names and shadowy histories. His life is gry with us for changing the name of elevated and saddened by them. He steps Gwenarc'han, which means white as silver, in the daylight mournfully amongst them, to Guenever, in which its etymology is lost; and for altering Brangwain into Brangier. The reproach is probably just enough; but in their zeal to appropriate Arthur and his court all to themselves, they insist upon burying his majesty in the aisle of Agalon or Avalon, near this chateau, instead of allowing him to repose in the island of that name in Somersetshire, where our minstrels interred him long ago. We will give up the etymology of the incontinent queen, if they will only leave us the bones of the king. This Breton island, we may add, was the favorite resort of Morgain, celebrated in the chronicles as a fairy and sister of Merlin the enchanter, but who was in reality a renowned priestess of the Druids.

and he shudders and cowers as he passes them at night. He has no books, no social intercourse except amongst people like himself, and then only upon occasions that admit of no play of the social feelings. This is exactly the man to be affected by the vague terrors of solitude; to see weird faces in the woods; to track the demons of the storm in the clouds on the mountain tops; to hear the shrieks of wandering spirits; to believe implicitly in omens and presages, and supernatural visitations. The church seizes him up in his dreamy fears, and completes his subjugation. His whole existence is one long superstition.

Let us look at the actual life of these people for a moment, before we approach the imaginative aspect of their character.

It is here also, in this storied Brittany, The peasantry of Basse-Bretagne are that we tread upon the sites of many fear- generally short in stature, with ungainly ful tragedies and strange deeds narrated bodies, thick black hair, bushy beards, large by Froissart and Monstrelet, and others: lumpish shoulders, and a fixed expression Beaumanoir, where Fontenelle de Ligueur of seriousness in their eyes. There is as used to disembowel young girls to warm marked a difference in the special charachis feet in their blood;-Carrec, where teristics of particular districts, as there is they show the mysterious pits in which a in their costume; although the general deDuke of Bretagne hid the golden cradle scription of frankness and fidelity, coldness of his son ;-Guillac, where the Combat of and indolence, credulity and ignorance, the Thirty took place, that extraordinary will apply with equal correctness to them fight towards the close of which Geoffrey all. The obstinacy of the Bretons has de Blois replied to Robert de Beaumanoir passed into a proverb in France. They when, exhausted by wounds and faint with make capital soldiers or sailors, but, left to thirst, he asked for a respite to obtain a themselves, fall into phantasies and idledrink, " Boy de ton sang, ta soif se pas-ness. Love of country showing itself in sera;"-the old Château of Kertaouarn, with the most passionate excess, is a permanent its portcullis yet gaping, and its dripping attribute of the national character. Bretons dungeons still exhibiting the enormous have never been known to seek the favor beam loaded with rings to which the seign- of the Court. They have always abhorred eur used to chain his prisoners, where the the contagion of offices and public employwhistling of the winds in the subterranean ment: and this feeling exists so strongly passages is believed to be the moaning of even amongst the lowest classes, that a the souls of unshrived coiners who return Breton peasant, after a service of twelve or to their desperate work at sunset ;-the fifteen years in the army or navy, always Château de la Roche, where the lord of returns to the scenes of his boyhood, and Rhe found the Constable du Guesclin carv-lapses back again at once into his original ing a boar into portions for his neighbors; habits-as if the interval had passed in a -and the Square in Dinan, where the same trance!

Morbihan and the Côtes-du-Nord recall still more emphatically the aspect and temperament of the middle ages. The peasantry in the neighborhood of Vannes e of the unmistakeable lineage of the old feudal races. Turbulent and choleric, they are always either fighting or drinking, frequently both. On the least excitement, they will grind their teeth and shake with violent emotions. All their evil passions are called into fierce activity by their hatred of the bourgeois. The Breton peasant has an invincible horror of modern notions, of the airs of fine breeding, the etiquette, taste, and manners of the towns. He glo. ries in his rough candor, his vigorous arm, and his blouse. Even the richest farmer rarely aspires to the grandeur of cloth, and considers himself well off if he can wear shoes four months in the year; while the poor never ascend above coarse linen and sabots, and are often compelled to dispense with the latter. Their jealousy of the bourgeois is a natural corollary from their circumstances; but they have other and profounder reasons for disliking them-the instinctive sense of the superiority of their education, and the knowledge of the contempt with which they regard the old usages and traditions of the country. A Breton never forgives a slight offered to the objects of his habitual reverence. It

The inhabitants of Cornouaille, embracing | through a succession of funerals: in Corthe districts lying between Morlaix and nouaille through bridal feasts. Corhaix, in the department of Finisterre, are distinguished by some striking peculiarities. Their costume is composed of the liveliest colors, bordered with brilliant loops. They frequently embroider the fronts of their coats with the date when it was made, or the name of the tailor, wrought in various colored wools. In the mountains, the breeches are worn short and tight, and equally fit for the dance or the combat; but towards Quimper they expand into huge cumbrous trousers, that fall about their legs and embarrass all their movements. An old author says, that the nobility imposed this inconvenient dress upon them, that they might not stride too fast in the march of revolution! Their hats, not very large, and surrounded by a raised border, are ornamented with ribbons of a thousand gay colors, producing a very picturesque effect as they flutter in the wind. The mountaineers wear a girdle of leather, fastened by a copper buckle, over their working-dresses of quilted linen. The costume of the women is composed of a similar variety of vivid colors, at once sprightly and graceful, and not unlike the dresses of the peasantry in the neighborhood of Berne. The life of these people is in keeping with their gaudy apparel, and forms a remarkable contrast to the sombre aspect of the population elsewhere. The people of Léon, in the same depart-is a part of the superstitions of our univerment, are of grave and solemn manners: sal nature to defend with the greatest pereven their festivities are under the control tinacity those canons which we have ourof this natural severity, and their dance it- selves taken for granted, and for which we self is stiff, severe, and monotonous. Their can assign no better grounds than the precold and rigorous exterior, however, con- judices of custom. This smouldering feud ceals a volcano. Their life, like that in-between the large towns and the rural deed of the Bretons generally, is folded up within themselves, and is expressed with singular propriety in their dismal costume. A Léon peasant sails along in a floating black dress, large and loose, and confined at the waist by a red or blue girdle, which only makes its melancholy the more palpable; the border of his great hat rolling back over his sun-burnt features, and his profuse hair falling thickly down his shoulders. The women are not less lugubrious in their appearance, and might easily be mistaken for the religieuses who attend the hospitals. Their dress, plain black and white, is equally ample and modest. It is only when they go into mourning that they affect any thing like gaiety. On such occasions they dress in sky-blue from head to foot. They wear mourning for the living, not for the dead. In Leon, you move

population, marks very distinctly the boundary between the Breton masses, and the rest of the people. Nothing can be more dissimilar than the modes of thinking of individuals disengaged from the primitive habits of the soil, and congregated together in the stirring occupations of commerce, and the native population still haunting the pastures of their ancestors, and inheriting their manners.

The intercourse with the towns is too slight to produce any sensible modifications of the popular characteristics. In the Côtes-du-Nord you meet country gentlemen speaking nothing but Breton, and attending the session of the States at Rennes in the dress of peasants; in sabots, with swords by their sides. The Bretons know nothing of governments or parties. They are never mixed up in the fugitive politics of the